What happened in the NCAA Men's Tournament Sweet 16

LOS ANGELES — Because he is a walk-on, and because the NCAA Tournament is not always a busy time for walk-ons, Will Kuykendall naturally had some time last weekend to scroll through TikTok. When he did, a familiar but long-lost sound greeted him.

The theme song to the Disney Channel classic “Liv and Maddie.”

The Arizona freshman turned the volume up. His teammates started singing along. Thus Kuykendall decided it: It was time to make a video. The Wildcats, lip-synching to the tune. As of Wednesday afternoon? The video had more than 300,000 likes. For Arizona, this is no longer merely a trip to the West Region semifinals.

It is, in fact, a Sweet 16-a-Rooney.

“It’s crazy,” Kuykendall said, shortly after arriving at Crypto.com Arena with the rest of the Wildcats. “I don’t know if I watched ‘Liv and Maddie,’ but I know my sisters did. But then when (the team) started signing, I was like, I did not know everybody knows ‘Liv and Maddie.’ Especially some of the foreign guys. It’s funny, right?”

It is. It very much is.

For the uninitiated, “Liv and Maddie” ran from 2013-17 and starred Dove Cameron as both titular twins: Liv and Maddie Rooney, the former an actress returning home to life in Stevens Point, Wisc., and the latter a tomboy who stayed home and became — spoiler alert! — a basketball star. Hence the opening lyrics to “Better in Stereo,” the song that opens every episode:

I'm up with the sunshine/

I lace up my high tops/

Slam dunk, ready or not/

Yeah, show me what you got

Arizona mainstays Keshad Johnson, Kylan Boswell and Jaden Bradley are among those who participated in Kuykendall’s project, although as the auteur notes, pretty much everyone in the locker room is at least somewhat familiar with the show. “I’ve seen a couple episodes, but that was all Will’s idea,” Bradley said Wednesday. “He just told us what to say. My part probably took like two or three takes. I wasn’t great at it. But I’m working on it.”

And now thanks to the numbers — “It’s going viral right now,” Bradley said. “Got people texting me with laughing emojis, everything” — the Wildcats have an emboldened would-be influencer and content creator at the end of the bench.

“It’s hilarious to us,” Boswell said. “He’s getting a little clout now. He thinks he’s trying to become like Jared (McCain) or something.”

West Regional, Thursday, approx. 9:40 p.m., CBS

We’d be more excited about this matchup if we weren’t still haunted by the affront to basketball that was the four-overtime disaster these two teams staged in the 2022 Phil Knight Invitational. Or … whatever that Bama-Grand Canyon second-round game was supposed to be. But that’s the Crimson Tide; they play fast, sometimes too fast, and hope the math of their shot selection prevails through the chaos. North Carolina, which showed some impressive spurtability against Michigan State, won’t be afraid to grab and go either. Unless Alabama has a great night shooting 3s — always possible! — the Tar Heels seem to have much more depth … and rationality.

Continue reading.

BOSTON — Dan Hurley knows this is not how coaches talk. Certainly not coaches of teams already wearing a bullseye as the reigning national champion and current No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. If pride comes before the fall, is it really a good idea to repeatedly call your team “bulletproof” before it has successfully run the gauntlet to become college basketball’s first repeat national champion since Florida in 2007? Hurley hasn’t stopped there. After a 39-point rout of Stetson in the first round and a 17-point win over Northwestern in the second, he told his team, while CBS cameras rolled, “Just keep blowing these teams out of this tournament. Just keep smacking them.”

It makes for great TV. But why do that? A sly grin creeps across his face when you ask.

“Well, what’s the alternative? To shrivel up? To turtle up? Your team is going to feed off your energy, your confidence, your swagger,” Hurley told The Athletic on Wednesday, the eve of his title-game rematch with No. 5 seed San Diego State in the Sweet 16. “It’s who we are. It’s the energy I coach with. It’s what the players expect from me. And you know, at UConn, you got this huge target anyway. It’s not like me being a confident man and coach is gonna create a bigger target. People are coming for us. We’re the champs.”

Fair point. The Huskies are 33-3 this season, 48-5 since the middle of last season, and they’ve done a whole lotta smackin’. They’ve won eight straight NCAA Tournament games, all by double digits and by an average of 22 points. So why not a little smack talking too?

“Coach is very confident, and he rubs that confidence off on us,” star 7-footer Donovan Clingan says. “He’s the best coach in the country and pushes us to another level and makes us want to be as great as possible. He always talks about being bulletproof, and what keeps us bulletproof, and that’s our elite defense. If we’re able to keep doing that, I think we’ll be good.”

Continue reading.

UNC trailed ninth-seeded Michigan State by as many as 12 points early in the second round before a sizzling 23-3 run helped propel the Tar Heels on to the Sweet 16. RJ Davis once again led the team in scoring with 20 points, but North Carolina also got 18 points from Armando Bacot, 17 points from Harrison Ingram and 14 points from Cormac Ryan.

Seed: 1

Record: 29-7

Games:

No. 16 Wagner, 90-62

No. 9 Michigan State, 85-69

March Madness and uncertainty are interwoven. From higher seeds getting upset to Cinderella teams advancing, it’s hard to win games at the NCAA Tournament. It’s even more daunting to achieve deep runs across several years.

That’s what makes Gonzaga’s achievement so impressive. On Saturday, the Bulldogs defeated the Kansas Jayhawks 89-68 in the Round of 32, and the Zags advanced to their ninth straight Sweet 16 appearance.

Yes, you read that right. For nine consecutive years, Gonzaga has played games in the second week of the tournament.

Continue reading.

OMAHA, Neb. — Brad Underwood stood at the end of the court, looked toward the Illinois fans and saluted. Minutes after clinching a spot in the Sweet 16, Underwood wanted to appreciate the moment with the people who were there to witness the Illini making it past the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2005.

This ride, however long and bumpy it’s been, was as much about the fans as it was his team.

“I always thought I’d get here — and beyond,” Underwood said in the hallway at CHI Health Center. His hair was still wet from a water gun fight the coaching staff initiated in the locker room after punching their ticket to Boston to play No. 2 seed Iowa State on Thursday. “It’s not about that or me or getting this off my back. You guys make that up. This is a completely different team.”

This third-seeded Illinois squad, winners of the Big Ten tournament and slayers of the longstanding opening weekend narrative, was built with March in mind. It’s why they’ve constructed a roster that’s versatile enough to play and win in different ways. They can go really big with Coleman Hawkins. They’ve found success by getting Dain Dainja on the floor. They can even go smaller if needed with Luke Goode and three perimeter players.

“I think we can kind of handle whatever we might see,” Underwood said.

Being part of a team that could have success in March was what the staff pitched to Marcus Domask last spring when the 6-foot-6, 215-pound guard entered the transfer portal after four seasons at Southern Illinois. Domask, who grew up playing on a racquetball-sized sports court in his family’s basement in Waupun, Wisc., dreamt about going on a deep NCAA Tournament run like the ones the Badgers had with Sam Dekker and Frank Kaminsky. Now, Domask is in that dream, having already posted a triple-double in the opening round against Morehead State. He added 22 points and seven assists in the second-round rout of Duquesne. He even stayed to sign autographs before jogging off the court.

“My No. 1 checklist in the portal was going to a team that could win important games, win meaningful games in March,” Domask said.

Illinois has the formula to go on a run. It has the top-ranked offense in adjusted efficiency at KenPom.com. It has one of the best players in the sport in Terrence Shannon Jr. whose burst makes everyone else on the court look a step slow. It has veterans like Domask and Justin Harmon, players who were immune to what Illinois did and more importantly hadn’t done previously in March.

“We all know what we came here for,” said Harmon, who spent the last two years at Utah Valley and two before that at Barton Community College. “We know what we’re capable of and what we need to do to win games and to get a ring.”

This reality wasn’t so clear a month ago. Illinois is still playing in late March in part because of how it responded to what players say now was a much-needed wake-up call on Feb. 21.

Continue reading.

SALT LAKE CITY — If, on any random Monday morning throughout this college hoops season, you happened to be walking through the Arizona basketball office, you would eventually come upon something that so many fans and talking heads and social media lurkers would be surprised to see.

Caleb Love in his real element. Sitting in front of a big screen. Film flashing, his eyes moving. Every shot, every pick-and-roll read, every decision made, every decision not made. Love breaks it all down to an audience of one — Arizona director of player development Rem Bakamus. Love narrates, assesses, winces at mistakes. He speaks, Bakamus listens.

“His own harshest critic,” Bakamus recently explained. “No matter what everybody says, this and that, he’s always his own harshest critic. That’s what people don’t understand.”

What everyone says about Love has long been a universal subject. In a college basketball landscape that more and more seemingly lacks major stars with household names, Love is one of the few collegians out there to elicit visceral reactions. Good and bad, for a few years now. Everyone who watches Caleb Love play has an opinion about how Caleb Love plays.

And now, perhaps, comes the ultimate theatre.

Of all the delicious scenarios that could emerge this March, no plotline rivals the potential script of Love facing his former team, the North Carolina Tar Heels, in an Elite Eight matchup in Los Angeles. A few orders of business will need to come first in the Sweet 16 — Arizona handling Clemson, North Carolina handling Alabama — but such a screenplay is too tempting to not at least imagine. It was only two years ago when, from the nether regions of the bracket, Love served as the flamethrower in eighth-seeded Carolina’s string of wins over Marquette, Baylor, UCLA, Saint Peter’s and rival Duke to reach the national championship game. Love was both incredible and erratic, unleashing his brand of wild shot-making and heedless decision-making.

For as perfect as the run was, what followed was every bit as dramatic, for all the wrong reasons. A 5-of-24, four-turnover performance in a national title game loss to Kansas that was so colossally bad that no two eyes could ever unsee it. As was Carolina’s entire following season, when one of college basketball’s proudest programs became the first preseason No. 1 team to miss the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded in 1985. Love was, both understandably, and at the same time overly harshly, the primary scapegoat in the complicated story of that team’s vanishing act. It was both in his best interest and the program’s best interest for him to enter the transfer portal last spring.

Continue reading.

The second round of the men’s NCAA Tournament did not provide a lot of upsets. Only two lower seeds won in the 16 games, and one of those, Gonzaga, was favored. Will we see more chalk in the Sweet 16? My model projects scores and title chances for every remaining team.

UConn is still the clear favorite. The Huskies won the title in more than a quarter of my simulations and made the Final Four a majority of the time. Houston, Purdue and Tennessee also remain the top contenders. In my projections, Arizona is ahead of North Carolina in the West Regional, but it favors the No. 1 seeds otherwise.

Continue reading.

Two NCAA Tournament games, two blowout victories for the Huskies. UConn, which beat Stetson by 39 points in the first round, led Northwestern by 22 points at halftime and cruised to a 75-58 victory to reach the Sweet 16. Tristen Newton recorded 20 points and 10 assists, while Donovan Clingan notched 14 points and 14 rebounds. UConn has lost just once this calendar year and continues to look like a team capable of becoming the first repeat national champ since Florida in 2006 and ’07.

Seed: 1

Record: 34-3

Games:

No. 16 Stetson, 91-52

No. 9 Northwestern, 75-58

East Regional, Thursday, approx. 10:10 p.m., TBS/truTV

The sales pitch here is simple. The Illini have the top offense in college basketball, per KenPom, while the Cyclones own the No. 1 defense in the country. Is that something you might be interested in? These are also two very passionate and very hungry fan bases; Illinois hasn’t been to the Final Four since 2005, which seems like yesterday to Iowa State faithful, almost none of whom were alive for the school’s lone appearance in 1944. (There were only eight teams in the NCAA Tournament that year, and many college-aged men were fighting in World War II, so …) We hope Boston is ready for a Midwest horde learning to pronounce “chowdah,” and we can’t wait to see which team’s strength prevails in this Final Four-worthy showdown.

Continue reading.

This San Diego State is unfair. This San Diego State is not cool, especially when all the opponent has going for it is a fairy tale. This version showed up Sunday and put together a comprehensively unkind performance, making happy and hopeful Yale miserable for almost every second of it. San Diego State did what it usually does defensively. It also did what it almost never does offensively. It had James Jones, the Bulldogs’ coach, staring at the floor and exhaling deeply a lot.

It is one thing to get drawn into a rock fight with the Aztecs. It is quite another when they have all the rocks.

The reward, though, wasn’t the 85-57 win or the soured body language of a vanquished opponent or even the last spot in the NCAA Tournament’s round of 16. It was what lay beyond, on a night when San Diego State approached its perfect self. It was UConn. Again.

Continue reading.

With 17 seconds left in overtime, leading by three, a trip to the Sweet 16 in the balance, Houston senior walk-on Ryan Elvin stepped to the foul line.

Elvin had played 60 total minutes all season, almost all of them in garbage time. But head coach Kelvin Sampson was forced to send him to the scorer’s table one second earlier when a fourth Cougars player fouled out of the game — Jamal Shead, the All-America point guard and Big 12 Player of the Year. Houston put the last guy on the bench in for its star player, and suddenly, instantly, he was the open man on the inbound pass, with a trip to the stripe and a chance to decide the game.

Continue reading.