The Basketball Tournament starts this week. Let's Remember Some Guys

The annual winner-take-all event gives us an opportunity to watch players who excelled in college, but never found their footing in the NBA. And for that, we should all be very grateful.

The idea was simple enough – get 32 basketball teams made up of former college players to compete in an open invitational tournament with a six-figure, winner-take-all prize and see what happens.

It worked. The Basketball Tournament (TBT) has grown considerably from where it was in 2014, when 17 fans showed up for the event’s first-ever game. The tournament field and prize money have since doubled. ESPN now broadcasts the games. One of its more innovative rule twists – the Elam Ending, in which a game ends when a certain point total is reached, not when the clock expires – was adopted by the NBA’s all-star game.

The secret of TBT’s growth and success comes down to a few different factors. Its place on a painfully slow time on the sports calendar certainly helps. The games have easily relatable stakes, as the money attached to winning the tournament is potentially life-changing for the vast majority of its participants.

The most crucial variable, though, is a market inefficiency TBT founder and CEO John Mugar explained to me in 2016. 

Every year, there are hundreds of standouts who exit the college game but don’t have a future in the NBA, often going overseas, where only the most obsessive sickos back home will follow their exploits. All the fond memories they created and passion they elicited from those fans of their programs over their years on campus? It doesn’t disappear, but until TBT, there wasn’t an outlet for that fandom to be rekindled for a team and in a game they’d actually care about.

Put more succinctly, TBT gives us a chance to Remember Some Guys.

None of these players achieved anything resembling NBA stardom and though some of them made it to the league, it wasn’t for very long. They live forever, though, in the minds of millions of college basketball fans across the country, bringing out a smile or ginning up some other visceral feeling inside someone with a mere mention of their name.

With the event kicking off later this week, I combed through all 64 TBT rosters and bring to you my personal top 10 of Guys. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did putting it together.

Lee Humphrey, Florida

TBT team: Gataverse

The 2006-07 Florida team that successfully defended its national championship is perhaps the best men’s college basketball team this century. The Gators not only withstood the pressure and expectations that greeted them after a somewhat surprising march to the 2006 title, but they sported one of the most talented rosters in recent memory. Three Florida players were among the first nine picks in the 2007 NBA Draft and six of the team’s top eight scorers eventually made it to the league.

The one player from that squad who averaged at least six points per game and never made it to the NBA? That’d be Humphrey. Joakim Noah and Al Horford were future NBA all-stars. Corey Brewer was a Final Four most outstanding player and top-10 pick. Taurean Green was the team’s scoring and assists leader, the point guard and proverbial straw that stirred the drink. Humphrey, though, was the all-important fifth and final piece of that starting lineup, a knockdown shooter who shot at least 43% from 3 in three of his four collegiate seasons. That included one of the wildest statistics I’ve ever come across in this sport – he shot 45.9% from 3 in both his junior and senior seasons, with an identical number of attempts (246) and makes (113) in each campaign.

The man was particularly memorable because of what he did on the game’s biggest stage. In four career Final Four games, Humphrey averaged 15.5 points per game while making a ridiculous 51.4% of his 3s (18 of 35). That doesn’t even include a 23-point effort in a 2007 Elite Eight win against Oregon in which one of his seven 3s that day broke a string in the net and delayed the game for 10 minutes while it was repaired.

"I think it was a faulty net or something," Humphrey said. "I didn't shoot it any different than I shoot the rest of my shots. I don't know.”

More than 15 years after he graduated, Humphrey is still the Florida career leader in 3-point percentage. He never caught on in the NBA, playing in Greece, Poland, Germany, France, Ukraine, Hungary and Lithuania, along with a one-year stint in the then-NBA D-League, over an eight-year stretch. Today, Humphrey serves as a color commentator on radio broadcasts of Florida’s games.

Henry Walker, Kansas State

TBT team: Purple & Black

In what may seem antithetical to Guy Remembrance, this inclusion might cause some confusion. Though he now goes by Henry, Walker was known as Bill when he starred for two seasons at Kansas State from 2006-08. 

The hype surrounding him began well before he ever arrived in Manhattan, Kansas. A former high-school teammate of O.J. Mayo – who’s still probably one of the most famous prep players I can recall in my lifetime – Walker was the No. 7 recruit in the 2007 class, putting him ahead of the likes of James Harden, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan, among others. 

After a promising six-game start to his freshman season, he ruptured the ACL in his left knee and missed the remainder of the season. He came back strong as a sophomore, averaging 16.1 points and 6.3 rebounds per game while forming one of the more notable one-two scoring punches in recent college basketball history with Michael Beasley, who averaged a ridiculous 26.2 points and 12.4 rebounds per game in what might be the most underappreciated individual season ever for a college basketball player. In one game, Beasley (44 points) and Walker (31) combined for 75 of the Wildcats’ 86 points in a loss to Baylor. It didn’t help that while Beasley and Walker went a combined 27 of 46 from the field, the rest of the team went three of 18.

Walker left Kansas State after that sophomore season, where he was projected by some as a first-round NBA Draft pick, but another knee injury, this time in a pre-draft team workout, bumped him to the No. 47 overall pick. He went on to play five seasons in the NBA and managed to average 11.9 points per game in a 27-game stretch with the Knicks in 2010. Since a run with the Miami Heat in 2015, he played in Croatia, the Philippines, Turkey, Uruguay, Japan and Venezuela, but hasn’t suited up for anyone professionally since last year.

As for the name change? It occurred in 2014, with Walker citing he wanted a fresh, more mature start.

“It’s just about growing up,” he told D-League Digest. “I never liked the name Billy and everybody called me that. My mom even wondered why everyone called me Billy? I just wanted to get out of it. I’m growing up and getting older, and I just felt like it was time to drop that name.”

Levance Fields, Pitt

TBT Team: The Zoo Crew

Back in 2019 when I was covering Pitt for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was working on a 10-year retrospective of the Panthers’ 2008-09 team, which fell just short of a Final Four, but is probably the best squad in program history. While speaking with former players, coaches, trainers and whoever I could get in touch with, I’d ask for phone numbers for other people I could shed some insight on that group and what made it special. Most of the time, when Fields’ name came up, there was some uncertainty. They’d have a phone number for him, but were often unsure of whether it still worked.

“Good luck with trying to get him,” I’d often hear.

Sadly, I never was able to get in touch with Fields, but frankly, it only added to his mythos. The man had the ideal form of a Big East point guard – stocky and rugged, which is really just a nice way of saying “kind of chubby”, but I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. It’s the ideal male body, the boxy-looking peak of human evolution (at least on a college basketball court in a mid-sized to large city in the American northeast).

He put that build to good use and when paired with extraordinary and careful court vision, he was lethal. Fourteen years after his final game, he’s third in program history in career assists (645), second in career assist:turnover ratio (2.89:1), first in assists in a season (270 in 2008-09), second in assists per game in a season (7.5 in 2008-09) and first in assists in a game (16, against DePaul in 2009).

Paired with that was an unmistakably odd jump shot, at least in the way it looked. Fields would rise up, cock the ball back unusually far to the point where his back would arch a bit and fall away. In the biggest moments of a game, those shots went in way more often than not. A 3-pointer he hit near the top of the key with 4.7 seconds left in overtime in a win against Duke in Madison Square Garden in 2007 is one of the most revered shots in program history. The following season, he went into the final four minutes of a win at No. 1 UConn zero of eight from the field, but made two clutch 3s in the last 3:09 to give the Panthers their first-ever win over a top-ranked team. In the NCAA Tournament that year, he made a 3 and got a layup off a steal in a 24-second span in the final minute to help Pitt avoid an upset bid from Xavier in the Sweet 16. And though Scottie Reynolds’ buzzer-beating layup in the Elite Eight ended his career, Fields made two free throws to tie the game with six seconds left.

That Panthers team featured two AP all-Americans in DeJuan Blair and Sam Young, both of whom were NBA Draft picks that summer, but if you ever asked anyone with that team who the most important player was, there was never any hesitation. It was Fields.

Fletcher Magee, Wofford

TBT team: Challenge ALS

My memories of Magee aren’t quite as strong as they are of Humphrey, another white sniper of a guard for a southern college basketball team – mostly because I’m convinced our sports memories peak somewhere around high school or early in college before life sullies it all – but I can remember going out of my way to watch him.

Between everything I had heard about him and wanting a reprieve from covering a Kevin Stallings-led Pitt team that finished 0-18 in the ACC that year, I began watching Magee closely as a junior in 2017-18. He astonished me. He shot at a ridiculously high volume his final two years at Wofford, with 714 attempts from 3 between those two seasons, but he shot it remarkably efficiently, connecting on 42.9% of his shots from beyond the arc. It helped that he played in a Mike Young-orchestrated offense predicated on crisp movement on and off the ball, which is still one of the more aesthetically pleasing groups I’ve seen in years.

Magee ended his time at Wofford as the NCAA’s career leader in made 3s, with 508, though Antoine Davis from Detroit Mercy broke that mark earlier this year. Still, for all those buckets from deep, it might be one of Magee’s worst college games that stays with me the most. In what would be his final time in a Terriers uniform, Magee missed all 12 of his 3s in a second round NCAA Tournament loss to Kentucky in 2019. After the game, Magee described himself as “still kind of in shock.”

"It just doesn't seem right to end on a game going 0 for 12 from 3," he said. "If I go 3 for 12, we win the game. I'm not sure how that happens. I'm sure I won't get over it for a while."

The man did the only thing a true hooper can, though – he kept shooting. It didn’t happen in the NBA – he went undrafted in 2019 – but he’s been draining 3s in Spain and Montenegro the past four years.

Mark Lyons, Xavier

TBT team: Zip ‘Em Up

I came across Lyons not by watching him play, but good ol’ fashioned word of mouth. My best friend in college went to the same high school as Lyons in Schenectady, N.Y. and knowing I was a big college basketball fan, he asked me if I knew about the young Xavier guard he simply called “Cheeks”.

Once I heard that nickname, I was hooked. This was a man whose exploits I’d be following the next four years. Lyons was an excellent player for the Musketeers, twice earning all-Atlantic 10 honors and helping lead his team to two Sweet 16s in three seasons there. 

Lyons might be best known, though, for his involvement in a brawl in 2011 between Xavier and archrival Cincinnati in the aptly-named Crosstown Shootout. If you’re reading this, you probably know the story. In the final minute of the Musketeers’ 76-53 win, a rising tension between the teams led to a bench-clearing fight in which actual punches were thrown (and connected). Most memorably, seven-foot Xavier center Kenny Frease had a large cut under his left eye and had a Bearcats player stomp on the back of his head as he lay on the court. Though no criminal charges were filed, seven players between the two teams were suspended, including Lyons, who was forced to sit out two games.

"If somebody puts their hand in your face or tries to do something to you, where we're from, you're gonna do something back,” Lyons said in a press conference after the game.

It was backcourt mate Holloway, though, who had the most memorable lines of the presser. He said Xavier “got a whole bunch of gangsters in the locker room. Not thugs, but tough guys on the court.” Then, while addressing some of the Bearcats’ trash talk in the week leading up to the game, he offered up this all-timer.

“We went out there and zipped them up at the end of the game,” Holloway said.

Though Holloway isn’t on the team, his fingerprints are all over it, down to the name. It’ll just have to be Lyons who carries on the legacy of that squad and that unforgettable moment in college basketball history.

Scoochie Smith, Dayton

TBT team: Red Scare

Admittedly, I didn’t watch quite as much of Smith in college as I did most of the other guys on this list. But, c’mon – the man’s name is Scoochie. How could he not be on here?

Of course, Smith was a fine college player. Dayton made the NCAA Tournament each of his four years at the school, including an Elite Eight run in 2014, his freshman season. Smith averaged 3.6 points per game for that squad and only got better from there, climaxing with first-team all-Atlantic 10 recognition his senior year in 2017.

But back to that name. Smith’s given name is Dayshon. As a toddler, he was given the Scoochie moniker by his grandfather, George Blount, but Blount passed away not long after that, so by the time Smith was grown enough to wonder ‘Hey, why did you call me this?’, Blount wasn’t around to answer. He was teased about it growing up – if you’re wondering why, just drop the ‘s’ from it and see what remains – but he grew to accept and even embrace it.

Then, as a high schooler, he looked up a definition for the word online.

“It said to be annoying or dance a lot,” Smith told the Dayton Daily News in 2017. “I know I was definitely one of the two and maybe both.”

Peyton Siva, Louisville

TBT team: The Ville

Among the many follies of the NCAA’s longstanding practice of vacating wins from misbehaving programs is that you can’t erase history. Certain moments and those involved in them simply mean too much to too many people to forcibly forget. Or some of us are just sentient beings who process the world around us and some of the events that take place in it. 

In the case of Louisville, which had its 2013 title and a 2012 Final Four appearance taken away after it was found it used escorts to try to land recruits, it means sticking Men-in-Black-style neuralyzers in our face and telling us half of Siva’s college career never happened. And why would you deprive us of that?

Siva was a quintessential college point guard, a player who seemed like a fixture of the sport for a decade despite only being there the customary four years. An agile and lightning quick guard at six feet tall who played an integral role in Louisville’s pesky and often overwhelming full-court pressure defense, Siva was statistically a model of consistency his final three years with the Cardinals, averaging between 9.1 and 10 points per game and 5.2 and 5.7 assists per game each season. As a junior, however, he was struggling mightily early in the season, shooting below 25% from 3 and turning the ball over as many as four times in a half one game. His coach, Rick Pitino, noticed his point guard was stretched thin in his life, exhausted from balancing all the responsibilities he thrust upon himself.

"I told him, 'Take a relationship sabbatical -- I'll even call your girlfriend for you,'" Pitino told ESPN The Magazine in 2012. "He should only be making time for two things: school and basketball.”

While I’d severely caution against taking romantic advice from that particular person, it seemed to help. He was the Big East Tournament MVP that season, won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award as the top men’s college basketball player six feet or shorter the following season and piloted the Cardinals to their first national championship in 27 years in 2013. He had 18 points in the title game, which included a pair of critical free throws late in the second half after he was viciously assaulted by Michigan’s Trey Burke while going up for a breakaway dunk.

Siva also had something that most any memorable college player needs – a gripping backstory. He grew up in a large Samoan family in a poor Seattle neighborhood. His father, Peyton Sr., was a 6-foot-3 former kickboxer who struggled with substance abuse and would often disappear from his family for days, even weeks. For at least some of that time, he contemplated suicide, with his son having to talk him out of it. Eventually, his dad became more of a regular presence in his life and during Siva’s college career, he was a fixture on broadcasts of Louisville games, a bear of a man who was so loudly and lovingly proud of his son.

Marcus Keene, Central Michigan

TBT team: Sideline Cancer

With Keene, the appeal was easy enough to understand and even easier to explain – he was under six feet tall and was a walking, breathing bucket.

Since 1997, only two Division I players have averaged at least 30 points per game. One of them was Keene, who transferred to Central Michigan after averaging 15.6 points per game at Youngstown State as a sophomore and sat out a season in adherence to what were then NCAA rules.

Then came the gift of his 2016-17 season. The 5-foot-9 Keene never scored fewer than 12 points and had seven games with at least 40 points, including 50 on 15-of-23 shooting in a win against Miami of Ohio. For someone who scored at the exhausting rate he did, he was relatively efficient, too, making 52.2% of his 2s and 36.8% of his 3s. He led all Division I players in scoring at season, at 30 points per game even. In my first year as an AP all-American voter, I made what I believe to be my single biggest mistake when I didn’t include him on one of my three five-man teams. His Central Michigan squad went 16-16 and lost its final eight games, which was a horrid justification even without the benefit of hindsight.

Sadly, it was the only year we got of the full Keene experience. He bypassed his final year of eligibility, but went undrafted. Since 2017, he has played in South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Estonia, Slovenia, France, Ukraine, Italy and the G-League. He’s been a TBT fixture, too, helping lead Sideline Cancer to the 2020 championship game and earning all-TBT honors twice.

Jarvis Varnado, Mississippi State

TBT team: Team Arkansas

As I type this, I’m half-expecting Varnado to swipe my hands away from the keyboard. To this day, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more effective and tenacious shot-blocker in the college game.

At 6-foot-9, but with a 7-foot-4 wingspan, Varnado blocked seemingly everything he could in his four years at Mississippi State. He never averaged fewer than 4.6 blocks per game in his final three college seasons and even then, he led the country in that category. As a senior in 2009-10, he had nine games with at least seven blocks, including 10 in a win against Arkansas that gave him the rare points/rebounds/blocks triple-double.

He was a three-time SEC defensive player of the year, the first player to ever win the award three years in a row, and his 564 (564!!) career blocks are still a Division I record. He played 37 NBA games across three seasons, 23 of which came with a very-early-in-the-process Sixers team in 2013-14, but has mostly been playing overseas since 2015.

Thomas “Snacks” Lee, Jackson State

TBT team: HBCUnited

You forgot about this guy, didn’t you? It’s understandable. We hardly had any time to relish his majesty and grace.

Only nine days before Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 and the world as we had previously known it ceased to exist, we had a moment of goodness that was destined to only last for so long.

In the final minutes of Jackson State’s 76-56 win against Arkansas-Pine Bluff on March 2, 2020, the Tigers inserted Lee, a student manager who had been around the program in some form since 2004, into the game after repeated chants of “We want Snacks!” from the fans in the arena. After missing his first three attempts from beyond the arc, he swished a 3 to send the crowd into pandemonium and instantly making himself a national star, if just for a fleeting moment. The clip of him went viral and before he knew it, he was being featured on Good Morning America and getting delivered signed jerseys from Kevin Durant.

Lee, whose nickname came from the fact he always came around the Tigers’ locker room as a kid with a bag of snacks, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical education in 2020. He went on to start a Jackson-based AAU team with former college teammate Darrian Wilson. The team, which managed to secure a sponsorship with Buffalo Wild Wings, has helped a handful of players graduate from high school and earn spots on college rosters.

The team’s name? Snack Pack Elite.

(Photos: Associated Press, SB Nation, Jackson State Athletics)