What happened in the NCAA Men's Tournament Sweet 16
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Elite 8 matchups are set
Clemson, UConn, Alabama and Illinois punched their Elite Eight tickets Thursday night. NC State, Purdue, Duke and Tennessee joined them on Friday.
The Elite Eight games will be played on Saturday (UConn vs. Illinois and Clemson vs. Alabama) and Sunday (NC State vs. Duke and Purdue vs. Tennessee), and then we'll head to Phoenix for the Final Four.
Thursday
Friday
Related reading
- Illinois beats Iowa State to reach Elite Eight. Now, can the Illini stop UConn?
- For North Carolina, loss to Alabama in Sweet 16 will be a haunting NCAA Tournament exit
- UConn has all the answers against San Diego State in Sweet 16 rout
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For ticket information on all tournament games, click here.
Sweet 16 projections: Model picks every men’s team’s chances
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.
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Sweet 16 odds and TV schedule: Will chalk continue?
If you’re a fan of upsets and Cinderella stories, the 2024 version of March Madness hasn’t been your favorite version of the annual tournament. The only double-digit seed to advance to the Sweet 16 is North Carolina State. Besides the Wolfpack, the next highest seed is No. 6 Clemson in the West Regional and all four No. 1 seeds and all four No. 2 seeds advanced past the tournament’s first weekend.
NC State is its own Cinderella story. It needed to win five games in five days to win the ACC tournament and get into the NCAA Tournament, and now it has beaten No. 6 Texas Tech and No. 14 Oakland to advance to face Marquette in the South Regional semifinal.
What does the abundance of chalk give the 2024 NCAA Tournament? The eight games scheduled for Thursday and Friday feature some great matchups. Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas and Detroit will host the four regions. Maybe the Sweet 16 will deliver the upsets that the first two rounds didn’t.
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NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 odds and TV schedule: Will chalk continue?
UConn's path to Sweet 16
(Photo: Robert Deutsch / USA Today)
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
Iowa State vs. Illinois breakdown
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.
San Diego State has a new, scarier gear
(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
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.
GO FURTHER
San Diego State enters UConn rematch ‘up for the task’ after finding a new, scarier gear
Win over Texas A&M a testament to Houston's toughness
(Photo: Petre Thomas / USA Today)
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.
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Ranking the Sweet 16 matchups
The Sweet 16 is set. And there are some incredible matchups on tap.
We’ll be glued to all of them on Thursday and Friday, of course, but some games are more enticing than others. Here’s our ranking of all eight games to decide the Elite Eight and how to watch (all times Eastern):
Sweet 16 power rankings
Eight double-digit seeds secured first-round upsets in the NCAA Tournament to bust brackets across the country. But when the dust settled on the opening weekend, only one double-digit seed was left standing in the Sweet 16: No. 11 NC State in the South Region.
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NCAA Tournament power rankings: Reseeding the Sweet 16 after top teams survive