Sweet 16 reasons to be excited for NCAA tourney
With so much madness already behind us, it’s fair to wonder whether the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments can top recent conference tournaments for basketball drama. After a final few days of regular-season action that coined my new favorite basketball phrase — “bid stealers”! — Selection Sunday was its own hyped-up exercise in “last four in,” “last four out,” snubs, and celebrations.
But fear not, basketball fans, the madness before the Madness is a mere reminder of what makes March so great, how the annual roll call of upstart winners and upset losers fuels the greatest playoff format of them all. Conference tournaments, and the automatic bids that go with them, continue to change the landscape of the tournament field. From five unexpected winners on the men’s side (the bid-stealing North Carolina State, Duquesne, UAB, Oregon, and New Mexico) to Portland’s win over Gonzaga on the women’s side, bubbles were bursting all over the place.
Here’s hoping the hoops thievery doesn’t rev up efforts to expand the tournament, efforts by the likes of SEC commissioner Greg Sankey that are more about protecting bids for ever-expanding Power 5 conferences than preserving the classic upsetminded ones at the very heart of the Madness.
As former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski put it to ESPN, “Before you start messing around with [it], understand what it is. It’s a treasure.”
With that in mind, and in honor of Sweet 16 games at TD Garden, here are 16 reasons to tune in. From the ridiculous to the sublime, March always delivers.
1. Can UConn do it? Dan Hurley’s overall No. 1-seeded Huskies could be the first repeat men’s champs since Florida in 2006-07, and they open against Stetson, which is coached by Donnie Jones, who was an assistant on Billy Donovan’s Florida staff. That team featured the Celtics’ own Al Horford.
2. Can UConn do it (Take 2)? You know you’re a powerhouse when a No. 3 seed feels low, but for the 11-time champion Connecticut women, that’s how it goes. Watch out, though, for a healthy Paige Bueckers.
3. There’s one shot at perfection, and that’s the South Carolina women. Dawn Staley’s team is 32-0, though it took a buzzerbeater in the SEC semifinals to keep that alive.
4. Double-title possibilities are strongest for UConn, with the No. 1 men and No. 3 women, and the Gamecocks, with the No. 1 women and No. 6 men.
5. Holy Cross coach Maureen Magarity takes her Crusaders to the tournament for a second straight year, only this year they get to fly! Magarity’s senior-laden roster draws UT-Martin in a Thursday night play-in game in Iowa, which means that, unlike last year, when a first-round game in Maryland fell 7 miles short of earning a charter flight, the team boarded a plane Tuesday morning.
The reward for the winner? No. 1 seed Iowa.
6. That’s Iowa as in Caitlin Clark, the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader and presumptive No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft. Magarity, while not looking past UT-Martin, would relish the opportunity.
“Looking at the brackets, I think all of us felt a certain way of ‘how cool would that be?’ ” Magarity said. “Even to play in the same gym.
“Obviously we have to win, and UT-Martin is such a tough team, but to play her on her home court, be that close to her, just the appreciation I think everyone in college athletics has for her, who she is and the attention she’s brought for women’s basketball.”
7. Clark, whose Hawkeyes lost to LSU in last year’s final, could face LSU and Angel Reese early this year, with LSU the No. 3 seed in Albany Regional 2. Everybody remembers the ClarkReese shenanigans last year, and while we won’t get a championship rematch, an Iowa-South Carolina final would be electric.
8. The men’s selection committee snubbed the Big East. Three bids for the No. 2-rated conference in the country? UConn, Marquette, and Creighton are in, and none lower than a 3 seed, yet Seton Hall, St. John’s, and Providence were bounced off the bubble.
9. Maybe Rick Pitino shouldn’t have told the world how bad his team was, with the Johnnies not even in the last four out, according to the CBS interview with committee chair Charles McClelland. Too bad there’s no chance for a game against his son Richard, the New Mexico coach.
10. Among multiple-bid conferences, the Big East was ahead of only the American, the A-10, and the West Coast, far behind the Big 12 and SEC (eight each), and trailing the Big Ten and Mountain West (six), the ACC (five), and the Pac 12 (four).
11. While Clark finishes out her collegiate career, the next big star is on Southern Cal, the No. 1 seed in Portland 3. Freshman JuJu Watkins has helped coach Lindsay Gottlieb’s team arrive a little earlier than expected.
12. With seven Pac-12 teams in the women’s field, it’s a head scratcher how they let it all dissolve. Stanford and legendary coach Tara VanDerveer also could have been a No. 1 seed, but lost to USC in the conference final.
As Gottlieb said, ”It is meaningful to me to get the championship in the last one, in this iteration of what it looks like. It’s also meaningful to me, I don’t know that I’d be in coaching if it wasn’t for Tara and people like her who did it when there was no money and none of this.”
13. The Maine women, in their 10th appearance, won’t have an easy time getting a tournament win for the first time since 1999, earning a 15 seed and drawing No. 2 Ohio State.
14. Did you see the Dan Monson story? Fired by Long Beach State before conference tournament play, in the NCAA field by the end of conference tournament play. Only in March.
15. Two bids for the Ivy League women — Columbia got an at-large after losing the tournament final to Princeton, the first-ever for the Lions. And Yale will represent the men after one of the craziest tournament finishes.
16. Last ride for Purdue’s Zach Edey, who feels like he’s been in college forever. After two straight years of shocking firstround upsets, the Boilermakers are a sentimental favorite. Maybe they can be on the Virginia plan. After being the first 1 seed on the men’s side to lose to a 16 seed when UMBC beat them in 2018, Virginia returned to win it all in 2019.