DAYTON, Ohio – Three thoughts on San Diego State’s 95-68 loss to North Carolina in the First Four of the NCAA Tournament on Tuesday night:
1. The future
Five years ago, the season would have ended, the team would have flown home and the coaching staff would take a few weeks to reintroduce themselves to their families or, possibly, a beach.
Those days are over.
The 2024-25 season ended Tuesday night in Dayton. The 2025-26 season began Wednesday afternoon, when they landed in San Diego.
“Yeah, the work starts now,” a weary coach Brian Dutcher said Tuesday night. “The portal opens shortly (on Monday), and we’ll find out who’s coming back from our team. We’ll find out who’s available. … I’ll turn my coaching hat into a GM hat and try to put a team together for next year that will be competitive and have an opportunity to come back here and play in the dance and hopefully advance.”
The thing about having such a young team is that more of it can return – or transfer out. The first task will be determining who’s out and who’s in.
Out: Seniors Jared Coleman-Jones, Wayne McKinney III and Kimo Ferrari all run out of eligibility. Demarshay Johnson Jr. has one more year but took part in Senior Night and isn’t expected back.
In: Reese Waters, the preseason all-conference guard who had his entire year wiped out by a stress fracture in his foot, has already committed to returning. Miles Byrd says he’ll return to SDSU if he doesn’t turn pro, and you’d think that’s less of a possibility given his struggles over the back half of the season (he had four points and three turnovers Tuesday night). Nick Boyd said when he arrived last summer from Florida Atlantic that his was a two-year commitment, so figure he’s back as well.
That’s a big, long, athletic, talented, veteran backcourt that will immediately rank among the best in the West.
But who else will them?
Whether this is a very good or a possibly great team hinges on 7-foot redshirt Magoon Gwath, who emerged as an NBA prospect in midseason before hyperextending his right knee on Feb. 22 and missing five games. There already have been NIL discussions to coax him to stay, but the vibe around the program is it’s 50-50 at best that he does.
Asked last week about his plans, Gwath said: “Right now, I’m looking more towards trying to get to the pros.”
That leaves two sophomores — Miles Heide and BJ Davis — and true freshmen Taj DeGourville, Pharaoh Compton and redshirting 7-footer Thokbor Majak.
And whoever the Aztecs can attract in the transfer portal. With only one incoming freshman (6-8 forward Tae Simmons), they’ll have at least three and possibly four or five available scholarships.
“We’ve always been able to piece together four-year guys and then add pieces out of the transfer market and find a way to have a good team,” Dutcher said. “So that’s the goal again, to retain the players who want to be here and then add pieces in the portal and continue to keep San Diego State relevant at a national level.”
The work starts now.
2. The offense
The last time the Aztecs faced an ACC team in the NCAA Tournament was 2021, a miserable night at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis against Syracuse. They trailed by 24 at the half and lost 78-62 only because they finally made some 3s in garbage time, just as they did Tuesday night to turn a 40-point deficit into a slightly less humiliating 27.
The big takeaway that night was the Aztecs were too small. They walked on the floor for the opening tip, looked up at the Orange giants and proceeded to get pushed around for 40 minutes.
The coaching staff vowed to get bigger. By the end of April, they had commitments from three players — a pair of strapping 6-foot-9 forwards (Jaedon LeDee and Tahirou Diabate) and a 6-3 guard (Matt Bradley) built like a linebacker.
Two years later, LeDee and Bradley were playing for a national championship with an old, physical, bruising roster that pushed opponents around.
The lesson after this public flogging should be clear: They need to fix the offense.
It’s been the elephant in the locker room for years, one of the nation’s elite defensive programs that looks like it’s playing against itself at the other end of the floor. The Aztecs finished this season ranked 117th nationally in offensive efficiency, according to the Kenpom metric. Since Jan. 1, they’ve been 157th.
The Aztecs rank 234th in 3-point accuracy, 337th in free-throw percentage, 195th in effective field-goal percentage (which adjusts for 3s being worth 50% more than 2-point baskets), 211th in the rate of baskets that are assisted (50.7%).
That’s not nearly good enough for a program that openly aspires to compete for a national title.
Consider: More than 90% of NCAA champions over the past 22 years ranked in the top 37 in defensive efficiency (no problem for SDSU) and the top 21 in offensive efficiency (big problem). Over the last 22 years, the Aztecs have achieved the latter only once, when they were 11th in 2019-20 with Malachi Flynn but never got to play in the NCAA Tournament because of the pandemic.
The offensive efficiency during Dutcher’s other seven years as head coach: 77, 184, 45, 167, 75, 62 and now 117.
There are mitigating circumstances, of course, and that’s what makes it more complicated than simply hiring an Xs and Os guru as assistant coach and handing him the keys to the offense.
The old coaching adage is you’re good at what you practice, and the Aztecs dedicate considerable time to defense while some programs give it lip service. They recruit to it, too, seeking specific body types (long arms, for instance) that aren’t always conducive to silky shooting strokes. And because they’re so good at it, they play it longer per possession as opponents struggle to score — which means more time in a stance and more lactic acid in the legs, and tired legs are a recipe for lower shooting percentages.
In exchange for that commitment to basketball’s less glamorous side, Dutcher allows his players offensive freedom and doesn’t micromanage shot selection. That’s a fine line with one of the nation’s youngest rosters that lost nearly 90% of its scoring and all five starters from last season, including the nation’s top power forward.
The result: They’re 15th in defensive efficiency, 117th in offensive efficiency.
But Dutcher also prides his program on morphing and changing, whether it’s adapting to relaxed transfer regulations or the advent of NIL.
“We always adjust,” he says.
It’s time to again.
3. The season
A brief thought about the season:
It wasn’t as bad as it ended.
Once the welts subside from the 27-point spanking on a national stage, fans should look back on 2024-25 with some level of appreciation. The mantra of college basketball in the transfer portal and NIL era is to get old and stay old. This team had three freshmen and three sophomores in the rotation, which is utter insanity.
Oh, and that was after losing its best and most veteran player (Waters) for the season.
Imagine taking a preseason all-conference player off other top teams in the Mountain West — Donovan Dent off New Mexico, Nique Clifford off Colorado State, Tyson Degenhart off Boise State, Ian Martinez off Utah State — and how they’d crash and burn. The Aztecs did not.
They outkicked their coverage in November, beating Creighton by 18 and then eventual No. 1 seed Houston in overtime to finish third in the loaded eight-team Players Era Festival in Las Vegas. They were up 18 at home on Utah State on Dec. 28 when the season turned south, losing the lead and then the game on a last-second 3. The team regressed to the mean from there and finished fourth in the Mountain West, which was where it was predicted in the preseason media poll that assumed Waters would be available.
The cautionary tale: UCLA has a similarly young but talented roster last season after losing most of its starting lineup from a Sweet 16 team in 2023. The Bruins ranked 318th in Division I experience, went 16-17 and missed the NCAA Tournament.
Coach Mick Cronin, vowing to never do that again, jumped into the portal and got old. The Bruins rank 83rd in Division I experience this season and are a No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
That’s been the Aztecs’ secret sauce in the past, ranking in the top 65 of Division I experience in each of the previous seven seasons. The 2022-23 team that played in the national championship game was 21st nationally with a nine-man rotation of juniors, seniors, fifth-year seniors and a sixth-year senior. The starting lineup was older than several NBA teams.
This was statistically SDSU’s youngest team in 13 seasons, ranking 227th in Division I experience and 304th in minutes continuity from last season. Only one other team, Illinois, got an at-large berth with less experience (and that’s because two starters came straight from European clubs).
“To lose Reese for the year was devastating,” Dutcher said. “Then to be fighting for an NCAA Tournament spot and lose Magoon, the freshman of the year and the defensive player of the year in the Mountain West, with six games to go added to the frustration. But to their credit, our kids fought and won the games they had to win.
“To have this young team come in and play with such heart and energy, and play their way into the NCAA Tournament is a tremendous credit to them.”
The victory, as hard as it is to swallow a 95-68 defeat in the NCAA Tournament, was just getting there.
