Just under one year ago, Texas A&M men’s basketball had only one player on its roster when head coach Bucky McMillan was hired last Spring. Forced to build a roster out of nothing, McMillan scoured the transfer portal — and the globe — to build a team for his first year at the helm of the Aggies.

One year later, that team went farther than many people thought possible. Picked to finish near the bottom of the Southeastern Conference standings, the Aggies not only made the NCAA Tournament, but won their Round of 64 game.

But all good things must come to an end. For this team, it was in the NCAA Tournament’s Round of 32, where the 10-seed Aggies ran into a buzzsaw as they fell to the 2-seed Houston Cougars 88-57 at the Paycom Center in Oklahoma City on Saturday, March 21.

“They don’t know who they’re going to play with,” McMillan said. “They don’t know who they’re going to be on the team with. They didn’t know us, didn’t know this, and they came, and they laid it out. They laid it on the line. … And so we got to salute this group, because they got this program ahead of schedule, in my opinion. We’ll always remember.”

After the game, McMillan said the Aggies cried like a team that had been playing together for years, not a group of guys who had started practicing with each other in the summer when they hardly knew each other’s names.

“After that scene in the locker room, it just really hit me, because I just enjoyed them so much,” McMillan said. “ … If I was their age, I’d hang out with them. … They got a special bond with each other, and that group, very rare to have a group that sort of time that was that connected and cared that much about something bigger than themselves.”

For junior guard Pop Isaacs — a two-time transfer coming off of a season-ending injury last year at Creighton — the opportunity to build something in McMillan’s first year is one that he’s grateful for.

“Nobody expected us to be in this position, you know, playing a game with a chance to go to the Sweet 16 today,” Isaacs said. “Obviously it sucks, and we wish we would have … gave ourselves a better chance to win the game, but I don’t think you could take away from what we accomplished this season as a group just as far as being picked second or third to last in the SEC and tied for fourth and then we won the tournament game in Coach’s first year. I think it’s huge for the direction of the program.”

Houston dominates

March Madness can be a fickle mistress. Sometimes upsets come a-plenty, like 10-seed A&M’s win over 7-seed Saint Mary’s in the Round of 64. But for every team but one, the magic can’t last forever.

Unlike its Round of 64 matchup against Saint Mary’s, A&M got off to a strong shooting start from behind the arc, going 5-for-10 on 3-pointers by the under-eight minute media timeout in the first half. That helped A&M hold as much as a four-point lead midway through the first half.

Unfortunately for the 12th Man, that’s where the wheels fell off.

Late in the first half, the Aggies went a full 6:34 without scoring a single point. That allowed the Cougars to go on an 18-0 run and take an 18-point lead into the halftime break, up 45-28.

“I would say during that stretch [they had] a lot of second-chance points,” graduate student forward Rashaun Agee said. “I mean, they made some tough buckets. We had chances. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t have a chance. We had a lot of good open shots we normally make. We just couldn’t capitalize. But they just made some tough shots down in that stretch and got a lot of second-chance points that I feel like we could have tried to fix.”

After that 5-for-10 3-point shooting start, the Maroon and White missed their last six 3-pointers of the half, and only made one more over the course of the entire game.

Of course, A&M’s foul trouble didn’t help matters.

Things were messy in the first half, with A&M picking up a total of eight personal fouls by the 8:37 mark in the first half, including a flagrant I on sophomore G Rubén Dominguez and a technical foul issued to the Aggies’ bench in response to one foul call. By halftime, that total was up to 11. 

Any hope for an Aggie rally was seemingly stifled at the start of the second half, when the Cougars started the period off with back-to-back 3-point plays as part of an 8-0 run.

For the game’s final 19:52, Houston led by more than 20 points. Even when the Cougars would go cold, their defense suffocated the Aggies, who committed 11 turnovers and never found a way to claw their way back.

“It was a 20-point game with, what was it, four minutes left right there,” McMillan said. “You know, we have the option to sit back and keep it at 20 or try to make something happen. You’re always going to try to make something happen. They got some easy ones there. It’s a dang good team. It was tough, well-coached, with high-level play and particularly high-level guards.”

The shooting difference between the Aggies and Cougars wasn’t anything outlandish — A&M shot 35% from the field, while Houston shot 44%. A bigger difference was the amount of shots taken.

The Cougars put up 16 more shots than the Maroon and White, shooting 68 field goals to the Aggies’ 52. Houston was helped on that front by the fact that they outrebounded A&M 19-9 on the offensive glass and collected 18 second chance points to the Aggies’ eight.

A bright spot for A&M was junior G Josh Holloway, who collected 12 points while shooting 4-for-6 from the field. Unfortunately for the Aggies, he was the only A&M player in double figures.

Foundation laid

No bucket was more poetic for the Aggies than a simple jumper with 7:35 remaining in the game. 

That seemingly insignificant shot was hit by sophomore F Chris McDermott, the only player from last year’s A&M team under then-head coach Buzz Williams to stay in Aggieland and join McMillan’s squad.

“We were going to always go try to make it happen,” McMillan said. “And if you want to make something happen, you put C-Mac in that game, because he’s going to — right or wrong, you know — he’s going to go after it.”

McDermott was a piece of continuity among a group of players who came together from every corner of the basketball — and literal — world.

Take, for example, Agee, who is playing for his fourth Division I team in his final year of eligibility — one that had to be secured via court injunction, no less. 

In his only year in Aggieland, Agee emerged as a captain and a leader of the Aggies, while laying the foundation of the program for years to come. 

McMillan spoke at length about Agee as a person and how much he means to the program. But for Agee — who said he was most proud of how the Aggies fought and exceeded expectations — playing under McMillan in his first year at A&M was about more than just the time on the court.

“That’s always going to be my guy,” Agee said. “I always talk to Bucky 24/7. I tell my teammates, I tell my family, like, man, I appreciate him. No matter what goes on, I know — I’m thankful that he allowed me to come here and be here at A&M and allowed me to lead. A lot of coaches, you know, wouldn’t pick somebody the first year just to come in and lead. He helped me become a man this year.”