Paul Battaglia/AP Photo

NDSU's Brett Winkelman redshirted a year so he could be postseason eligible as a senior.

Will NDSU's patience pay off?

By Kyle Whelliston
ESPN.com

Very few teams get to end their seasons on a winning note. Kansas certainly did, winning 13 consecutive games to close the season with a national title. Ohio State, the NIT champion, goes into 2008-09 on a five-game winning streak.

Then there's North Dakota State. The Bison, in their first year as Summit League members, ended 2007-08 on a three-game tear, thrashing eventual league champion Oral Roberts by a 68-55 count on March 1. But there were no commemorative T-shirts or confetti -- the season just plain ended.

"It was kind of weird seeing the others get to keep playing," said NDSU coach Saul Phillips, whose team was in its final season transitioning from Division II to Division I and its first as a Summit League member. "But we treated that like it was our championship game."

Had the Bison been eligible for the postseason, they would have worn their light-colored jerseys into the tourney as a No. 4 seed, by virtue of their 10-8 league record. But now that NDSU's Division I transition is complete, the Bison enter 2008-09 with no postseason restrictions whatsoever.

And with a core of senior starters, North Dakota State could emerge as a real March threat.

There's Ben Woodside, the 5-11 point guard who led the team with 20.7 ppg a season ago. Brett Winkelman is an undersized banger, leading the team with 8.3 rpg (and eight double-doubles) despite his 6-foot-6 height. And Wisconsin product Mike Nelson, not to be confused with the former "Mystery Science Theater 3000" host, is the team's 3-point threat.

This 2008-09 season has been five years in the making. That core trio joined the program in the summer of 2004 but all three were given a redshirt so that they'd have four years of eligibility at the Division I level.

"Redshirting an entire class took a lot of patience from our fans," said Phillips, who was promoted when Tim Miles left to rebuild Colorado State last summer. "And to everybody's credit, nobody looked at it like a throwaway year. Surviving that season, ending up with a bunch of men on the following year's team instead of a mix and match, really helped us through that transition. That's the single biggest thing that we did that maybe wasn't done in some other places."

Indeed, there are plenty of transition horror stories, from New Jersey Tech's record-setting 0-29 trudge last season to the struggles of a team within NDSU's own conference, border neighbor South Dakota State. In SDSU's first Summit season, the Jackrabbits finished 3-15 against the league.

In contrast, NDSU has not had a losing record in its three seasons since making the jump into the NCAA's top flight. And some of the program's 52 wins as a Division I member have been of the unexpected, shocking variety. On Jan. 21, 2006, 19 games into its first full Div. I schedule, NDSU toppled Wisconsin 62-55 in Madison. Woodside, then a freshman, tallied 24 points. Less than a year later, the Bison stuck again, slipping by Marquette 64-60 at the Blue & Gold Classic. Winkelman was fearless in the paint against Big East beef, grabbing 10 rebounds.

"There was one Division I offer among those three guys," explained Phillips. "So they all came into this with the feeling they had something to prove. Nobody wanted them."

Now, nobody wants to play them, especially now that they've shown they're not afraid of anybody.

"We played a Big Ten-caliber schedule every year, that's the way they looked at it," said Phillips. "When we went down to Florida for my first game as a head coach last year, I was more nervous than they were. They were like, 'Hey, we're playing the national champions, this is pretty neat.' And then when we lost by just 10 points, it was, 'OK, who's next?'"

Five Things To Watch in '08-09

By Kyle Whelliston
ESPN.com

• Dance tickets
With the Division I maturation process of the Summit's two Dakota-based schools complete, all 10 teams are now eligible for league and national tournaments in March 2009. But the conference has a long way to go in terms of sharing the postseason wealth.

Including North Dakota State, South Dakota State and fellow 2007 entrant IPFW, six of the Summit schools have never made it to the NCAA tournament. Despite their long-standing league affiliations, Centenary, Western Illinois and Missouri-Kansas City have yet to reach the Big Dance. Southern Utah, IUPUI and Oakland have each gone just once, and three-time defending champion Oral Roberts is the only current member to have reached the Big Bracket multiple times.

The owners of all eight of the conference's NCAA wins have moved on. In addition to victories by Northern Iowa and Wisconsin-Green Bay (now in the Missouri Valley and Horizon, respectively), this league has been the springboard for some of the most memorable Cinderella runs in mid-major history. Cleveland State streaked to the Sweet 16 in 1986 out of what was then the Mid-Continent, and Valparaiso's Bryce Drew hit "The Shot" to sink Ole Miss in the 1998 first round. Both are Horizon members now.

• Feeling the draft
He was something less than a household name, but IUPUI guard George Hill left school for the NBA draft following his junior season. In 2007-08, the Jaguars' 6-foot-2 guard was the league's No. 1 scorer at 21.5 ppg, also leading his team in minutes played, rebounds, assists, steals and 3-point field goal percentage. Everybody in the Summit League pretty much knew who he was, even if he was a relative unknown elsewhere.

Hill's gambit paid off after a series of impressive workouts for NBA teams. He was selected by the San Antonio Spurs with the 26th overall pick, the first IUPUI player ever drafted and just the second first-rounder from this conference (Valparaiso's Bryce Drew was picked 16th overall in 1998). Even though Hill's old college coach will face the 2008-09 season without him, nobody's happier about Hill's ascent to the Association.

"I felt the same way I do whenever I help one of my seniors get a job," said IUPUI head coach Ron Hunter. "But this was definitely more special because it was our first draft pick and because he's such a special kid. I've known George since he was coming to our basketball camps in the sixth grade, and I know where he's come from. It means more to me than it might to a normal coach."

• Grizzly newcomers
Oakland's last NCAA trip was something of a fluke. In 2005, as a conference No. 7 seed with just nine regular-season wins, the Golden Grizzlies won three games in four days, capping the run with a last-second win over Oral Roberts in the title game. From there, Oakland beat Alabama A&M in the opening-round contest before being throttled by North Carolina in the first round.

Since then, Oakland has been on a slow rise. Greg Kampe's squad has earned semifinal berths in two straight seasons and was a win away from an NCAA return in 2007. And the 2008-09 Golden Grizzlies may be the best edition yet. Not only does the team return all its starters, two highly regarded Great Lake State recruits will be added to the mix. Michigan natives Drew Maynard, a 6-6 shooting guard, and 6-9 power forward Jay Thames were both considered top-40 prospects at their positions by Scouts Inc.

But the league's most intriguing newcomer is Ilija Milutinovic. The Serbian 7-footer turned down a six-figure pro contract in his home country to learn and play at the Rochester Hills, Mich., campus, and Kampe says he's the best big man he's had in his 24 years at Oakland.

"He had signed with Oregon State, but his English wasn't good enough to get a good ACT score," Kampe explained. "He was going to play professionally over in Europe, but his handlers think he has a chance to play professionally here in the United States. So we got involved with him, and he finally made the test score and decided to sign with us. Hopefully, that's going to be more than just a one-year deal, and he'll stay here for four years and get his degree."

• From way downtown
The Mid-Con changed its name last summer to the Summit League, but perhaps it should have also considered the "Three League."

Last season, the conference featured the second-best 3-point shooting team in the nation, the IUPUI Jaguars (42.3 percent). If North Dakota State's team stats had counted with the NCAA in its last Division I provisional season, the Bison would have finished seventh overall at 40.7 percent. The league had 17 players who hit at least 40 percent of their attempts from beyond the arc, led by NDSU's Mike Nelson, who nailed 59 of his 128 tries (46.1 percent).

So perhaps no conference will be as much affected by the new rule that moves the 3-point line from its previous distance of 19 feet, 9 inches out to 20 feet, 9 inches.

"Our league has figured out that to compete against teams outside the conference, we have to do it with shooting," said Kampe, who counts Erik Kangas (14.6 ppg, 41 percent from 3) among his players. "Because we have guys who can make shots, 1 foot is not going to make a difference. Where I think you'll see the line move make a difference is the teams that shoot it average. Most of the ones that Kangas takes are a foot back anyway."

• Lose the shoes
IUPUI's Hunter brought a lot of attention to the Summit League when he walked the sidelines without shoes for a game against Oakland on Jan. 24. The gesture was to raise awareness for Samaritan's Feet, a charitable organization that aims to collect 10 million pairs of shoes for children worldwide. Hunter helped raise 150,000 pairs of shoes that day, and this summer he and several IUPUI players brought shoes to earthquake-ravaged Peru.

Hunter and Samaritan's Feet are spending the summer lobbying the NCAA and the National Association of Basketball Coaches to help organize an even larger event. They hope to have college coaches from all three NCAA divisions go shoeless this season, targeting the weekend before the Martin Luther King holiday.

"On that Saturday, Jan. 24, we're asking every coach in America to go without shoes," said Hunter. "Our goal will be to raise a million shoes to give to children. With the help of the NABC and NCAA, I think we're going to get this done."