How Andrew Funk and Cam Wynter have helped put Penn State on the brink of the NCAA Tournament
Cam Wynter didn’t take long to ponder what he remembered.
Penn State’s loss to Wisconsin was almost a month earlier, but one thing stood out from the postgame locker room.
“Dead silence,” Wynter told the Centre Daily Times Friday afternoon. “Kind of just sitting at my locker thinking what we could’ve done better to get that game.”
For others, the opposite stood out.
Andrew Funk had a moment of frustration boil over during the game and showed it by waving his hands and yelling to the bench.
He heard about it after the game from assistant coach Mike Farrelly and took it to heart.
Their memories from the game vary, but their response was the same.
Funk and Wynter have played a crucial role in turning Penn State’s season around and putting the program at the precipice of its first NCAA Tournament bid since 2011.
Their impact is fitting, given the similarities they share. Both are offense-first players who were the team’s best players at their previous schools — Drexel for Wynter and Bucknell for Funk — and came to Penn State with the idea of taking a step back in their role. They even committed on the same day at the behest of the Penn State staff, even though Wynter said — with a laugh — that he wanted to wait.
There paths to get to this point, however, could not look less alike.
Funk thrived almost immediately. He moved off the ball and ran around screens, firing shots from deep at will on his way to becoming one of the best shooters in the Big Ten.
His move was relatively seamless.
“I think it freed me up a little bit this year,” Funk told the CDT in late February. “There’s a little bit of other pressure that comes with it, like, I’m not gonna have the ball in my hands, I need to take advantage of my opportunities when I get them. But at the same time, the way the season has played out and what my role has become, I know I’m gonna get shots.”
Wynter took some more time. He had to learn to play without the ball in his hands, becoming a secondary creator on offense. He hadn’t played without the ball since his junior year of high school and now he was being tasked with doing it at the highest level of college basketball.
It took time for him to get there, but he’s taken off since he did. The fifth-year senior said it was just a matter of seeing a few shots fall for things to click.
“Once you see it go through a couple times you just start to gain more confidence,” Wynter said. “I just think I saw it go through the basket, stayed in the gym, stayed confident.”
He’s scored in double figures in his last four games as a result and has taken his shots with more and more confidence in each game.
That all led to what could go down as the most important shot the program has made in the last decade. Wynter splashed home an open 3-pointer — on a pass from Funk — Wednesday night against Northwestern with 0.7 seconds on the clock in overtime, giving the Nittany Lions a win and putting them back in the mix for the NCAA Tournament.
“I knew two guys were gonna fly to Funk,” Wynter said with a smile. “You’ve got to sell out to him. I knew I had so much time to line it up and I didn’t have to worry about getting it off quick. I just took my time and just let it go.”
Now he and Funk are two of the team’s most important players heading into a Senior Day that will have a lasting impact. Win Sunday and the team is primed to make the tournament — they’re currently ESPN’s Joe Lunardi’s last team in.
The day itself may not have as much emotion surrounding Funk and Wynter as it will players like Myles Dread and Seth Lundy who have spent their entire college careers at Penn State.
But that doesn’t mean their one-year stint with the program won’t influence the rest of their lives.
Both spoke about the lasting friendships they’ve made as Nittany Lions and what this year has meant to them.
For Funk, it’s been a career’s worth of experiences.
“It can feel like a one-year rental,” Funk said. “I was nervous about going to a school and it being like that. And this has just been the complete opposite. I’m gonna talk to these guys forever. The guys on this team will be my friends forever. ... Regardless of how this pans out, I think we’re gonna look back on this and think that we really gave this everything that we could.”
Their fondness for the university will likely be reciprocated, but their legacies could be determined in the next two weeks. Funk and Wynter have a chance to be key pieces of the group that breaks the NCAA Tournament drought.
And if that happens, both will be able to point to their own midseason turnarounds that pushed the team in the right direction.
