NATCHITOCHES — After the Big Thaw Monday, things heated up that night inside Prather Coliseum.
A day that began with widespread condemnation of Punxsutawaney Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog who made the most unsurprising proclamation of 2026 – six more weeks of winter – culminated with another easy-to-predict result.
For the seventh time In Northwestern State’s last eight Southland Conference basketball games, the outcome came down to the final seconds.
Good news for concession sales. Not a lot of fans leave early.
Not good news for third-year Demons coach Rick Cabrera, whose team is 2-6 in those eight nailbiters, the latest letdown a 61-58 loss to Nicholls on Mike McConathy Court.
“This has just been the story of our season,” Cabrera said. “This (Southland) conference is just extremely competitive.”
Case In point: six days before, Northwestern went across Toledo Bend and took league-leading Stephen F. Austin down to the buzzer in a 69-67 defeat.
That’s closer than mighty McNeese finished at SFA Monday night in a showdown for the SLC lead. The Lumberjacks repelled a Cowboys rally from a 13-point deficit and won 67-60 to claim a two-game lead in the SLC standings.
That’s more a symbolic victory, since the Southland, like Conference USA, the SWAC, the Sun Belt and a bunch more, is a one-bid league when it comes to March Madness. And the odds in the SLC are stacked in McNeese’s favor through 2029, because the Cowboys host the SLC Tournament as part of horse trading to keep McNeese from departing its longtime conference home for the now-all-but-dead Western Athletic Conference in 2023.
Homecourt in the Southland has never been an insurmountable advantage but it’s still pretty durn significant. The Cowboys at home are nearly unbeaten since that deal was done and Will Wade arrived with a million-dollar-plus NIL pool a year later.
So the rest of the Southland’s 12 teams are playing to 1) make the eight-team tournament field and 2) avoid facing McNeese until the championship round. If Cabrera’s Demons earn a trip to the Lake City in March, at least they’ll have a trove of down-to-the-buzzer contests to toughen their resolve.
It was “Demons 4 Demons Night” in Prather, a promotion that incentivizes athletes from all the other Northwestern teams to come cheer for the home team. Happens for every sport at some point of the calendar and it worked again Monday.
It also draws nearly every other head coach, including football’s Blaine McCorkle, who like his counterparts across the country, used to be on point monitoring late changes in recruiting heading into February’s first Wednesday. Not these days.
National Signing Day for football is really anticlimactic. The early signing period in December is the most heavily trafficked for high school prospects getting Division I opportunities, which have dwindled to a relative handful thanks to the transfer portal.
Proof? McCorkle said in a halftime radio interview with Chris Salim on the Demon Sports Network that his program expected to sign one high school player Wednesday. One! That’s more than many other D-I programs will add.
He said the Demons lost 13 players from last fall in the transfer portal, the second-least in the SLC behind 12 from Southeastern. Most everybody else, said McCorkle, had a migration into the 20s. Again, typical for the landscape these days.
Some schools have already announced their transfer intake – the big boys like LSU have avid media tracking the comings and goings, with the Lane Train cycling through about four dozen former for new Tigers. Northwestern will announce its additions later this week, said McCorkle, on Super Bowl week, which brings a former Demon coach into the conversation.
That’s Jay Thomas, who joined the Tennessee Titans staff as a scout and analyst after his run in charge of the NSU football program concluded with the close of the 2017 season. With the Titans, Thomas – now having finished his second season as defensive coordinator at Natchitoches Central High School – worked with Mike Vrabel, who was in charge at Tennessee and has just guided New England to its first Super Bowl since Tom Brady departed.
Vrabel is exactly who he seems to be, said Thomas, standing in line at a concession stand at halftime Monday night. Down to earth, but a magnetic leader, with an exceptional football mind.
In one season, pulling together outcasts from other teams along with holdover Patriots players, he’s blended a championship roster – just as he did, to not quite the same level of success, with the Titans.
Thomas is not doubting the Patriots come Sunday.
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