Engineering the biggest upset in NCAA men’s tournament history requires close to perfection. It’s an impossible standard to set over the course of a 40-minute basketball game, but the one Siena largely stared down as it looked No. 1 overall seed Duke in the eye.
For much of that Thursday afternoon in Greenville, S.C., the Saints were exactly that. Every big three dropped. The defensive plan to slow likely national player of the year Cameron Boozer was working. Confidence grew in the green and gold and wavered for 32–2 Duke. Siena made it to halftime with a double-digit lead and didn’t get immediately popped out of the locker room by a Duke team that admitted coming out of the locker room that it thought the Saints would be a “cakewalk” coming into the day.
And then came the fateful 13 seconds, the stretch that may have prevented the Saints from forever Cinderella status and the Blue Devils from one of the tournament’s ugliest losses ever.
Jamie Sabau/NCAA Photos/Getty Images
Siena inbounded underneath its basket with eight seconds on the shot clock, 17:30 between them and immortality. Point guard Justice Shoats dished to center Riley Mulvey in the corner, who pitched it back to Shoats immediately and rolled toward the rim. Duke’s defense froze, and Shoats looped a pass over the top to his big man. It should have been an uncontested dunk to give Siena a 15-point lead.
Somehow, almost defying gravity, the ball rattled off both sides of the rim and bounced out. Mulvey recovered and dished to Francis Folefac, who attacked the rim aggressively and tried to split two defenders for an even bigger slam. It clanged off the iron and went flying into open space, snatched up by Duke’s Isaiah Evans with a head of steam. Evans blew by a backpedaling Shoats, the final line of defense, and dunked it with two hands at the other end.
There was the momentum swing Duke desperately needed.
“We had to do something to get some energy going,” Boozer said. “I think [Evans’s] two dunks back to back really helped us get it going for sure.”
Consider it the biggest what if of a tournament always filled with them. Siena still had an 11-point lead at that point, but that moment felt like the beginning of the end of one of the great upset bids of all time.
This wasn’t Siena’s first rodeo in the March spotlight. Devoted March Madness lovers will remember Bill Raftery’s iconic “Onions! Double order!” call in 2009, when point guard Ronald Moore sunk a pair of enormous threes deep into the night in an No. 8 vs. No. 9 game against Ohio State before putting a serious scare into a Rick Pitino–coached Louisville. This is a proud program in a town without major pro or college teams: Siena plays its games in a downtown NBA-sized arena in Albany, N.Y., 10 or so minutes from campus, and has consistently drawn the best attendance in its conference.
But it had been awhile since the Saints had gone marching into March Madness. That 2009 team was part of a run of three straight tournament appearances that ended after the 2010 season, when head coach Fran McCaffery left for Iowa. Then the program sputtered. It won the league’s regular-season crown in 2020 and looked poised to get back dancing before the MAAC tournament was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, then repeated as regular-season champs in the shortened 2021 campaign before getting upset early in the tournament by a Pitino-led Iona.
And for this to be the team that broke the school’s March drought was incredible on its own. Head coach Gerry McNamara, a Syracuse legend, was clearly building momentum there, but the Saints’ roster had been decimated throughout the year with injuries. They entered their conference tournament with two available frontcourt players and seven total scholarship players after starting center Tasman Goodrick went down for the year midseason and another starter up front, Antonio Chandler, was ruled ineligible at the end of February. Siena got through three games in four days at the MAAC tournament with six total bench points, but its defense bowed up and shut down all three tournament opponents (including No. 1 seed Merrimack in the title game) to send the program dancing again.
Drawing Duke was a bit of a gut punch though. Siena thought it had a strong case for a No. 15 seed; instead it was the second team revealed during the selection show with a date against the No. 1 overall seed. By tip-off, they were 28.5-point underdogs, five points further a long shot than Fairleigh Dickinson was against Purdue in 2023 and eight points beyond UMBC’s underdog status against Virginia in 2018.
Siena head coach Gerry McNamara reacts in the first half against Duke in the first round of the NCAA men’s tournament. | Bob Donnan-Imagn Images
That Siena might win the game wasn’t even a thought in the minds of most in Greenville there covering the game; the greater focus being on McNamara’s future given his alma mater, Syracuse, was hunting for a new head coach and McNamara was expected to be involved. McNamara rebuffed questions about his future, saying he felt strongly about keeping his entire focus on the players who helped him get to the Dance and not the job he may or may not get the following week.
“These kids have given me everything they’ve got every day this season,” McNamara said. “They deserve my full attention, and they’ve got it.”
Those questions are part of the new reality for smaller schools getting their moment in the spotlight in March. Siena fans who’ve waited for 15 years for the chance to see their team in this tournament again spent the eight days leading up to their return to the Dance hearing about the likelihood that their coach would depart, and with him likely many of the key players who had made this season’s Saints so special. The timing of all these moves make it increasingly hard to actually enjoy the moment these days.
But boy, did the Saints ever give their fans (and all the new ones who adopted them for two hours) a ride to remember. Kids getting home from school and nine-to-five workers streaming the action on their work computer suddenly became as big a Siena fan as those who have been making the trip to downtown Albany their entire life. The Saints’ “Iron Five” who played the game’s first 39:50 before McNamara finally made his first sub battled unbelievably admirably. They could have easily rolled over when Duke made that 11–0 run, sparked by the missed dunks, to cut Siena’s lead to two. That they punched back, briefly reextended the lead, and held it until the game’s final five minutes said everything about what the Saints were made of. If there was ever a deserving Cinderella in a year without one, it was Siena.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” McNamara said to open his postgame news conference. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of any group of kids I’ve been around. I think the world and college basketball saw what I’ve been so grateful and thankful to be around all season, a group of kids that love each other, that compete at the highest level and play for each other.”
Its cast of characters were everything that’s right about current college hoops. Its star, Gavin Doty, is wildly competitive. He turned down pursuits from bigger programs to return as a sophomore and be the face of the program. Its point guard, Shoats, grinded away in anonymity at Division II Lock Haven … just playing a game against Duke is a marvel, let alone starring in it. Mulvey and Brendan Coyle were local products who grew up just a few miles from campus. Mulvey came home after starting his career at Iowa, and Coyle stuck around after a coaching change to become a key piece of McNamara’s puzzle. And Folefac, the fifth starter, didn’t pass the eye test out of high school as a thickly built, highly skilled forward but grinded his way into the lineup and looks like a future star. They stared one of the sport’s biggest Goliaths in the face and didn’t blink.
Siena center Riley Mulvey (55) and forward Francis Folefac celebrate after a play in their first-round game against Duke. | Bob Donnan-Imagn Images
In another world, one where Mulvey’s dunk attempt is a few millimeters more on line and rattles through the rim, those five starters would be the heroes of this March, the 40-minute warriors that slayed the giant and reminded fans that Cinderella in this tournament is alive and well.
Instead, the rest of Siena’s March is being spent picking up the pieces. Perhaps sealed by the epic tournament performance, McNamara locked down the Syracuse head job over the weekend. The Saints are expected to hire an outside candidate, which will likely prompt a roster reset. The Siena you watch come November will hardly resemble the one that nearly became the story of this March. That’s part of the new finality of March in college basketball’s current era. Seniors or not, many, if not all, of the players crying in the jersey at the final buzzer will be wearing a different one next season.
But for those two hours, nothing else mattered. It’s the beauty of the NCAA tournament format, one that should never get messed with. A team that had gotten blasted by Fairfield 20 days before got its chance by winning its conference tournament and came painfully close to taking it, every disadvantage they had in the game be damned.
“I said after [the MAAC tournament] in Atlantic City I’m a proud coach,” McNamara said. “I’m still a damn proud coach.”
More March Madness From Sports Illustrated
Listen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on the SI College YouTube channel.
