What happened in the NCAA Men's Tournament Sweet 16

For the 25th consecutive year, Iowa will miss the Sweet 16. The Hawkeyes’ biggest basketball rivals — Illinois and Iowa State — play one another tonight for the right to go to the Elite 8, where Iowa hasn’t competed since 1987.

Few Iowa fans would cheer for either team tonight, but there is a slight rooting interest. Here’s what they picked via an X poll.

DALLAS — Little can be gleaned from a 15-minute window into a much longer workout. But if the beginning of Duke’s practice session at American Airlines Center is any indication, the Blue Devils are a pretty loose bunch ahead of their Sweet 16 matchup against top-seeded Houston.

Who knows if this is the norm for No. 4 seed Duke, but amid the light-hearted banter and a couple of over-the-head passes during drills, I lost count of the “Whoo!” and “Ball! Ball!” shouts from freshman guard Jared McCain, a player who has upped his draft stock with his recent play according to our John Hollinger.

Big games are nothing new for Duke as a program; it certainly looks like nerves won’t be an issue against the Cougars, but we'll see.

BOSTON — Even before the season began, people associated with the Connecticut basketball program understood the commuting bonus that would come their way by being the top seed in the tournament: Opening round games at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is about a three-hour, 15-minute drive from Storrs, Conn., and the East Regional at Boston’s TD Garden, a drive that can be made in less than two hours.

“We hope the crowd (at TD Garden) can be a Storrs North for us,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “Maybe feel a little but like MSG does for us when we play there.

“We’ve earned that by the season that we’ve had. This wasn’t some gift by the committee to try to make it as easy as possible for us. We’ve earned our position.”

There is, of course, one small problem: Games close to home mean more requests for tickets. And more requests for tickets mean needing to say “sorry” to some people.

Who handles that?

“My mom,” Alex Karaban said. “She’s been helping me a lot with the tickets. She’s telling people yes and no.

“She’s got all the power who can come or not.”

DETROIT — The ultimate challenge of preparing for Purdue is looking at anything other than Zach Edey. The 7-foot-4 center is the sun and the moon and the stars.

“He’s an entity that you just don't see,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few on Thursday.

But at least Few and the Zags, have, in fact, seen Edey and his Boilermakers before. For better or worse, they know exactly what they’re getting into in Friday night’s Sweet 16 matchup. The two powers faced off in each of the last two seasons. The Boilers won 73-63 this season in Hawaii and last season in Portland, 84-66.

Edey was, of course, dominant both times around.

• Nov. 12, 2023 — 33 minutes, 25 points, 8-16 FGs, 9-10 FTs, 14 rebounds (4 offensive), 3 blocks, 0 fouls
• Nov. 25, 2022 — 31 minutes, 23 points, 10-16 FGs, 3-6 FTs, 7 rebounds (3 offensive), 3 blocks, 2 fouls

“I’ve been doing this a long, long, long time, and you just have never dealt with something like Zach, that size but yet that good of a player,” Few said. “He's really developed his touch. His ball goes in now. It's very soft. Great passer if you choose to double-team him. Shoots free throws really, really well. Obviously at that size, really impacts the game on the defensive end.”

The question Few will have to answer, like everyone else encountering Edey, is to send help or to not send help. Edey’s passing ability opens the door for a potential barrage of 3s from the Boiler guards. This is, perhaps, the ultimate difference between this year’s Purdue team and the one already home in West Lafayette, Ind., by this time last year. That team shot 32.2 percent from the perimeter, ranking 276th nationally, and going 5-for-26 on that day of infamy against Fairleigh Dickinson. This year’s Boilers? They lead the country in 3-point shooting at a steamy 40.9 percent. They went 20-for-47 in two NCAA Tournament wins last week in Indianapolis.

“I think they're most dangerous when they're making a bunch of 3s,” Few said.

Gonzaga does not have a player on the roster over 6-foot-10. Graham Ike, at 6-9, will have some primary duties on Edey.

Ike fouled out of three games this season, against Kentucky and twice against Santa Clara, a WCC team trotting out two 7-footers of its own. In postseason games this season, he was whistled for four fouls in both conference tournament games, had a clean sheet in an opening NCAA Tournament matchup with McNeese State and three fouls against Kansas.

Ike’s plan against Edey?

“Just try to stay legal, try to keep the physicality up as much as possible, as much as the refs will allow me to, and meet him early,” Ike said Thursday. “That's about it. Just trust my teammates they'll have my back with good ball pressure, good communication on the floor."

Good luck with that.

LOS ANGELES — In a previous life, Caleb Love was an ACC player. That means Clemson has more than a passing familiarity with him before getting reacquainted in the Sweet 16 on Thursday — although the numbers suggest the Tigers have not seen Good Caleb Love before.

They’ve seen Decent Caleb Love, more or less.

In three career games against Clemson, the newly christened Pac-12 Player of the Year has averaged 14 points, shot 40.9 percent from 3-point range and totaled more turnovers (10) than assists (nine). This is of course a different year and a different version of Love, one that remains capable of thermonuclear shooting streaks but one less prone to debilitating inefficiencies.

"We're very familiar with Caleb Love," Clemson coach Brad Brownell said, "and how good a player he is."

So the plan is pretty simple: Don’t let Love get anything easy right off the bat, such that Good Caleb manifests at Crytpo.com Arena.

“That’s when a basketball player gets a lot of confidence,” Clemson guard Joseph Girard III said. “When you get a great player get confidence early, it’s usually the struggle bus for the defense. We’re going to have to be locked in early."

Arizona, which beat Long Beach State in the first round, held off Dayton 78-68 to reach the Sweet 16 against Clemson. The Wildcats’ quick pace and defensive length gave the Flyers fits. Caleb Love, the team’s leading scorer, scored 13 points in the first 12 minutes and finished with a team-high 19. Pelle Larsson, Keshad Johnson and Jaden Bradley also reached double figures in scoring.

Seed: 2

Record: 27-8

Games:

No. 15 Long Beach State, 85-65

No. 7 Dayton, 78-68

LOS ANGELES — Caleb Love and North Carolina will be in the same building this week, and that meant cameras and recorders swarming the now-Arizona star during all 30 minutes of open locker room access Thursday.

It also meant coming away somewhat disappointed if you expected Love to talk about a possible Elite Eight matchup with his former team.

“I’m focused on Clemson,” Love said, elaborating no further.

The Pac-12 Player of the Year couldn’t avoid reliving a little bit of his time in Chapel Hill, though he didn’t comment on whether he even had the option to return to North Carolina if he wanted to. He alluded to “a lot of extra stuff I went through that I didn’t deserve” — read: fan criticism — and reiterated how one year in Tucson has, so far, rewritten narratives.

“I can hear with a clean sheet of paper,” Love said. “I’m grateful for (the coaches). They kind of revamped me as a player.”

West Regional, Thursday, 7:09 p.m., CBS

Clemson beat tournament teams Alabama, South Carolina, TCU, UAB and Boise State in nonconference play before having some stumbles in the (apparently pretty good!) ACC. So, yeah, the Tigers are legit and should provide a good test for Arizona. Brad Brownell can stretch the floor with his bigs, which could make for a challenging matchup for Wildcats center Oumar Ballo, who lives in drop coverage. The Tigers should also be very familiar with Caleb Love — both the good and bad versions — from his time at UNC.

Continue reading.

The NCAA Tournament is not only the greatest sporting event ever created, it’s also the most incredible generator of choose-your-own narratives. You can draw all kinds of conclusions from a 68-team scatter plot:

• The ACC put four teams into the Sweet 16, more than any other conference. This clearly proves that critics who said the league was mediocre and deserved no more than four bids were completely off base.
• Or … maybe it was just all about NC State somehow channeling the 1983 Wolfpack for a fortnight. The other three regional semifinalists are North Carolina, Duke and Clemson — the three best teams, metrics-wise, in the ACC. No one ever doubted those teams belonged in the field. Meanwhile, Virginia turned in arguably the worst performance of the tournament in the First Four.
• OK, well, the Big 12 sent only two teams to the Sweet 16, after getting eight in and being hailed as the best conference in the country all year. This proves that the league was, in fact, gaming the NET rankings and wasn’t as strong as purported.
• Or … maybe the NET is pretty good after all? Of the top 16 teams in the NET on Selection Sunday, 12 are still playing. Fourteen teams in the Sweet 16 ranked in the top 20. If you correctly predicted that ratio, you’re probably feeling pretty good about your bracket.

We can do this kind of either/or all day, but so far, we can say with some confidence that the first two rounds refuted two myths.

Continue reading.

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.

All odds via BetMGM.

No. 2 Arizona vs. No. 6 Clemson

Spread: Arizona -7.5

Total: 151.5

No. 1 Connecticut vs. No. 5 San Diego State

Spread: UConn -10.5

Total: 135.5

No. 1 North Carolina vs. No. 4 Alabama

Spread: UNC -4.5

Total: 173.5

No. 2 Iowa State vs. No. 3 Illinois

Spread: Iowa State -1.5

Total: 146.5

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.