There is a low rumble coming from the shadow of Pikes Peak, as real and breathtaking as a Stealth bomber soaring over the horizon.
It is the sound of the best story in college basketball. Nowhere in America can be found a crazier hoops dream.
A member of the NCAA tournament selection committee attended last week’s game between the Falcons and Utah.
“I’m here to look at two teams,” said Karl Benson, moonlighting from his day job as commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference.
The Falcons beat Utah 62-49. Air Force’s record is 14-2. Clune Arena, which people have long avoided like a tax audit, rocked harder than Outkast.
And the guy from the NCAA tourney took notes.
“What can I say?” Benson said. “They’re for real.”
In the 48-year history of Air Force basketball, the Falcons never have been ranked in the Top 25. They’ve never even shown up on the radar.
“The way we’re playing, we’re one of the best teams in America,” Falcons coach Joe Scott said. “If any other team in this league was 14-2, had won two [conference] road games and had won 12 in a row, they would be mentioned with the elite in America. Because our team is named Air Force, we’re not.”
Scott earned his basketball education at Princeton, where as a point guard, he directed the Tigers to the NCAA tournament.
“These players believe what I say, because they know Princeton beat UCLA,” Scott said. “They know Princeton was ranked in the Top 10.”
The easy assumption is Scott downloaded all the files from the brain of legendary coach Pete Carril’s brain and Napstered the sweet music of Princeton’s motion offense.
The Utes, the class of the Mountain West Conference for several years, doggedly denied the back-door pass that made this offense famous and were ever mindful of getting out on three-pointers. But the Falcons repeatedly beat Utah on mismatch drives, which allowed 6-foot-3-inch guard Tim Keller, who led Air Force with 16 points, to be an unstoppable force in the post.
While Scott is a grateful disciple of Carril’s, everything about this 38-year-old Air Force coach, from his cool intensity on the bench to his speech patterns in front of a TV camera, reminds an observer more of a young Rick Pitino.
And, fittingly for a service academy, what defines Air Force is its defense. It might sound like a statistic from the 1940s, but this is the current reality in the Mountain West Conference: When the Falcons score at least 50 points, their record is 13-0.
The cadets might be gentlemen and scholars, but on the basketball floor they have the cold hearts of thieves. Their defense is predicated on inciting paranoia. Go in the lane against Air Force, and you feel as flop-sweat panicked as some poor tourist who just dropped all his credit cards in a crowded New York subway.
It is this defense that has suddenly turned Air Force’s home court to a place to be seen rather than a place to get lost.
The Falcons play in a bunker. As recently as a season ago, four of 13 home dates attracted an audience of fewer than 1,000. But the crowd was so loud against Utah that the decibels nearly punctured eardrums.
“Whenever it gets so loud that you can’t hear the ball dribbling on the court, how is the other team even going to be able to think what play they are going to run?” Falcons center Nick Welch said.
Joel Gerlach plays for Air Force. He is a senior. During his first three seasons, the Falcons lost 56 of 85 games. Did Gerlach ever imagine the NCAA tourney could be a real possibility?
“It always starts,” Gerlach said, “with a dream.”
