0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/3/2014
When looking at the history of college basketball, it’s hard to apply the same set of standards to the pre-shot clock era and the shot clock era on a general level. This reality emerges to an even greater degree when trying to identify the worst games. Wyoming defeated Georgetown, 46-34, in the 1943 Final Four’s […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/2/2014
Earlier this week, we explored the various Final Four national semifinals (not championship games) that defined the product of college basketball on the court. This piece will look at Final Fours as a whole, not just the semifinal round. Moreover, it will also focus on off-court issues relating to race, economics, culture, and the length […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/1/2014
The Final Four moments that typically linger in the public memory come from Championship Monday, but what about the Saturday semifinals that stand above the rest? The envelope, please: 10 – STANFORD-KENTUCKY 1998 While this game might have lacked a measure of star power, it was never short on drama. Arthur Lee and Jeff Sheppard […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The national championship game is part of the Final Four, but National Semifinal Saturday is the time when all four teams play on college basketball’s grandest stage. Here are 10 moments from Final Four national semifinals — five of them specific actions, five of them larger realities — that spoke profoundly about college basketball (not […]
0 comments by Steve Fetch on 3/31/2014
It was always going to happen this way, but today he made it official: Kansas’s Andrew Wiggins declared for the NBA Draft today at a press conference attended by Bill Self, his parents, his older brother Mitchell, and his now former teammates. At his press conference Wiggins remarked that the atmosphere and fan support around […]
0 comments by Steve Fetch
The funniest and most frustrating part of the NCAA tournament is when people use three weeks (or in this case, two weeks) of single elimination 40 minute basketball games to completely erase everything from the previous four months. Kentucky shot 31.9% from three in SEC play, good for 11th in the league, but because they […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
If the first weekend of every NCAA tournament creates dozens of stories — some of them super-sized, some of them bite-sized — the second weekend creates the bigger headlines. In the second weekend of each NCAA tournament, the heavyweights and brand-name schools either take their place at the Final Four table or endure a very […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
No more conventional arenas. No more cuddly 11 seeds… well, at least not this time. No more narratives about how Kentucky’s one-and-dones had failed. It’s time to set up the Final Four in short-term and long-term historical contexts. These are the 10 Final Four facts that will shape the coming weekend’s action in Arlington, Tex. 10 […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/30/2014
Kentucky’s coaching staff and athletic director will make extra money off the performance the young Wildcats just delivered in each of the first two weekends of the 2014 NCAA tournament, culminating in Sunday’s Midwest Regional final victory over the Michigan Wolverines. It therefore seems somehow inappropriate to put the focus of the moment on a […]
0 comments by Scott
Andrew Harrison hit a huge 3 to send Kentucky to the Final Four. From NCAA.com and from SB Nation, here is a gif and video of the shot.
0 comments by Matt Zemek
One basketball concept that surfaces from time to time is “fool’s gold.” It is unquestionably the reason the Connecticut Huskies are headed to the Final Four, while a Tom Izzo senior class at Michigan State will fail to reach college basketball’s holy grail for the first time (a span of 18 years). Within the larger […]
0 comments by Scott
Photo by Julio Cortez / AP Photo via ESPN
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/29/2014
The Wisconsin Badgers had to win an old-school defensive slugfest on Saturday evening in Anaheim, Calif., in order to bring their gray-haired coach his first Final Four. In that sense, Bo Ryan’s team felt right at home. Yet, anyone who followed the Badgers during the course of the Big Ten season knew that this was […]
0 comments by Scott
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The Florida Gators — winners of 29 games in a row; owners of a perfect SEC record this season; holders of the No. 1 overall seed in the 2014 NCAA Tournament — were greatly burdened entering Saturday’s South Regional final against the Dayton Flyers. No, really, they were. It’s true that all programs would love […]
