Blue White Illustrated

B Y L O U P R A T O drought followed, with losing seasons until 1962-63. 1965 After ending its regular season with a 13-game winning streak and amassing a 20-3 record that is still one of the program's all-time best, Penn State finally had the opportunity to play a first-round game at the Palestra in the East Region. The Lions and their star players, Bob Weiss and Carver Clinton, had the misfortune of playing Princeton and Bill Bradley, the senior All-American who would go on to be named the tournament's Outstanding Player. The game went down to the last minute, with a controversial noncall for the tripping of Weiss, and Penn State lost, 60-58. 1991 Bruce Parkhill was in his eighth season as head coach, and 13th-seeded Penn State was coming off its only At- lantic 10 title when it upset fourth- seeded UCLA, 74-69, in the East Regional at Syracuse. James Barnes and DeRon Hayes led the scoring, but they weren't able to engineer another vic- tory, as the Lions dropped an overtime game to 12th-seeded Eastern Michigan, 71-68, in the second round. Barnes and Monroe Brown missed free throws in the last 1 minute, 3 sec- onds of regulation, and a desperation 3-point attempt by Freddie Barnes failed as time ran out. 1996 Parkhill's sudden retirement after the 1994-95 season thrust his chief assistant, Jerry Dunn, into the head coaching role. Dunn inherited a veteran team, but losses in four of the last seven games of the Big Ten regular season were a sign that the team was wearing out. In the East Regional at Providence, 12th-seeded Arkansas led most of the way, using a stifling defense and shoot- ing 53 percent from 3-point range. The 86-80 loss dropped Penn State to No. 18 in the final AP poll. 2001 Another five years passed before Dunn got Penn State back to the tour- nament, and this time much of the credit went to co-captains Joe Crispin and Titus Ivory and starter Gyasi Cline-Heard. The seventh-seeded Nit- tany Lions were shipped to New Or- leans and beat 10th-seeded Providence, 69-59, in the first round, then upset second-seeded North Car- olina, 82-74, two days later to reach the Sweet 16 in Atlanta. Old nemesis Tem- ple, seeded 11th, came back to haunt them. Penn State had beaten the Owls at the Bryce Jordan Center on Dec. 9, but this time Temple used a tenacious defense that forced the Lions into wild shots. They couldn't overcome an 18- point halftime deficit and lost, 84-72. 2011 With Ed DeChellis, another for- mer Parkhill assistant, in his eighth season as coach, Penn State earned an at-large bid after pulling off three up- sets en route to the championship game of the Big Ten tournament, where it lost to Ohio State. The Lions, with an 18-15 record, were seeded 10th and sent to Tucson, Ariz., for a matchup with seventh-seeded Temple. There were 10 lead changes in the second half, and it all came down to the very end after Talor Battle's 3-pointer tied the score, 64-64, with 12.2 seconds left. Temple won it on a desperation 18-foot floater with .04 seconds on the clock. ■ and procedures for each tournament were strikingly different. That inaugural NIT in March 1938 com- prised six teams – three from the East and three from the Midwest. The teams trav- eling the farthest – Colorado and Okla- homa A&M – were given byes. The writers later regretted matching two New York teams, NYU and Long Island Uni- versity, in the opening quarterfinal on March 9. Temple – yes, Temple – beat Bradley and Oklahoma A&M en route to the championship game, where the Owls clobbered Colorado, 60-36, limiting the Buffaloes' star, future Supreme Court Justice Byron "Whizzer" White, to 10 points. "Two weeks after the first national in- vitation tournament, the nation's coaches gathered for their convention at Chicago's Morrison Hotel," Frie wrote. "Stanford's John Bunn brought up the idea of a tournament involving teams from all areas of the country, with the se- lections made by men who knew what they were doing. Other coaches joined in the chorus." THAT CHAMPIONSHiP SEASON Parkhill (far right) and his players from the 1991 Atlantic 10 championship team were honored prior to PSU's "Return to Rec" game in 2013. Photo by Bill Zimmerman

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