NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — Among the countless things that make March the most magical sports month on the calendar, the unexpected spill into the NCAA Tournament by an unsuspecting, lowly seed team from a one-bid league ranks high on the list.
We typically get at least one of these every year. Programs that flail in obscurity for four months, then roar to life when given a chance at glory in the biggest week on the calendar, make for some incredible stories.
On Feb. 19, Saint Francis was a 10-17 team toiling in the bottom half of the Northeast Conference.
On Tuesday night, it pulled a stunner and did something that will live forever at the tiny school in the tiny town Loretto, Pennsylvania. (Population: 1,168)
SFU went into the gym of No. 1 Central Connecticut State — 22-6 coming in, a nation’s-best 14-game winning streak and obviously the best team in the conference this season — and the Red Flash (what a great moniker) pulled off their third straight NEC tournament win by three points to take the league’s automatic bid to the 2025 NCAA Tournament.
The game was ugly, but nobody associated SFU cares about that now.
The team is dancing for just the second time ever, the previous trip coming all the way back in 1991. Saint Francis won 46-43, shooting a paltry 31.7% and making only five of its 26 3-point attempts. The game was on a tightrope all night; Saint Francis never held a lead larger than four, CCSU’s biggest advantage being just two points. This after CCSU beat Saint Francis twice this season by a combined 31 points.
Red Flash coach Rob Krimmel had guided his alma mater to the NEC championship game three times previous, in 2020, 2019 and 2017, all losses. Had he lost belief he’d ever coach in the NCAA Tournament?
“You start to say, well, are we going to have one?”
On his play card from Tuesday night’s game, Krimmel wrote “Audience of One,” “Thy Will Be Done” and “Surrender,” leaving his faith in whatever outcome it would be.
Saint Francis took the lead 43-41 with 33.1 to go after Red Flash big man Valentino Pinedo hit a close-range shot while being fouled. CCSU answered back with 17 seconds to go when guard Joe Ostrowsky hit a layup to tie the game.
In that moment, Krimmel opted against calling a timeout. It was high-stakes drama in a low-major title game.
“The last couple possessions, I think, epitomizes this team,” Krimmel told CBS Sports. “They trust the coaches and we trust them. I don’t need to call a timeout. Go make the plays you need to make.”
Eight seconds later, Daemar Kelly sank a midrange jumper that won the game. CCSU’s Devin Haid wound up having a halfcourt heave that nearly fell — and would’ve sent the game into OT — but it was all of three or four inches off, giving the Red Flash verification to rush the floor and celebrate program history. They’re the eighth different NEC champion in as many years to win the league, following a succession of Wagner (2024), Merrimack (2023), Bryant (2022), Mount St. Mary’s (2021), Robert Morris (2020), FDU (2019) and LIU (2018).
As his players leapt into each other’s arms at midcourt, Krimmel watched from the sideline as he got a moment and victory he’d waited 29 years for. At 47, he is now what he once thought he’d never become: a Saint Francis lifer. Krimmel grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. His older brother played at Penn State. His parents worked there. He wanted to play there. He wasn’t good enough.
Saint Francis recruited him. He resisted it.
“My first impression of the place: I didn’t like it,” Krimmel told CBS Sports. “I thought college was Beaver Stadium, 100,000 people, big campus. I grew up going to football games, basketball games, and my first trip up there, I told my dad, ‘I’m not going to a school like that.'”
Six months later, he committed. He never left. Krimmel arrived in the fall of 1996, played for SFU for four years, then immediately joined the coaching staff after graduating in 2000. He spent the next 12 years under Bobby Jones and Don Friday, two coaches with names straight out of a pulp fiction novel. Krimmel was promoted to head coach in 2012.
“The thing that’s kept me there so long is the people are special,” Krimmel said. “I believe the college experience is a four-year experience, but it’s about developing people. And that’s at the heart of what Saint Francis is.”
Enrollment is under 2,500. It’s one of the smallest Division I schools in the country, with a humble campus in a small community in the middle of nowheresville Pennsylvania. The school has an NIL budget of precisely $0. Krimmel isn’t boasting about that, but he did tell me it made getting into the NCAA Tournament — where some schools with NIL budgets north of $7 and $8 million await — that much more gratifying.
“There’s a purity to that. I wasn’t going to sell my soul just to try to win a game or try to win a championship,” Krimmel said. “I was going to try to do it the way I thought was the right way. And if it didn’t work, I’ll give the keys to someone else and they can drive the bus and do it a different way.”
In the last two years, the program lost critical players prior to the portal. Krimmel added six players after going 8-22 a season ago and finishing second-to-last in the lowest-rated conference, with a KenPom ranking of 354. This year’s team (ranked 310th) might wind up being the lowest-rated team to ever earn a spot in the bracket.
So what?
The fact we can even have a story like this is what makes March Madness the most interesting and rewarding event in sports. About 10 minutes after the game went final Tuesday night, friends and family made their way to the court take pictures alongside the media. Players took turns posing with the NEC championship trophy. Members of the staff could be seen FaceTiming, one of them all smiles as he pointed into his phone proclaiming, “I told you! I told you!”
The Red Flash band, endured the six-hour road trip from Loretto to New Britain, lined up along the baseline and exchanged high-fives with the players. Mothers and sons were posing for pics, everyone in championship shirts and hats. This was something they could only have dreamed about.
On Tuesday night, it became reality. It was as pure a scene as you’ll see in the sport this month.
“This is the team that has embraced the journey the best,” Krimmel said. “Even in our darkest moments, maybe some of our most embarrassing losses, they were able to come in the next day and try to move the needle and just be a little bit better.”
What was true of the players was true of the coach, even as it seemed for most of the past four months like this would be another sub-.500 season for a program almost nobody knows anything about.
“This is probably the first year that I wasn’t going to let the season, or my self worth, be defined by how many games we won,” Krimmel said. “It was: my value is, can we develop young men?”
As Krimmel was reflecting on his own journey, he watched from about 30 feet away as his his players were climbing the ladder, taking turns cutting the net. He saw a group of young men in euphoria, coming to realize with each passing moment that yes, they had actually just won that game and were actually going to get to play in the NCAA Tournament.
Krimmel became emotional. He had every right to be. It took him 25 years to find this moment, and it came in maybe the most unexpected way in the most unexpected season of Rob Krimmel’s life.
“I don’t know that my circumstances are like anything else across the country, but I can tell you that Saint Francis has allowed me to grow up as a player, as a young professional, as a father, as a husband,” he said. “Twenty years from now, they’ll remember this, but the relationships that they’ve built, that’s what it’s about.”
He was looking at one of his sons, Tom, as he said this. Krimmel’s teenage boy is named after his college coach, Tom McConnell, and Tom Fox — a former Red Flash player who hosted Krimmel back in the mid-’90s, when he went there on a visit with no intentions of ever coming back.
Only college basketball and the unique setup of the NCAA Tournament could pave way for a story like this. A tiny school in a tiny town in Pennsylvania is now on the map thanks to a man who was once a kid who didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. Turns out, he had the rest of his life waiting for him at a place called Saint Francis University.
And now, that story gets to be part of the 2025 NCAA Tournament. There will be few better when the field of 68 is unveiled on Sunday.
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