Belmont riding high into WBIT Final Four

After defeating familiar in-state rival Middle Tennessee, 64-51, in the WBIT’s opening round March 20 at home in Nashville, Tenn, the third-seeded Bruins faced elimination in the second round three days later, trailing nearly the entire game to Northern Arizona.  

Down by as much as 21 in the second quarter, the Bruins mounted an incredible comeback, outscoring the Lumberjacks 32-19 in the fourth quarter. Still trailing by 12 with two-and-a-half minutes remaining in the game and down by five with 30 seconds left, the Bruins had a string of hustle plays, eventually hitting the 81-80 game-winner with just 0.3 seconds on the clock. 

“I don’t know if we played three quarters of worse basketball than we did against Northern Arizona, and then had a quarter of being absolutely brilliant,” Belmont head coach Bart Brooks said Sunday in a WBIT semi final pregame press conference. “That’s kind of the beauty of this sport, I guess, in that just if you keep your head where your feet are and you focus on what’s in front of you and you continue to play the possession, and there’s time on the clock and you keep playing, you’ve got a chance.”

Belmont kept up its momentum from the dramatic comeback win into the quarterfinal March 27 on the road against top-seeded James Madison in Harrisonburg, Va. The Bruins cruised to a 90-45 win behind a season-high 18 three-pointers in their largest margin of victory ever in a national postseason game.

The Bruins (25-12) now face fourth-seeded Villanova (21-14)  at 2:30 p.m. ET today in Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. While Belmont lost in the second round of the WBIT last year, Villanova is no stranger to the tournament’s biggest stage, advancing to the 2024 championship game before falling to Illinois, 71-57. 

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Belmont is the lone remaining mid-major team in the WBIT. Second-seeded Minnesota and third-seeded Florida face each other in the other semifinal at 5 p.m. ET today. The championship game is at 6 p.m. ET  Wednesday. 

None of the top seeds – Virginia Tech, James Madison, Saint Joseph’s and Colorado – advanced to the final round at Hinkle Fieldhouse. Those teams received an automatic bid to the WBIT as the first four teams out of the 2025 NCAA DI women’s basketball tournament.

Prepared for competition

Playing in the mid-major Missouri Valley Conference which typically just sends the tournament champion to the NCAA Tournament, Brooks sets up his non-conference schedule with the postseason in mind. 

Facing six Power 5 teams – Kansas State, Ohio State, Duke, Michigan, Mississippi State and Kentucky – put Belmont’s non-conference schedule as the fourth-toughest in the country. Although Belmont went 0-6 against those teams, the Bruins nearly upset top-15 Ohio State on Nov. 17 at home. Belmont held a 59-50 lead with just over five minutes left in the fourth quarter and was knotted up with the Buckeyes at 63 with 30 seconds remaining, before falling 67-63.

Brooks realizes in order to earn an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament as a mid-major, his strength of schedule needs to result in more wins. 

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“I think there’s multiple mid-majors in a lot of leagues that are good enough to play and win games in the NCAA Tournament,” Brooks said Sunday. “Unfortunately for us, as an example, we played six quad-one teams in our non conference schedule, and only one of these games was a home game. We were competitive in those games. But we got one of those at home, and that was a four-point loss to Ohio State.”

“If you put other teams in that same predicament and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to win some games to be an at-large team,’ that’s really hard to do when you’re where we are and you’re not able to get home games like other programs do,” he added. “I think there’s a lot of mid-majors that are good enough; that have the talent. It’s just we’ve got to find more ways to get opportunities to get these games that we can win. You’ve got to beat at-large teams to be an at-large team, and that’s our mindset going into every season, and we didn’t do the job. We didn’t earn that this year. We had a chance but we did not earn that.”

Belmont’s schedule in the MVC has put them in a position to face a variety of playing styles in the postseason. 

“I think the Missouri Valley is a really unique league, and it has a ton of styles,” Brooks said Sunday. “So, we get to play against teams that are great in transition; teams that move the ball and play five-out pass-and-cut; teams that are heavy ball screen; teams that have two big guys and you have to be really good inside. We’ve played against all of that.”

“Every team that we’ve played here in the postseason so far has had a lot of similarities to a team we played in our league,” he added. “And I think that’s given us a chance to maybe use some comparable game planning and things that we’ve seen and things that we need to work on and fix based on the last time we played a team that played in that similar style. I believe that that’s the case again.”

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Going into the MVC Tournament, the conference’s top four teams – Murray State, Missouri State, Belmont and Drake – were just one game apart in the regular season.

The Bruins were riding a six-game winning streak when they fell to Murray State, 83-62, in the MVC Tournament championship game on March 16, missing out on the NCAA automatic bid for the second time in three years. 

The MVC led all conferences with four at-large selections into the 2025 WBIT field. Missouri State won its first-round game against Oral Roberts before falling to Minnesota. Drake and the University of Northern Iowa both lost their first-round games. 

In a good spot

While advancing to the NCAA Tournament is always the goal, Brooks is proud of his team’s accomplishments this season.

“Any time you’re playing this late in the season, it’s a really cool thing, and we don’t take that for granted. We are unbelievably grateful to the selection committee,” he said. “This was the first year in my life as a coach that we’ve ever been able to host a postseason game, and we got to host two of them.”

The run is Belmont’s deepest postseason tournament in any sport since becoming a NCAA Division I member in the late 1990s. Men’s basketball reached the 2014 NIT quarterfinals and the baseball team advanced to the 2011 NCAA Baseball Championship Nashville Regional final.

“Moving forward for our program, I think all of our players came to Belmont because they wanted to play in this kind of environment. They wanted to play in postseason tournament play, and I’m just thrilled that this group is able to do that,” Brooks said. 

Brooks feels his team is playing its best basketball heading into the WBIT semifinals. 

“I feel really good about where we are. I think we’ve piecemealed our way through some tough stretches this year. We lost four in a row in the middle of our conference play, and I don’t know if that’s ever happened to us, for sure since I’ve been here. That was a unique thing we had to overcome,” he said. “I think we are battle-tested. I think we’ve got a lot of resilience, and I think we probably just played our most complete game front to back our last time-out against James Madison against a really good team on the road, and I thought we played great on both sides of the ball. I’m hoping that we’re going to ride that momentum, and excited about the opportunity.”