Win in Columbia

This was a difficult game. Quick turn. On the road. The NIT and not the NCAA. It was made more difficult by the officials’ apparent decision to call a foul on what seemed like just about every touch in the first part of the second half. Max and Steve with four fouls before the first media timeout? Seriously not ideal.

Davidson has a reputation for being very very physical. I don’t think I’m revealing any great secret by saying that. They have that reputation because they’ve earned it. There’s a difference between being big and being physical. Duggar Baucom told me that last summer in my reporting for the book. The guys who play for Davidson, he said, almost every one of them, almost every year, are the latter. They play physical because they have to. Refs who for whatever reason decide to call an abnormally tight game typically mean not good things for Davidson.

And yet: 70-63.

A win like tonight’s is the kind of thing that makes a team like Davidson that plays on Davidson’s level a program. It’s not as important as beating Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin on CBS -- obviously -- but it’s still really important. It is.

To be a program like Davidson wants to be, and is, and to do that from where Davidson sits within the structure of the sport, you win your league in the regular season. You do that more often than not. In Davidson’s case, of course, at least over the better part of the last decade and a half, you do that far more often than not. You don’t beat teams from power conferences every time you play them but you do beat them some of the times you play them. You win, like, 18 games in down years. You don’t go to the NCAAs every year but you are in the running. You have a real chance every year.

And in the years where it doesn’t happen and you don’t get to the NCAAs?

You get invited to the NIT.

And you win there.