When the Fairy Godmother helped Cinderella prepare for the ball and her shot with Prince Charming, do you think it was her first time? She appeared to be an older woman – well an older fairy – and she was a fairly skilled dress designer, much better than Gus and the rest of the mice anyway. Come to think of it, Cinderella may not have been her first client, and maybe those other helpless potential princesses never did find their prince.
Even Cinderella herself had more than one chance. She was already on her way to the ball when her Fairy Godmother appeared. Once it all went wrong, she had to overhaul everything, and as far as 2025 March Madness Cinderella stories, Akron Zips head coach John Groce can relate to that.
Groce punched his ticket to the big dance for the fourth time in his 16 years as a Division 1 head coach, winning the MAC Tournament behind star forward Enrique Freeman, veteran guard Ali Ali, and a deliberately methodical pace.
That recipe was good enough for a 14-seed and a 77-60 first-round loss to Creighton, his second first-round NCAA Tournament exit after arriving at Akron in 2017. So, last offseason, Groce overhauled everything, not just his roster, but also his play style, and now the Zips – a fitting name for this up-tempo group – are atop the MAC standings and poised to punch another ticket to the big dance. Though, this time, they might make some noise before the clock strikes midnight.
The Cinderella role won’t be unfamiliar to Groce if this Akron team fares better on the opening weekend of March Madness than last year’s. The veteran leader’s most successful postseason came back in 2012 when he was the hot new up-and-coming head coach at Ohio and took the Bobcats to the Sweet 16 as a No. 13 seed.
That March Madness run landed him the Illinois job, but Groce has only one NCAA Tournament victory since and missed the tournament in four of his five years as the head coach of the Illini. With a team as good as his Zips, which got to 22-6 (14-1) with a high-scoring 87-82 win over Ball State on Tuesday night in Muncie Indiana, Groce needs to find a way into the field of 68, and that means another conference title.
Can Akron punch its ticket to March Madness?
For as dominant as Akron has been in the MAC, only losing its first conference game over the weekend with an 84-67 dud at Ohio, the Zips are just 101st in Kenpom and 98th in the NET Rankings with zero quad 1 victories. Simply put, the MAC is a one-bid league.
Akron nabbed that bid a season ago on the back of Freeman’s dominant run through the conference tournament, averaging 23.7 points, 14 rebounds, and 4 blocks a game. Then, the fifth-year senior left for the NBA, and Groce’s veteran-laden roster was gutted by graduation, losing Ali, Greg Trimble, Sammy Hunter, and Kaleb Thornton with Mikal Dawson and Ryan Prather Jr. exiting through the transfer portal to Marshall and Robert Morris respectively. Groce’s 2025 roster is led by key returners Nate and Tavari Johnson (no relation), but like the Fairy Godmother, Groce didn’t just rebuild it, he made it better.
Last year’s helio-centric methodical offense has been replaced by a versatile up-tempo attack (11th in the country in Kenpom adjusted tempo) with nine players logging over 15 minutes a game, six of them newcomers. The Zips run off turnovers, the Zips run off misses, the Zips even run off makes. Their 13.7 fast break points a game are 94th percentile, and they’ve more than doubled their bench scoring output from last season now averaging 33.5 bench points a game.
While Nate Johnson is the team’s leading scorer, 5-foot-11 point guard Tavari Johnson is the real conductor of Groce’s new-look offense, which puts a premium on letting it fly from deep. Groce goes 10 deep and nine Zips average more than six points a game, with nearly everyone capable of putting the ball on the deck or pulling up from deep.
That depth of talent enables Akron’s blistering pace, and crucially it often leaves opposing bigs out of position or too exhausted to defend the rim. Akron is shooting a staggering 69% at the rim and across its last 10 games, including the let-down loss to Ohio, the Zips are up to 78.2% on field goal attempts at the rim.
Kent State is lurking at No. 116 in Kenpom, and the Zips have the Golden Flashes at home on Friday night, but the MAC is Akron’s to lose.
Why the slipper may not fit the Zips
There is an inherent concern with any up-tempo underdog in March Madness: If you play a high-possession game against a team with superior athletes, you’re giving those athletes more opportunities to separate themselves.
That exact thing happened to Pat Kelsey’s Charleston team when it ran into an Alabama buzz-saw in the first round last March. Now the head coach at Louisville, Kelsey was accustomed to running opponents out of the gym with a deep bench and a barrage of threes, but that played right into the Crimson Tide’s strengths.
However, if Akron, or any up-tempo team like it, draws a methodical opponent that tries to drag them into the mud, but can’t, and isn’t comfortable playing a full-court game; advantage underdog. In a lot of ways Akron’s potential postseason success is matchup-dependent, but then isn’t every Cinderella? You saw the ugly step-sisters… they earned that unflattering adjective. If Belle and Snow White had shown up at the ball, it may have been a different story for our girl and her fairy godmother.
While a bad matchup could spoil their postseason, the Zips do have a bigger worry than a Selection Sunday draw. It’s a glaring weakness that any team, up-tempo or not, can expose: Akron does not get to the free-throw line, and on the other end they sent their opponents there quite a bit.
Across Akron’s six losses, the Zips have committed an average of 16.1 personal fouls, which can partially be attributed to the inflated number of possessions in their fast-paced games. They’ve also shot 30 total fewer free throws than their opponents in those six games, and 37 fewer in the most recent five losses, if you exclude an 80-75 loss to Arkansas State back on November 4.
Getting to the line is the best way to slow a fast-paced team down and with officials vying to advance to the next round of the NCAA Tournament almost as hard as the players on the floor, Groce’s postseason fate may be decided at the free throw line.
No matter how the season ends for the Zips, Groce’s on-the-fly rebuild was one of the most impressive in the sport, but offseason wins don’t tend to get remembered quite the same as postseason ones.
Cinderella Search Committee Watchlist:
- George Mason (Jan 22)
- North Texas (Jan 30)
- Drake (February 5)
- New Mexico (February 13)
- VCU (February 20)
- Akron (February 27