What. Just. Happened?! NCAAs amp up the March Madness Family that found seven baseball cards worth millions finds eighth
“We put our name on the map. We (gave) hope to teams that come to the tournament with lower seeds,” guard K.J. Maura said.
UMBC’s success story contributed to the messy, unprecedentedly jumbled bracket in the South Region, where the highest-remaining seed is No. 5 Kentucky. It’s the first time in tourney history that a regional semifinal will be held without a top 4 seed, according to the NCAA.
Seventh-seeded Nevada added to that by matching the secondbiggest comeback in tournament history to beat No. 2 seed Cincinnati 75-73 after trailing by 22 points in the second half.
“That locker room right now, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It’s the happiest I’ve ever seen. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,” Wolf Pack coach Eric Musselman said.
The way reigning champion North Carolina got bounced from the tournament in an 86-65 loss to Texas A&M might have been the top storyline on any other tournament day. It left coach Roy Williams with the most lopsided tournament loss of his Hall of Fame career.
It was also the second straight year the titleholder lost before the Sweet 16. And it happened in UNC-friendly territory in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Tar Heels hadn’t lost a tourney game since 1979.
“I didn’t picture it ending it like this,” said Williams with his players sitting nearby. “I pictured it ending with these guys having a huge smile on their face, but that’s not college basketball.”
Who’s left
A look at the teams and matchups for the Sweet 16 by region.
South: No. 5 Kentucky vs. No. 9 Kansas State; No. 7 Nevada vs. No. 11 Loyola-Chicago.
West: No. 4 Gonzaga vs. No. 9 Florida State; No. 3 Michigan vs. No. 7 Texas A&M
Midwest: No. 1 Kansas vs. No. 5 Clemson; No. 2 Duke vs. No. 11 Syracuse
East: No. 1 Villanova vs. No. 5 West Virginia; No. 2 Purdue vs. No. 3 Texas Tech.
Call It A Comeback
Nevada’s comeback from a 22-point deficit matched Duke’s rally after beating Maryland in the 2001 Final Four. The biggest comeback belongs to BYU, which trailed by 25 points before beating Iona in the 2012 First Four.
Glass Slippers In The South
What a mess in the underdog-laden South.
The top four seeds — No. 1 Virginia, No. 2 Cincinnati, No. 3 Tennessee and No. 4 Arizona are all done.
“You know, just obviously we didn’t think 16 was going to ... beat a 1,” Weber said. “You thought it would be a little different situation, but we just said we could write history tonight. No 9 has ever beaten a 16 to go to the Sweet 16, so we wrote our own history tonight.”
Spoiled Home Cookin’
Don’t invite Texas A&M and Syracuse to homecoming parties.
The Aggies manhandled North Carolina in Charlotte in surprisingly easy fashion to get to the round of 16 for the second time in three seasons. After holding a 47-36 edge on the glass, Texas A&M should scare a Michigan team that has had to slog through two victories and deliver a buzzerbeater 3 to get to the Sweet 16.
In Detroit, Syracuse tuned out the noise from a Michigan State-partisan crowd for a 55-53 win . The Orange’s trademark 2-3 zone gave another unfamiliar opponent fits after holding the more talented Spartans to 26 percent shooting.
An NCAA tourney run that started with the First Four in Dayton for Syracuse will continue against Duke in the Sweet 16 in Omaha, Nebraska.
Two Ones Are Done
Two No. 1 seeds didn’t make it out of the tournament’s opening weekend for the first time since 2004, when Stanford and Kentucky both lost in the second round.
This time around, Virginia and Xavier were the top seeds that were bounced.
The Cavaliers went home on Friday after the historic loss to No. 16 seed UMBC. The Musketeers gave up a 12-point lead on Sunday and fell to Florida State, 75-70. It was a disappointing ending for a program that returned four starters from a team that lost in the Elite Eight last year to Gonzaga.
The only other years when two top seeds lost in the first weekend were 1981 and 2000.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — What could be better than becoming a millionaire after finding seven vintage baseball cards while cleaning out your late greatgrandfather’s house?
How about finding an eighth?
The family that two years ago made one of the greatest finds in sports collectibles history when they found seven Ty Cobb baseball cards printed between 1909 and 1911 have now found one more in the matching set.
“It falls under the category of ‘you can’t make this stuff up,’” said Joe Orlando, president of Professional Sports Authenticator of Newport Beach, California. The company verified the new card and valued it at $250,000.
The first seven cards were in a rumpled paper bag that may well have ended up in the trash if someone didn’t peek inside.
“The initial discovery, it was a real shock to them,” Orlando said. “They put the cleaning on hold for a while ... later they knew what they were looking for, and in a dusty box between two books, there was another one.”
The greatgrandfather himself apparently had no idea that he was leaving a fortune to his descendants.
“He wasn’t even a collector,” Orlando said. “He just held on to these cards that were most likely given to him after buying a particular tobacco product.” (Baseball cards were associated with tobacco, not bubble gum, in their earliest days.)
The family, which is from the rural South and wants to remain anonymous, intends to keep this one as a memento.
There are now 24 known copies of the card featuring the famed Detroit Tigers slugger that on the back reads, “Ty Cobb — King of the Smoking Tobacco World.”
That’s less than half the known remaining number of Honus Wagner cards from the same time that have long been considered the holy grail of collecting.
And while the surge in numbers for the Cobb cards may have diminished the value somewhat by making them less rare, Orlando said the excitement surrounding them, and the possibility that more could exist, have made up the difference.
“Sometimes a card can be so rare that no one bothers to talk about it,” Orlando said. “This raised the importance of the Ty Cobb card.”