Championship Week provides an opportunity for teams from a one-bid league to have a second chance at the season. If the regular season did not go as planned, the tournament offers a clean slate to start winning some games and steal an NCAA Tournament bid. Prairie View A&M Panthers took this to heart, winning 4 games in 5 days to claim the SWAC bid to the NCAA Tournament.Â
The Panthers' claiming the NCAA Tournament bid was a surprise given how the regular season went. The SWAC also had Bethune-Cookman, one of the better teams the SWAC had ever seen, but the nature of a single-elimination tournament means the top seeds don't always advance. Prairie View A&M was the team that knocked out the top seed on its way to the NCAA Tournament. The Panthers are making their first appearance since 2019 and their third appearance overall. Prairie View is headed to Dayton looking for its first win in program history. Here are some things to know about the Panthers.
Free Throw Line
This one is either going to make people extremely upset or make people extremely happy. The Panthers foul at one of the highest rates in the country, and they are not just fouling because they are out of position; the fouls are part of the defensive philosophy of head coach Byron Scott. He wants to disrupt the offensive flow on the defensive side so no one gets comfortable.
On the flip side, Prairie View also draws a ton of fouls every night. That is a result of having many players who can get to the rim and usually get past their man. There are many theories suggesting that once teams leave their conferences, they are officiated differently. This probably won’t be the case with the Panthers because they are coached to be aggressive and coached to draw contact. Â
If you like games with a lot of free throws, then watch some Prairie View basketball. Just remember, if you are going to have an offense where 25% of your scoring comes from the free throw line, then you better make your free throws, otherwise it could be a long night. The good news for the Panthers is that they make them at a 75% clip.
Quite the Turnaround
The SWAC is one of the conferences where most teams will have lopsided records. The schools don’t have the operating budgets of many other low majors and are nowhere near those of the power-conference schools. That means the schools in this conference have to play buy games, where they will go and get hammered for a large payday to keep their athletic departments open. Then, once conference play starts,s things start to even out.
Every team is going to have a large number in the loss column, but it's how the teams fare in their conference. Last season, the Panthers only won 5 games and struggled to defend anyone. Heading into the offseason, Coach Byron Scott knew he would have to get more athletic and commit more on the defensive side of the ball if Prairie View A&M was to reach its goals.Â
The Panthers had few players returning from last season, but still brought in older players who had been in college for a while. That new philosophy by Coach Scott allowed the Panthers to improve by 13 wins from last season and make the NCAA Tournament. Granted, a 9-out-of-10 game-winning streak happened, but at least the Panthers got it figured out. Â
Completing the turnaround from worst to first in the SWAC would be all the better if the Panthers could get a win in the First Four game and finally remove the zero from wins in the event. The win would provide much-needed revenue and help tremendously with recruiting.
SWAC Pride
This has kind of already been mentioned throughout, but the SWAC, and quite frankly, the rest of the HBCUs, including those in the MEAC, don’t get much respect in the sport of college basketball. The fact that all of them get 16 seeds and usually end up in Dayton isn’t a conspiracy theory; it is where the metrics place them. There is usually no gripe with that.Â
This is usually a best-case scenario for those teams. It is a chance to play a standalone game and to get a win in the NCAA Tournament. It is also against teams they can beat when the talent gap isn’t so large.  Â
All of the SWAC schools seem to get the picture: they want each other to do well; if one school does well, they all do well. SWAC Pride is a real thing, and this year Prairie View has the distinction of trying to secure the SWAC win and move on to the bracketed portion of the event. The schools usually want to be recognized; the exposure is a good thing.