ST. LOUIS — A year ago, the Wichita State Shockers were the darlings of the NCAA Tournament en route to an improbable Final Four berth as a No. 9 seed with a band-of-brothers roster filled with castoffs and under-recruited players.
Now, back at the dance a year later as a No. 1 seed, it has become sport for people to poke holes at the remarkable 34-0 season they bring with them to Friday’s Midwest Regional opening-round game against sacrificial-lamb No. 16 seed Cal Poly (14-19) at the Scottrade Center.
The marvel that came with Wichita State’s run last year has been replaced with suggestions the Shockers are an overhyped fraud as a top seed because of the so-called inferior Missouri Valley Conference competition.
Funny, a year ago, when Wichita State was carving out tournament upsets over Pittsburgh and top-seeded Gonzaga and coming within a possession of beating Louisville in the semifinals and advancing to the championship game, not a word was spoken about an inferior schedule played.
So, from last March to this March, Wichita State has gone from the most admired college basketball team in the country to the most scrutinized and picked-apart team. That ticks them off — which is a good thing.
Wichita State’s mantra under head coach Gregg Marshall always has been to “play angry.’’ It worked for the Shockers a year ago when few believed in them, and it has worked for them this year with a bull’s-eye on their backs.
“The seeding doesn’t have anything to do with how we are taking our approach,’’ Wichita State senior guard Fred VanVleet said Thursday. “It is still us against the world and we are still hungry, still being hunters and not allowing ourselves to be the hunted.’’
The Shockers, who are the first team since UNLV in 1991 to take an undefeated record into the NCAA Tournament, are chasing history. Winning five more games would give Wichita State the most wins in NCAA history. Winning six more would make it the first unbeaten NCAA champion since Indiana went 32-0 in 1976.
Greg Anthony, now a CBS analyst, has seen this movie before. He, in fact, starred in an earlier version of it, having played on that 1991 UNLV team that took the last undefeated record into the tournament — though Anthony saw the world through a different lens then than the Wichita State players are seeing it now.
“Their situation is a little different than ours; we were defending national champs,’’ Anthony told The Post Thursday as he sat courtside watching practice. “We didn’t have the questions about whether or not we were legit that Wichita State has, which I think are absurd. The fact that every time they take the floor they’ve got a bull’s-eye on their back speaks volumes about how good they are.’’
There has been quite a bit of baiting of Wichita State since the brackets came out. They were clearly handed the toughest road to the Final Four among No. 1 seeds with national powers Louisville, Michigan, Duke and Kentucky — schools that have won a combined 16 NCAA titles — in their regional.
“They didn’t ask me my opinion when they put this together,’’ Marshall said of the selection committee. “Obviously, it’s a great region that’s stacked. I didn’t even talk to my team about it. That’s not the way you do it. You don’t get to 34-0 talking about three games from now. You take care of the business in front of you. Eat an elephant one bite at a time.’’
Marshall, too, doesn’t give a damn about style points — whether for his players, his team’s schedule or the way they win games.
“This NCAA Tournament, it’s not the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show,” he said recently. “You don’t have to have papers to win it. We love our dogs at my house. None of them have their papers. I don’t have my papers. These [players]… most of them don’t have papers.”
Anthony described Wichita State “as complete a team as we have in the country,’’ adding, “A lot of people tend to focus on who they haven’t played, but I’ve always felt it’s more important to focus on how they’ve played. They have all the tools that are necessary to make a run and get to North Texas.’’
If Wichita State is able to do that, return to the Final Four in two weeks, it will do so with no apologies.