In a 2017-18 college basketball season with so much volatility on a night-to-night basis, where ranked teams regularly showed their vulnerability even when facing squads that ended up firmly in the NIT, an NCAA Tournament with top seeds dropping left and right by the end of the first weekend probably should be of little surprise.
Chaos was the rule all of a regular season where teams in the Associated Press lost 46 times to unranked squads. Regardless, the permanence suggested by numbers attached in front of team names and the rapid-fire succession of one game played after another, many of them close, will always make the tourney seem wild, and we’ll always be thankful for it.
The first weekend of the 2018 NCAA Tournament certainly was unpredictable. In any year, who wouldn’t think it crazy if:
- A 16 seed would defeat a 1 seed for the first time? The No. 1-ranked team in the country? By 20 points?
- As many teams seeded No. 11 will be in the Sweet 16 as No. 1?
- The defending national champions would go out in the second round by 21 points while playing in their home state?
- No 12 seeds would win, but two 13s would? (And the other two 13s were very, very close)
- The most impressive teams after the first two rounds would be Villanova and…Clemson?
It certainly was a wild couple days, and one where there are few easy conclusions to draw from them. Other than, perhaps, that a team would rather be a 5 seed this year (three 5s are in the Sweet 16) than a 4 seed (just one left), 3 (two), 2 (two) or 1 (two).
Among the highlights, Maryland-Baltimore County’s upset of top-seeded and No. 1-ranked Virginia is an all-time moment, one that will be remembered as long as there is a tournament. The Retrievers were fearless on offense and pesky on defense in not just beating the Cavaliers, but blowing them away 74-54.
The score was 21-21 at halftime. It’s almost incomprehensible to think a Tony Bennett team would allow 53 points in one half to anyone. Much less UMBC. In the NCAA Tournament.
There were some remarkable individual performances that should be remembered for some time. Houston guard Rob Gray scored 39 points, including the final two to beat the buzzer in the Cougars’ 67-65 win over San Diego State in the first round. UMBC’s Jairus Lyles-a player that poachers tried to lure away from the school this past offseason-scored 28 in the Retrievers’ historic upset of Virginia. Seton Hall’s Angel Delgado grabbed 23 rebounds, and along with 24 points almost willed the Pirates past Kansas. Gonzaga had a freshman star born as Zach Norvell wowed in wins over UNC Greensboro and Ohio State. Kentucky suddenly has a distinct leader in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who twice threatened double-doubles.
Statistically, the tourney has been a mixed bag, ahead of norms in some areas, below in others. So far there have been 11 of what the NCAA tournament records book defines as “close games”-contests decided by three points or less or in overtime. The 11 so far are two less than a year ago at this point of the event, though still on pace to meet or exceed last year’s total of 15 for the entire tourney.
Two games have been decided by one point, four more by two points and three more by three points each. The two overtime games also are already one more than all of last year’s event, though well short of the record of seven set in 1995 and tied in 2014.
A bunch of games decided by four and five points each has given us a total of 20 games decided by five points or less, and 25 games of a total of 52 have been decided by single digits. That actually is well down from 32 games at this stage a year ago and even the 27 decided by nine points or less through the second round two years back.
Moreover, for all the surprises based on seed in this year’s tourney, though, the final 16 is still light on charm. Florida State, Syracuse and Texas A&M may be lower seeds, but they also have a combined 36 losses this season. FSU and A&M, in particular, are teams whose dominance at times makes it almost unfathomable how they were able to lose to the likes of Boston College and Wake Forest (FSU) or to have seven losses by double digits (A&M). At least with Loyola Chicago facing Nevada in a regional semifinal, we’re guaranteed Cinderella hanging around at least another round.
The final 16 teams remaining includes squads from eight different conferences. Four teams each are from the ACC and Big 12, and just one comes from the Big East. Yet one each also come from the MVC, Mountain West and WCC, three leagues that received one at-large bid combined.
The ACC lost four of its nine teams after the first round, yet four of the remaining five moved to the Sweet 16. The only one that didn’t was defending national champion North Carolina, which was drilled by Texas A&M 86-65 while playing a virtual home game in Charlotte, and is out before the regional semifinals for the first time since 2014.
The Big 12 still has four of its seven remaining, with Kansas and Texas Tech playing to seed and West Virginia and Kansas State taking advantage of advantageous second round matchups to move on. Meanwhile, the SEC’s league-record eight teams is down to two after six teams advanced past the first round, but four dropped in the second. Of course, Kentucky is still playing and so is Texas A&M, which has run hot and cold all season but brought its best against UNC while also capitalizing on miserable shooting by the Tar Heels.
If there’s one thing that should be evident so far, it is that there have been numerous ways to win games and advance.
More than a few chirped after Marshall’s exciting opening-round upset 81-75 of Wichita State that it was a triumph of analytics, and how the Thundering Herd and some other teams (such as UMBC) won because they were on the cutting edge and everyone who wasn’t playing the same way was going to be destroyed. Yet in its next game, Marshall was pummeled 94-71 (and it wasn’t that close) by in-state rival West Virginia and coach Bob Huggins, who is less than impressed by analytics. Meanwhile UMBC shot just 6-for-22 from three-point range in its second round matchup with Kansas State, yet stayed in the game primarily on the strength of a superb hustling, disruptive half court defensive effort.
Syracuse won by playing its patented 2-3 zone. (A note: why did it seem so many other teams with zones in their toolboxes didn’t use them much this weekend?) West Virginia won how it so often does, by pressing, harassing and outworking its opponents. (And probably taking advantage of the increasingly lax officiating too just a bit…) Kentucky and Duke won with top-flight talent playing like it, on both ends of the court (and never let the defensive end be forgotten with both). Loyola Chicago won with superb team defense and unselfishness on offense that both allow a small team to play much bigger.
Of course, there was also the good ol’ “shoot the lights out” plan. Villanova made 17 three-pointers in turning a close second round game against Alabama into a rout. A surprising entrant in this category, too, was Clemson. The Tigers shot nearly 56% in a first round win over a New Mexico State team that is excellent defensively, and then were right around there again until a long stretch of a whole lot of garbage time at the end of their stunningly easy 84-53 blowout of Auburn.
Unfortunately, there also were plenty of ways to lose. Play on the defensive end, from our view, was often less than impressive, especially guarding players on the drive, though it does magnify the teams that really did play terrific defense (see: Loyola Chicago). Shooting badly from three-point range with little counter got Auburn, North Carolina and others dismissed quickly. Star guards not on the top of their game hurt a number of underdog teams in their attempts to win. Bad free-throw shooting in the clutch was painful to watch as teams like College of Charleston and Houston lost late.
‘Painful’ also was the only way to describe the meltdowns by Cincinnati and Xavier on Sunday. The city of Cincinnati had about as bad of a day as could be imagined, with the Bearcats surrendering a 22-point second half lead to Nevada and Xavier unable to hold onto a 12-point margin against Florida State.
The Bearcats, in particular, were the second-best team in the country all year in scoring defense, allowing 57.5 points per game. Somehow, Nevada rallied against that defense to come back from 22 points down in the final 10:49 for a 75-73 win Sunday, but make no mistake-Cincy lost this one on offense. Eight points in the final 11:36, and just one shot in that time for American Athletic Conference Player of the Year Gary Clark, was unacceptable and also hard to watch.
Xavier, meanwhile, now has been knocked out as a 2 seed or better in the second round in two of the last three years, a strange dichotomy for a program that also has seven Sweet 16 trips in the last 15 years. The Musketeers also as an 11 seed last year slayed No. 3 Florida State by 25 points in the second round a year ago.
As is often the case in March, sometimes it’s better to be the hunter than the hunted. And if ever that was a case throughout an entire season, it has been this one.
As much as the tourney has been fun so far, it still feels like we’re lacking for signature, well-played games throughout. UMBC’s stunner over Virginia will obviously be remembered for a long, long time, and is probably the moment that will be remembered most, but still…it was a 20-point win in the first round. A number of other close games were either rather ugly or else fairly one-sided before a frantic comeback. For our money, maybe the best back-and-forth game of the first weekend was Gonzaga‘s narrow escape against a highly underrated UNC Greensboro team (though even that one had a somewhat unsatisfying ending with UNCG not executing well in the final minute), as well as Texas Tech‘s narrow win over Florida. Even Rhode Island‘s overtime win over Oklahoma to open Thursday, while headlined by Trae Young‘s brilliance and freshman Fatts Russell‘s emergence for the Rams, still featured some horrible shot selection by Young late where some much more team-oriented play would’ve been more satisfying.
With the combustible mix of social media plus high-definition television, heaven knows scrutiny of officiating in sports has ascended to nonsensical heights. Because of that and also being one that strongly prefers the human element of sports, have tried from this view to maintain perspective on the people in the striped shirts in recent years, and also felt that officiating in college basketball generally has been much better of late since officials finally started enforcing freedom of movement. That said, the officiating in this year’s tourney has been an issue.
Too many charge calls (including obvious flops rewarded), phantom fouls, ridiculous technical fouls and end of game errors were too noticeable. More importantly, freedom of movement has been essentially non-existent. Physicality, reaching in and hand-checking suddenly are allowed for the teams that take advantage of it. A theory of some has long been that postseason laxness is because of broadcast networks needing so much time for commercials; whether true or not, it’s undeniable that there have been too many misses on contact that should be called.
Along those lines, we’re hoping the tourney has gotten the attention of those in charge of rules for NCAA basketball-they include the NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules Committee, the Division I Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee and the Division I Men’s Basketball Competition Committee. While these groups have never been shy in recent years in needlessly attempting to tinker with the sport, they often continue to miss the point on any real issues, of which have only become more obvious in March.
At a time of year when more casual fans are watching college hoops than any other, there wasn’t a soul out there opining that the NCAA Tournament really just might be worth watching if games were played in quarters, or if the lane was wider. The one thing casual fans (and many hardcore ones, too) are sick and tired of are the endless delays for reviews.
There’s no other way to put it: replay is a mess in the sport now. There are too many plays being reviewed, and they take too long when they are. The final minute of the Wichita State/Marshall game took 18 minutes, 26 seconds, and while that was an outlier in length, it wasn’t in the frustration level it induced. The repeated delays at the end of games are especially noticeable and maddening when NCAA Tournament games already have a built-in 25 minutes of commercials-four full 2 1/2 minute TV timeouts, plus the first team timeout automatically becomes a full for another 2 1/2 minutes-plus 20-minute halftime breaks that are five minutes longer than the regular season.
If the sport’s caretakers so badly want to have expanded replay, then a one-minute limit is sorely needed. Anything more is sapping the life out of the end of games. Replay should be used to correct obvious errors, not to nitpick every call for perfection. If there isn’t enough evidence in one minute to change a call, then it’s not worth holding fans hostage, especially at this time of year. Move on.
We continue to have no clue why the tourney insists on using the pod system, other than obvious attempts to needlessly give higher seeds as much home court advantage as possible. Even so, it backfired several times on Sunday as Michigan State and North Carolina played poorly in front of friendly audiences. The first two rounds, though, continue to be a confusing jumbled mess, where one has no idea what region teams are playing in while watching them.
Rather than the pods nonsense, the committee needs to get back to its old philosophy of placing sub-regionals where they belong in their region, giving geographic/regional preference to conference champions, and then filling the bracket around them. If that then results in an occasional Michigan State, Duke or higher seed playing in its home state? So be it. But there’s no reason why priority for location, as a whole, should go to a team like Purdue-good as the Boilermakers are-that didn’t win its regular season or tournament titles, while a team like Cal State Fullerton (far and away the westernmost of the 15 seeds) has to fly across country to Michigan, and then to play an early tip-off, just to accommodate the higher seed getting preferred geographic placement. We’d also suggest the tourney needs a refreshing on the sites that it is using for tournament games. Rather than playing in so many antiseptic NBA-sized arenas, it needs to play more on-campus arenas, such as it did at Boise State and San Diego State this year and as it regularly used to in the past at places like LSU, New Mexico, Notre Dame, Utah and even Washington State and Weber State.
Television coverage of the tournament continues to be a mixed bag. On the plus side, Bill Raftery was a witty pleasure as always, and a number of the less-touted broadcast teams on CBS and Turner were outstanding-Andrew Catalon and Steve Lappas made a great team, and analysts such as Debbie Antonelli and Dan Bonner continue to be excellent. The negative, though, is Turner continues to insist on using way too many analysts and studio people who so obviously are just dropping by the college basketball neighborhood. It’s something of an insult to fans, who can see right through it, but it also is not doing the sport any good. There are more than enough smart college hoops people out there who know college basketball nationally and could add significantly to the coverage at games or in the studio (we’d suggest Mark Adams, Dalen Cuff, Fran Fraschilla, Dino Gaudio and Pete Gillen to name a few). They also would sell the sport far better than a bunch of NBA people who just can’t seem to go more than 10 minutes without telling us just how great the NBA is.
The studio shows also are filled with too much of the heads joshing about or among themselves (perhaps in an effort to avoid attempting to go in-depth on teams they don’t know) and not enough spent talking about the teams playing. The studio is the place where the tone for the tourney can really be set: putting into perspective outstanding individual performances (see Gray’s 39 points for Houston in its first round win over San Diego State) or helping us get to know the teams we may not know much about. Many years ago (back in the 1980s), ESPN did a wonderful job with this when it carried the first round games in the tourney, but the current studio work feels stale, ineffective and like a lot of many things in college basketball: trying too hard to imitate what works for the NBA.
Twitter: @HoopvilleAdam
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Is it just me or are players fouling more on 3-point field goal attempts? If the NCAA keeps stats on such things, I’m not sure where to look. That and the percentage of times players actually make all 3 free throws might be interesting to know. Perhaps it pays percentage-wise to not worry about committing the foul. Have to wonder, too, if the number of charging fouls is up. Again, I get the feeling that the charge is the sexy call these days.
Hi Paul, good to hear from you last couple days. Tend to think some defenses are so focused on closing out hard on 3-pt shooters now that sometimes they do it out of control. Shooters continue to kick legs out more & more too, and I think officials also were a little more cognizant of calling it in 2nd Rd. after missing that one in Auburn/Charleston game. I’d agree, to me it’s not worth fouling on. Also thought the number of charges had gone down last few years, maybe just me, but sure seems it’s up now in tourney again.