Top seed Stanford to face Utah Valley
The Stanford women’s basketball team — 252 and the Pac12 champion — received the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament on Monday.
The Cardinal will play Utah Valley in San Antonio at 7 p.m. Sunday on ESPN.
N.C. State was named a No. 1 seed for the first time. South Carolina and UConn received the other two top seeds.
The Huskies will play at least two games without coach Geno Auriemma, who tested positive for the coronavirus. The other members of UConn’s travel party have tested negative. He will be in isolation for 10 days.
A top 16 seed won’t give a team home games in the tournament’s first two rounds this year. Every game will be played in the San Antonio area because of the pandemic, with the last four rounds at the Alamodome.
This could be one of the most wideopen tournaments, with a dozen teams capable of winning the title. There were five different No. 1 teams in the Associated Press women’s basketball poll this year, including the Huskies, who finished the season at No. 1.
The Stanford team was affected when Santa Clara County started restricting sports participation late last year because of the coronavirus, so the Cardinal made their home base at UNLV’s arena, the Thomas & Mack Center, until those restrictions were lifted. Still, they managed to develop one of their most competitive teams in years.
In December, Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer became the winningest women’s coach in Division I history, surpassing the late Pat Summitt of Tennessee with her 1,099th win. Now VanDerveer and the Cardinal are in a strong position to compete for their third NCAA title and their first since 1992.
‘Bubble’ team: Ahead of the NCAA Tournament, the biggest stage in men’s college basketball, Louisville coach Chris Mack and his players have the role of understudies: They will be the first replacements should a team from a multiplebid conference be unable to play this week because of coronavirus issues.
Virginia, the tournament champion in 2019, and Kansas withdrew from their conference tournaments last week because of virus protocols. They earned atlarge berths to the national tournament in Indiana, but whether they will be able to play remains an open question.
Alternates will be able to fill slots vacated by teams with coronavirus issues through 6 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. After that, vacated spots will not be filled, and an opposing team would advance via the nocontest rule, similar to a walkover in tennis. No replacement teams will enter the tournament once it begins with the First Four games Thursday.
After Louisville, the next three replacements are Colorado State, St. Louis and Mississippi. They were the first four teams to miss the cut for the 68team field.
“No one’s wishing for anyone to get COVID,” Mack said. “We’re not on hands and knees here praying for an outbreak. That’s just not us. So I hope every team that got selected is able to play in the tournament, and has a great experience.”
But Mack, whose team had four games postponed in February and ended up with a 137 record after losing to Duke in the second round of the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament, said it was tough to come so close to making the field only to be excluded.
“The tournament committee has a tough job and we’re not a part of it, and I don’t see that changing,” he said.
Lisa Byington’s favorite event since she was 10 years old has been the NCAA Tournament after she saw Indiana’s Keith Smart hit the gamewinning basket and David Barrett’s “One Shining Moment” played for the first time.
Starting Friday in Indianapolis, Byington gets her own shining moment when she becomes the first woman to call playbyplay for an NCAA men’s tournament game. Her first game will be a South firstround matchup between topseeded Baylor and Hartford, airing on truTV.
Byington will call four firstround games and some additional secondround matchups. She has called college football and basketball on Fox Sports and the Big Ten Network as well as the WNBA’s Chicago Sky and some local broadcasts of Chicago Bulls games.
“Watching this event has always been the Super Bowl for me, so you can kind of put that in perspective of what it means,” Byington said. “In terms of the history piece, this is one step closer to get to a point of where we want to go. I look at this as just one part of a bigger story.”
Archie Miller’s $10.3 million buyout was one of college basketball’s priciest.
Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson decided keeping Miller would prove even more costly. Dolson fired Miller on Monday, armed with enough cash from private donations to cover the buyout and ready to answer a fan base angered by four straight mediocre seasons.
“It’s a resultsoriented business and I didn’t feel like we had made enough progress,“Dolson said on an afternoon Zoom call.
Minnesota fired Richard Pitino on Monday after the coach compiled a 5496 regularseason record over eight years in the Big Ten and had only three conference finishes higher than 10th place.
Iowa State and men’s basketball coach Steve Prohm have agreed to part ways after one of the worst seasons in the history of the program, athletic director Jamie Pollard announced.