On the afternoon of Friday, March 12, few teams in men’s college basketball looked better than Michigan. The Wolverines, who had just won the Big Ten regular-season title, entered that day ranked second in Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted efficiency rankings and then delivered a confidence-renewing win over Maryland to open the conference tournament. Senior guard Eli […]
First, we look at how the women’s NCAA Tournament is shaping up. There have been some amazingly close games — Texas A&M inched past Troy with some questionable refereeing — and an upset that took the FiveThirtyEight Excitement Index all the way to 11 as Wright State beat Arkansas. But unfortunately, the NCAA has been […]
From the outside, March 16, 2012, was the maddest day in the history of the men’s NCAA Tournament. Before that tourney, only four No. 2 seeds had ever lost their opening-round tilts against No. 15 seeds. On that day, it happened not once, but twice. The first Goliath to fall was Missouri, a historically solid […]
To borrow a trademark from the world of golf, the 2021 NCAA women’s basketball tournament will certainly be “a tradition unlike any other.” Among the differences this year from recent editions of the storied tournament: It will be played entirely on neutral courts in the state of Texas instead of the first two rounds occurring […]
When the Oklahoma State men’s basketball program was slapped with a postseason ban for a bribery scandal involving a former assistant, coach Mike Boynton made a crucial decision: He picked up the phone and called the future face of his program, Cade Cunningham. Cunningham was the highest-rated point guard of all time in 247Sports’ recruiting […]