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Sunday, November 24, 2024
The nickname will live on, but as far as the team that earned the label for Florida Gulf Coast, it turns out the first we saw of “Dunk City” in the NCAA tournament in 2013 was also the last. At the same time, FGCU’s legacy as a D-I newcomer making it big will live on and could only be added to this March.
Saturday’s college basketball day had all kind of major storylines featuring many of the sport’s biggest name schools. Would like to take a moment, though, to recognize a league at the other end of the spectrum, maybe as far from the biggies as can be in NCAA Division I.
“Anybody can beat anybody” is a cliché. It’s also being proven on a regular basis early in this college basketball season. The upsets keep coming this year, and if there’s one thing we’re learning early this college basketball season, it is that you cannot take anyone lightly. That seems to go especially for NCAA Division I newcomers and transitional members.
Some weekly thoughts, from watching and reading and generally spending too much time following college basketball:
The independents are dead. Long live the independents. NJIT’s 72-70 win at Michigan will go down as the biggest upset of this season and one of the biggest in a long time. This one is going to remembered for a long, long time.
The Atlantic Sun had a big run in the postseason once again, showing that while the conference doesn’t get a lot of notice during the regular season, its teams can’t be dismissed when March rolls around.
The transition up to Division I isn’t easy. It usually involves a lot of time on the road, a lot of guarantee games that often include blowout losses, and some changes in evaluating a team. Most of that is the same with USC Upstate, which is currently in its second season of Division I play. Like a number of teams making the transition, the program had some good years leading up to the jump, including back-to-back seasons with over 20 wins in 2004-05 and 2005-06. They even went 17-11 in their final season of Division II.
