March Madness is a time to celebrate underdogs. They’re the teams that fight and grit their way into the NCAA Tournament before grinding out wins against “better” basketball teams. They get in, maybe win a game or two, and lose because they’re ultimately an underdog who exceeded expectations. The school gets to sell a few t-shirts and see a spike in applications in the aftermath, and happily enjoy their moment in the spotlight.
All of that stuff about being happy to be there does not apply to the 2012-13 Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, who on this day five years ago stunned the college basketball world by playing a style of hoops in wins over Georgetown and San Diego State that captivated the college basketball world.
The Eagles are still the only 15-seed to ever make it to the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend, and as starting point guard Brett Comer remembers, the team didn’t really think it had a ceiling.
“We knew we wanted to go to the tournament and make some noise,” Comer, now a graduate assistant at the University of Dayton, told Dime. “The fact that we won two games, at that point we thought why not just keep winning? There’s no reason why we can’t do it. We’re the first team in history to be a 15 seed and make it to the Sweet 16, might as well just keep going. I think we were wired in a way of like there’s no reason why we can’t now at this point.”
Comer was the engine that made this team go. He was a pass-first point guard who, as a sophomore, was second nationally in assist rate. When he got the ball in his hands, he got it to a teammate and put them in a position to make a play.
It was an attribute that fit perfectly in the fast-paced, wide open style of play that endeared Florida Gulf Coast to many. The team was 41st nationally in adjusted tempo that year and had the 19th-fastest offensive possessions in the sport, per KenPom.
Comer enjoyed it, and says that getting up and down was a priority for the team. For Chase Fieler, a junior forward on the team who you remember as being That Guy Who Dunked Everything during the Tournament, getting the chance to play with a point guard with Comer’s ambition is something that hasn’t been replicated during his professional career, which has taken him to Spain, the Netherlands, and currently Belgium.
“Still to this day, I’ve not played with a point guard who actively looks to make almost a difficult pass,” Fieler says. “Brett could just find you. Give him an inch, he’s going to put a lob in the air.”
Playing like this is one thing, but doing it well is another thing entirely. Florida Gulf Coast didn’t quite perfect the style of play, but they ran it in a way that one of the team’s seniors, guard/forward Sherwood Brown, never felt like he had to tell his teammates that they were getting out of control.
“We were a high scoring team we wanted to out score our opponents so we would shoot threes in transition,” says Brown, who has traveled all over the world in his professional career and is now playing in Saudi Arabia. “We wanted the first good shot we could get, and we felt like that’s where we had the advantage. Sometimes it may have seemed like guys were flying around everywhere but that’s the way we wanted to play.”
The team also had an obvious chemistry that made this work. Part of this was because of Comer’s court vision, part of this was because of the athleticism that everyone on the team possessed, and part of this, the players say, was cultivated during a preseason tour to the Bahamas that brought the team closer and made things easier once the regular season began.
While this style of play was on display in the Tournament, it was something that made the team so much fun all season. The Eagles played four KenPom top-30 teams during the regular season — Duke, Miami, VCU, and Iowa State ��� and felt there were positives to take away from all of them. They even beat the Hurricanes on their floor by 12 and lost by only nine against the Cyclones in Ames.
Basically, the team was not afraid of anyone. And when the bracket reveal showed that it would take on National Player of the Year candidate Otto Porter and a Georgetown team that preferred to grind things out, the team knew it had a shot.
“We knew if we played our style of play that we’d have a chance to beat them and honestly anybody in the country at that time,” Comer says. “We felt like we were clicking so well that if we just played our way that everything would work out.”
That sentiment was shared by Comer’s backcourt mate Bernard Thompson, who said he was confident from the time the bracket dropped that they could win. Thompson, now playing in Hungary after stints in Slovakia and Germany, ended up having a big game — his 23 points trailed only Brown’s 24 for the game high — but the thing that everyone remembers were the dunks.
Georgetown managed to put the clamps on Dunk City for a half, but couldn’t manage to get going offensively. The Eagles didn’t dunk at all in the first 20 minutes and took a 24-22 score into the locker room, which meant the game was being played at the Hoyas’ pace. Florida Gulf Coast felt confident, though, because it was leading a top-10 team at halftime despite not playing its brand of basketball, and put on a show in the game’s second frame.
There were five dunks by Florida Gulf coast in the second half: Comer threw a lob to Fieler on a fast break. Senior forward Eddie Murray flew through the lane to clean up a Comer missed layup right as it came off of the rim. Comer dropped off a cheeky pass through two defenders to set up a Murray jam. A smart dunk by Fieler and a beautiful bouncy pass by Comer set up dunk number four.
Then, of course, there is dunk No. 5, which you probably watched a lot in March of 2013 but might not have watched since. Let’s remedy that.
It is still as entertaining of a March Madness highlight as you’ll ever see. Comer, with his team up by seven and less than two minutes on the clock, decided that instead of pulling it out and milking some clock, he was going to throw a lob over his head that Fieler would grab and throw down with one hand.
The crowd erupted. Kevin Harlan, Reggie Miller, and Len Elmore of TBS collectively lost their minds. Fieler knew from the second Comer got the ball that a lob was coming, and says he knew that his point guard “was going to go for the highlight reel play and the dagger.” Comer threw his arms in the air triumphantly as he ran up the court, and looking back, he recalls thinking this was the moment the Eagles proved they deserved to be on the biggest stage with a college hoops powerhouse.
“I feel like that play was the knockout blow to prove that we belonged and we deserved to be there,” Comer says.
The run didn’t end with the 78-68 win over the Hoyas. The following game was another matchup with a stingy team: San Diego State. The Aztecs were a little more comfortable running, but at that point, the Eagles were playing with house money.
Comer recalls that team team was slowed down in a bit during the first half, but remembers getting out and running during the second. The first half did, however, feature Fieler going full extension to dunk on someone, which Thompson still laughs about to this day.
“He took off outside the paint and he kind of has this Jordan pose dunking on this dude,” Thompson, who had his second-straight 23-point game, says. “And I was like, ‘God dang Chase, why you do them like that, bro?'”
Just like the first game, the Eagles turned on the jets in the second half and walked out with a 10-point win. Upon getting back to campus in Fort Myers, Fieler remembers experiencing something that reminds him of the celebrity that you’re not supposed to experience at a small school like Florida Gulf Coast — especially Comer and Brown, who needed police escorts to get to class.
“We got to see what big-time program experience with media questioning everything, people on social media tweeting about what you’re doing at all times,” Fieler says. “Just taking pictures when we were getting caught by other students or out in the town center … you really felt like it was a small community and after that run, just experiencing it with everybody and experiencing a whole ‘nother level of athletics.”
Things didn’t go as great in the Sweet 16 against Florida — FGCU lost, 62-50, to its in-state foe — but by that point, the Eagles had already established themselves in college basketball lore. After the team’s run came to a close, Brown made it a point to tell the remaining players two major things: It’s now up to the rest of the players to keep the team’s run going, and that he wouldn’t have wanted to play with any other group of guys.
That second thing continues to be true, as the players are still, to this day, close friends. Brown, Comer, Fieler, and Thompson are all in a group text together with some other former teammates, and the lasting sense of brotherhood felt among everyone while making a run to the Sweet 16 is something none of the players will ever forget.
“I’ve won championships, I’ve won prizes overseas as a professional where there’s actually money bonuses and you get prizes from that,” Fieler says. “It still does not come anywhere close to the joy we had or the camaraderie as a team we had, of winning and playing for your university like we had in that season.”
