The Elite Eight is set. The games tonight did not provide the drama of Thursday, but there are plenty of storylines:
Just as UConn made an athletic Arkansas team look skinny and small last night, a physical San Diego State team did the same to Alabama in an impressive comeback win tonight. In the process, the Aztecs gave a much needed boost to a Mountain West Conference that annually receives an inexplicable number of bids, and whose other three teams in this tournament each lost its first game by double figures.
The Selection Committee may want to take a closer look at Miami next year. Last year, Miami made the Elite 8 as a 10 seed. After winning the ACC, the Canes were “rewarded” with a 5 seed from which they have proceeded to make the Elite 8 again, making fairly short work of a top-seeded Houston team that was only a little more hobbled than Miami. Star rookie analyst Jay Wright saw this one coming, saying that Miami would not be intimidated by Houston because (I paraphrase modestly) “they have some street in them. I am not sure I am supposed to say that, but in basketball that’s a compliment.”
Creighton handled Princeton with relative ease while Texas handled Xavier with total ease.
With Alabama and Houston gone, there are no Number 1 seeds and only Texas remains as a Number 2 seed.
There also are six conferences in the Elite Eight, with only the Big 12 with Kansas State and Texas and the Big East with UConn and Creighton having more than one team remaining and the two eight- bid conferences who are supposed to rule the world—The Big Ten and The SEC—enjoying the rest of the Tournament at home, accompanied by the Pac 12.
Perhaps a favorite or two will emerge this weekend, but, to this point, this is as truly wide open as any tournament in memory. Maybe this will be the way things will go in the era of the portal and NIL, or maybe there never will be another tournament like it.
For now, at least, we are done with Nate Oats and Sean Miller and the administrators and network executives who enable them. For many reasons, I rarely find myself rooting for the University of Texas and I will be rooting for Miami and the ACC on Sunday. But the Longhorns deserve credit for dealing with their mess of a situation in a notably different way, and their coach, who for some reason remains an interim coach, has done a terrific job in keeping a team that could have been in turmoil moving forward and peaking at the right time.
We are not, however, done with CBS. They continue to annoy in matters great and small, including this amusing exchange with a Yale grad who was not feeling the Ivy League love tonight:
Even having watched my share of barf-inducing coverage of Duke and Coach K, I’m not sure I recall a more lopsided commentary than all this fawning over Princeton on CBS
Just got home from watching the first games at a friend’s. So I blessedly missed that on the ride home. I trust they spiced up the underdog talk with the “they do it the right way” talk.
Yes, they sure play some smart basketball. It makes me want to write a poem about Bill Bradley.
Someone also should let CBS and Westwood One know that Marcus Carr did not start his career at Minnesota. He started it at the University of Pittsburgh, way back in 2017-18 in the darkest days of the Scott Barnes-Kevin Stallings era. If Texas should win the tournament, one of the compelling storylines will be Carr’s journey from a Pitt team that went 0-18 in the ACC to a national champion, and from a player who seemed like a good kid who took too many bad shots at key times to a grown up senior leader, which to my surprise and to his credit he has been in this tournament so far. It’s a pretty compelling story already.
In fairness, one thing that CBS got right was adding Jay Wright to the studio broadcast team. It therefore was especially nice to watch Wright listen to an inside coaches story the other day from Creighton coach Greg McDermott about how Jay Wright was the leader of the Big East coaches and the role he played in the Big East hanging together through a challenging time.
Four more games this weekend. I am picking the Big East parlay, UConn over Gonzaga in Las Vegas and Creighton over San Diego State in Louisville in a rematch the half-brother battle between Arthur Kaluma of Creighton and Adam Seiko of San Diego State won by Arthur (12 points) over Adam (5 points) in overtime in last year’s tournament. Given my predictions in this tournament so far, congrats in advance to the Zags and Aztecs. I’ll take Miami and the ACC over Texas, just because (and because of the injury to Disu of Texas and the surprising recovery of Omier of Miami.) I really don’t have a view on Kansas State-Florida Atlantic because of the uncertainty as to Nowell’s ankle injury. If Nowell is effective, he is the man of the moment and I lean to the Wildcats.
Tip at 6:09 EDT. Enjoy the games.
Just as UConn made an athletic Arkansas team look skinny and small last night, a physical San Diego State team did the same to Alabama in an impressive comeback win tonight. In the process, the Aztecs gave a much needed boost to a Mountain West Conference that annually receives an inexplicable number of bids, and whose other three teams in this tournament each lost its first game by double figures.
The Selection Committee may want to take a closer look at Miami next year. Last year, Miami made the Elite 8 as a 10 seed. After winning the ACC, the Canes were “rewarded” with a 5 seed from which they have proceeded to make the Elite 8 again, making fairly short work of a top-seeded Houston team that was only a little more hobbled than Miami. Star rookie analyst Jay Wright saw this one coming, saying that Miami would not be intimidated by Houston because (I paraphrase modestly) “they have some street in them. I am not sure I am supposed to say that, but in basketball that’s a compliment.”
Creighton handled Princeton with relative ease while Texas handled Xavier with total ease.
With Alabama and Houston gone, there are no Number 1 seeds and only Texas remains as a Number 2 seed.
There also are six conferences in the Elite Eight, with only the Big 12 with Kansas State and Texas and the Big East with UConn and Creighton having more than one team remaining and the two eight- bid conferences who are supposed to rule the world—The Big Ten and The SEC—enjoying the rest of the Tournament at home, accompanied by the Pac 12.
Perhaps a favorite or two will emerge this weekend, but, to this point, this is as truly wide open as any tournament in memory. Maybe this will be the way things will go in the era of the portal and NIL, or maybe there never will be another tournament like it.
For now, at least, we are done with Nate Oats and Sean Miller and the administrators and network executives who enable them. For many reasons, I rarely find myself rooting for the University of Texas and I will be rooting for Miami and the ACC on Sunday. But the Longhorns deserve credit for dealing with their mess of a situation in a notably different way, and their coach, who for some reason remains an interim coach, has done a terrific job in keeping a team that could have been in turmoil moving forward and peaking at the right time.
We are not, however, done with CBS. They continue to annoy in matters great and small, including this amusing exchange with a Yale grad who was not feeling the Ivy League love tonight:
Even having watched my share of barf-inducing coverage of Duke and Coach K, I’m not sure I recall a more lopsided commentary than all this fawning over Princeton on CBS
Just got home from watching the first games at a friend’s. So I blessedly missed that on the ride home. I trust they spiced up the underdog talk with the “they do it the right way” talk.
Yes, they sure play some smart basketball. It makes me want to write a poem about Bill Bradley.
Someone also should let CBS and Westwood One know that Marcus Carr did not start his career at Minnesota. He started it at the University of Pittsburgh, way back in 2017-18 in the darkest days of the Scott Barnes-Kevin Stallings era. If Texas should win the tournament, one of the compelling storylines will be Carr’s journey from a Pitt team that went 0-18 in the ACC to a national champion, and from a player who seemed like a good kid who took too many bad shots at key times to a grown up senior leader, which to my surprise and to his credit he has been in this tournament so far. It’s a pretty compelling story already.
In fairness, one thing that CBS got right was adding Jay Wright to the studio broadcast team. It therefore was especially nice to watch Wright listen to an inside coaches story the other day from Creighton coach Greg McDermott about how Jay Wright was the leader of the Big East coaches and the role he played in the Big East hanging together through a challenging time.
Four more games this weekend. I am picking the Big East parlay, UConn over Gonzaga in Las Vegas and Creighton over San Diego State in Louisville in a rematch the half-brother battle between Arthur Kaluma of Creighton and Adam Seiko of San Diego State won by Arthur (12 points) over Adam (5 points) in overtime in last year’s tournament. Given my predictions in this tournament so far, congrats in advance to the Zags and Aztecs. I’ll take Miami and the ACC over Texas, just because (and because of the injury to Disu of Texas and the surprising recovery of Omier of Miami.) I really don’t have a view on Kansas State-Florida Atlantic because of the uncertainty as to Nowell’s ankle injury. If Nowell is effective, he is the man of the moment and I lean to the Wildcats.
Tip at 6:09 EDT. Enjoy the games.
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