Cinderella is dead. But March Madness is very much alive.
That is the takeaway from what almost assuredly is the greatest, wildest opening weekend in NCAA tournament history. So much happened that it will take days to sort it all out – and forget trying to make sense of it all. That’s not possible.
And that is the most compelling thing about this tournament, year after year, March after March: something always happens that defies belief, as the field is sliced cleanly but cruelly in half between those who advance and those who are done. This year, there were multiple happenings that defied belief.
It’s hard to even remember the Cincinnati dunk that wasn’t, in a buzzer-non-beating loss to St. Joseph’s. Or the stunning layup Providence got to beat USC. Or the Adam Woodbury push-off-putback of an airball to get Iowa past Temple. Or UALR guard Josh Hagins’ crazily difficult 3-pointer to force overtime against Purdue.
Because so much happened after that. Particularly Sunday, when the amazing was routine and the Cinderellas fell left and right. When No. 11 seed Northern Iowa completed the most ghastly collapse in Big Dance history – giving away a 12-point lead in the final 35 seconds of regulation to Texas A&M, then losing in double overtime Sunday night – the little guys were officially run out of the tournament.
The Sweet 16 will be the province of the six power conferences, plus long-established basketball heavyweight Gonzaga. All four No. 1 seeds advance, for the first time since 2012.
Overdog athletic programs from conferences with huge media-rights deals are everywhere. That continues the decidedly non-romantic Sweet 16 trend of recent years – last spring Wichita State and Gonzaga were the teams from outside the power leagues, and nobody considers either of them any kind of underdog. In 2014, the outsiders were Dayton and San Diego State, neither exactly plucky underdogs.
There were a few of those Cinderellas with a chance this year. But on Double-Digit Seed Sunday, they were all swept out in varying degrees of cruelty.
• There was the Hand of Pflueger that beat Stephen F. Austin. Notre Dame backup freshman Rex Pflueger tipped in a Zach Auguste miss with 1.5 seconds left, swatting it up and off the glass to complete a Fighting Irish comeback from five points down in the final 1:35. The Lumberjacks had the game in their hands late, and couldn’t squeeze it – star player Thomas Walkup failed to keep hold of a rebound up five, Auguste made a hustle play for the ball, and the Irish had their chance. They scored the final six points of the game, and Thomas Walkup and his beard and broad shoulders were gone. Ten chaotic hours later, it would all seem rather unremarkable.
• Fifteen seed Middle Tennessee hit the Great Orange Wall in the second half and was routed by a Syracuse team that was a controversial inclusion in the field. Now Jim Boeheim is smirking his way into the Sweet 16. Thirteen seed Hawaii similarly stopped cold against Maryland.
• Tenth seed VCU – which isn’t much of a mid-major either – was Buddy’d out of the tourney. The Rams trailed by 13 to No. 2 seed Oklahoma in the second half, roared back to take three different leads, and then were shot into the offseason by the brilliant Buddy Hield in the final minutes.
• That left No. 11 seed Northern Iowa as the last little guy standing. The Panthers are a legit program, having made the tourney four times in the last seven years and memorably advancing to the 2010 Sweet 16 – but UNI is an FCS football school from a Missouri Valley Conference that wasn’t among the top 10 leagues in the nation this year.
And for 39 minutes and 25 seconds, the Panthers had Texas A&M beaten. At times hopelessly beaten. The lead early in the second half was 18. It was over 99 times – but never all the way over.
Northern Iowa experienced a waking nightmare, completely folding against Texas A&M’s pressure. UNI turned the ball over four times in a 25-second span, with its press offense apparently consisting of disastrous decisions to try and throw the ball off the legs of the Aggies. And missing. Any and all coaching fundamentals that had been imparted about breaking the press clearly flew out of the minds of every Northern Iowa player.
It was hard to watch. Certainly Texas A&M deserved credit for perseverance and energetic defense, but this was a game that was more lost than won.
The last turnover of regulation was the most painful. With five seconds left, guard Wes Washpun (more on him later) was trapped in the corner – the Panthers seemed to spend the entire last 30 seconds eternally trapped in the corner – and tried the throw-it-off-the-Aggie trick. If he’d simply chucked the ball high and far to the other end of the court, the clock may well have run out. At the very least, it would have left A&M with a long drive to get off a last shot.
Instead Admon Gilder grabbed the catastrophically errant pass and went in for the tying layup with less than two seconds remaining.
Going into overtime, Northern Iowa had the same chance of winning as Jeb Bush does of being president in November. Yet still the Panthers took a lead – and lost it. And yet still the Panthers had the ball for the final shot with 5.9 seconds left – and took the worst last shot of the tourney. Paul Jesperson (more on him later, too) pulled up from halfcourt with, oh, four seconds left and chucked it – a half-court heat check – and it missed with so much time left that Texas A&M actually got off the last shot.
Which led to a second overtime. With almost all the good UNI players fouled out or hurt, A&M managed to put the game away and put the Panthers out of their bottomless misery. Although, in reality, it put them into their misery. Let all tape of the game be burned, and let it never be spoken of again in Cedar Falls.
Perhaps this was the gods of March evening the scales – because Northern Iowa had gotten supernaturally lucky not just once, but twice, on the journey to this point.
There was the shot Washpun made two weeks ago, in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament final – a jump shot that beat the buzzer in a tie game with Evansville. It thudded off the heel of the rim, bounced straight up in the air and went straight down through the net to sent UNI to the Dance. It’s the kind of bounce you can only dream of and rarely get.
Then, Friday night. That’s when Jesperson etched his name into March lore with a shot that brought all of America roaring to its feet in disbelief – in a bar, in your living room, wherever you watched it, the response had to be universal. He launched from half-court in a tie game against Texas and banked it in for the win, a ridiculous stroke that must have emboldened him to try again with too much time left Sunday night.
That lightning wasn’t striking twice.
So, yes, Northern Iowa was due. But the nature of the payback from the gods was harsher than anything Sisyphus had to endure.
And with that, the little guys were sent home. Makai Mason of Yale and Walkup and Hagins will be remembered for years by the fans of their schools, but otherwise will be assigned to the dustbin of history. There is no Florida Gulf Coast miracle Sweet 16 equivalent again this March.
It’s all Goliath, all the time, from here on out.
Other Sweet 16 takeaways:
• Eight coaches who have been to a Final Four are still dancing: Bill Self of Kansas; Jim Larranaga of Miami; Jay Wright of Villanova; Jim Boeheim of Syracuse; Roy Williams of North Carolina; Tom Crean of Indiana; Mike Krzyzewski of Duke; and Lon Kruger of Oklahoma. Half of them own championship rings: Self, Boeheim, Williams (two) and Krzyzewski (five).
And yet none of them is named Izzo or Calipari. Last time neither of them were in the Sweet 16: 2004.
• The ouster of Kentucky and John Calipari was a bit of a surprise, but Indiana is a quality opponent that probably shouldn’t have been a No. 5 seed. The ouster of Michigan State and Tom Izzo was by far the bigger shock – the biggest shock of the year, and quite possibly the biggest ever.
Of the seven other No. 2 seeds to lose to a 15, few if any were popular picks to win the national title. Michigan State – widely considered underseeded as a No. 2 – was not only the choice on millions of brackets, it was led by a coach who is considered a master of tournament basketball. Izzo may be going into the Hall of Fame in a few weeks, and he’ll deserve it, but losing to Middle Tennessee State is as bad a loss as anyone has ever had in the tourney. And yes, that’s even with the acknowledgement that MTSU deserved a better seed.
• Combining the Michigan State flop with Purdue’s first-round loss to UALR, the Big Ten made ignominious history. It was the first time in conference history that the two teams that played in its tournament final combined for zero NCAA tourney wins.
• Wisconsin’s coach was in the 2014 and ’15 Final Fours, along with players – he just wasn’t the head coach then. Greg Gard, who was Bo Ryan’s right-hand man, is the boss now. And he’s still coaching because Bronson Koenig is the King of Clutch.
The junior guard, who is named for actor Charles Bronson because his father was a fan, hit what crestfallen Xavier coach Chris Mack called “two of the toughest shots I’ve ever coached against.” The first was a contested bomb from the top of the key with 13 seconds left that tied the game against the Musketeers. The second was harder.
After a controversial charge call on Xavier’s Edmund Sumner gave the Badgers the last shot, Gard called timeout with two seconds left and designed a wheel play for Koenig to catch the inbounds pass on the wing. Koenig took one dribble and two steps into the corner and, as he said, “channeled my inner Steph Curry” with a fallaway three to win the game. It was the singular shot (not heave) of the tournament to date.
• Villanova cleared a considerable hurdle in making it to Louisville for the South Regional. The Wildcats haven’t advanced that far since 2009, despite being seeded to do so four times. That’s a big burden off Wright’s back, and it was removed emphatically Sunday. Villanova destroyed Iowa, which was fortunate to advance from the first round on an Adam Woodbury push-off-and-putback basket to beat Temple at the buzzer Friday.
• The obvious big winner of the weekend is the Atlantic Coast Conference, which placed six teams in the Sweet 16 – and that’s with one of its best teams, Louisville, not participating due to a self-imposed postseason ban. But know this: the ACC has been both lucky and good.
The league benefited from a lot of bracket breakdowns. The highest-seeded team the ACC has defeated so far: No. 7 Dayton. Syracuse was gifted with a round-of-32 matchup with No. 15 MTSU; Notre Dame got No. 14 SFA; Duke drew No. 12 Yale; North Carolina faced No. 9 Providence and Virginia took on No. 9 Butler.
There are tougher games to come.
• The only thing keeping the Southeastern Conference in the tournament was the Northern Iowa collapse. The SEC, a persistent underachiever outside of king Kentucky, lost Vanderbilt in the play-in round and the Wildcats at least one round earlier than expected. Texas A&M marches on, but only by the slimmest of margins.
• Seven of the 16 remaining teams won either their conference regular-season title or the league tourney or both: Kansas, Villanova, Gonzaga, North Carolina, Indiana, Oregon and Texas A&M.
• Fifteen games have been decided by five points or less so far, which is actually one fewer than last year at this stage. But there was no half-court shot for the win in 2015. Or in any other year since Ulysses Reed did it for Arkansas to eliminate defending champion Louisville in 1981.
• There are zero African-American coaches in the Sweet 16 for the second year in a row. There were three in 2014: Kevin Ollie of eventual national champion Connecticut; Cuonzo Martin, then of Tennessee; and Johnny Dawkins of Stanford, who was fired last week.
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