Can the Charlotte 49ers make NCAA tourney for 1st time since 2005? They have a real shot

One of the great pleasures in sports is standing inside a sold-out basketball gym, with the home team sprinting out on a big run and the crowd not just riding that wave but pushing its crest even higher.

That used to happen with regularity with the Charlotte 49ers in their home gym. But then it was gone, and no one has quite figured out how to get it back. The men’s basketball program has been lost in the wilderness for much of the past 15 years.

On Saturday, though, it happened again, as Charlotte blew past East Carolina, 67-52, for its eighth consecutive win in the American Athletic Conference. Now 8-1 in the AAC, Charlotte (14-7 overall) is tied for first in the conference and suddenly looks very capable of winning the AAC tournament in Texas next month and the automatic NCAA tournament berth that goes with it.

The victory came before a crowd of 8,201, which was a sellout and more than double Halton Arena’s previous average attendance this year (3,296).

“If you can’t get excited about a sporting event like that one, then you don’t have a pulse. That was magic,” Charlotte interim head coach Aaron Fearne said afterward.

In October, the league’s head coaches predicted Charlotte would finish 13th in the 14-team AAC. Instead, the 49ers have been flirting with the conference lead for the past month. And nothing brings a crowd out, of course, like winning.

How rare was a crowd like that on the Charlotte campus?

It was Charlotte’s first sellout of Halton Arena in 11 years. Eleven!

Camping out in ‘Fearneville’

Students camped out the night before in a temporary area called “Fearneville” and the school literally catered to them, bringing them pizza Friday night and doughnuts and Bojangles’ biscuits on Saturday. All that salt and sugar had the students riled up from the beginning, with every basket by Charlotte drawing screams.

“People were loud,” said Charlotte forward Igor Milicic Jr., who had 12 points, 10 rebounds and five blocks. “Sometimes we had trouble hearing what Coach wanted us to do. It was electric.”

That sort of hard-to-hear issue is common in, say, a huge ACC game, or a crosstown rival high school game, but it hasn’t been a problem at Halton Arena for years. Sometimes in Halton, you could hear a conversation from 15 rows away. Until Saturday, the biggest crowd of the past five seasons in Halton was a mere 5,148, which means there were still several thousand empty green seats staring down at the court.

Many of the Charlotte 49ers’ best moments over the past 30 years came with coach Bobby Lutz on the sideline. There was a time where the 49ers made the NCAA tourney seven times in nine years from 1997-2005, and the 1977 team led by Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell got all the way to the Final Four.

But since 2005, Charlotte hasn’t made the NCAA tournament a single time, and fan interest has slowly faded away.

Fearne was named interim head coach in June, shortly after Ron Sanchez suddenly departed to rejoin the Virginia coaching staff as an assistant. Again, that odd summer departure from the Charlotte program spoke to the 49ers’ low spot on the college basketball totem pole. How many people give up a Division I head coaching job to go somewhere else — even a bigger place — as a D-I assistant?

Lutz returns for 1st time since 2010

Lutz got fired in 2010 after 12 years as Charlotte’s head coach, and it wasn’t pretty. Firings rarely are. For years, he didn’t come back on campus and the 49ers, meanwhile, rifled through a succession of coaches, not one of whom had a winning record by the time they departed.

At best, the 49ers of the past 15 years have been mediocre. At worst, they have been unwatchable.

So it felt symbolic that Lutz was back Saturday, as part of a massive Charlotte basketball reunion that brought back dozens of players and coaches.

“First time I’ve been in here since 2010,” Lutz said pregame. “To be honest, I wasn’t invited for a long time.”

But that ice has mostly thawed. Lutz recently was inducted into the school’s hall of fame, and before the game Saturday he was regaling some of his former players with stories. He also talked about how nice it was to see Halton sold out again, with a team that, as Lutz said, was “in the hunt.”

“They really guard,” Lutz said of the present-day 49ers. “And they fight and I love the competitive spirit. … Now they don’t score the ball as well as I’m sure they’d like to at times.”

The scoring part can indeed be a problem for the 49ers, who shot only 4 for 17 from three-point range Saturday. Fortunately, East Carolina shot the ball just as poorly, and the 49ers led, 26-24, at halftime.

In the second half, the 49ers played better and ECU was worse. Charlotte outscored the Pirates 41-28 to win it going away, led by guard Lu’cye Patterson, who had 16 points. A massive dunk in the final minutes by Charlotte’s Dishon Jackson brought the crowd to its feet one more time.

There was no court-storming afterward; this Charlotte team and its fan base are actually getting used to winning. A big test looms Tuesday at South Florida (9 p.m., ESPN2). But barring a total collapse, Charlotte is going to enter the conference tournament in Fort Worth March 13-17 as a top-4 seed.

The 49ers will still need to win the 14-team tournament to make the NCAA field, probably by winning three games in three days. The AAC will most likely be a one-bid league, with a possible second bid only going to Florida Atlantic (No. 20 in the AP poll) if FAU doesn’t win the tournament outright.

Charlotte, though, has beaten FAU once already this season. That January victory was an enormous win for the 49ers’ confidence — FAU, after all, made the Final Four last season — and what’s going on now is partly because of it.

So these 49ers definitely have a chance to break that 19-year NCAA tournament drought — the best chance in a long time.

“I hear the old people around here that have been here for a while,” Fearne said, “talk about those (glory) days. And now this generation of students can talk like that, after this game. And hopefully we can continue to keep it rolling.”