0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/10/2015
What is there to be said about the 2015 NCAA Tournament through the prism of coaches that hasn’t been said already? We already know that Coach K is the coach of our generation… and frankly, in 1992, he had just about established himself as the coach of a previous generation as well. He’s the best […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/8/2015
Every NCAA tournament leaves behind its share of expected occurrences, surprises that don’t shock, surprises that ambush the brain, and series of events that cut against the grain of the regular season. In the coming days at The Student Section, we’re going to put this tournament — and the season — in perspective. In separate […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/7/2015
Let’s say you’re a replay zealot, as I am. What’s a replay zealot, first of all? Someone who believes in the more expansive use of replay to correct calls in all sports, someone who thinks that more applications of replay can only be a good thing for sports. A replay zealot would look at the […]
during the NCAA Men’s Final Four National Championship at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 6, 2015 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
0 comments by Matt Zemek
At the end of this endlessly fascinating college basketball season, Wisconsin could not become what Duke became in 1991. That’s because the 2015 version of Duke stood in the Badgers’ way. When the Final Four came to Indianapolis in 1991, Duke took down an unbeaten team in the national semifinals and then won two nights […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/6/2015
Evaluating the quality of a sports story is one of the 19,847 reasons why being a sports fan is so much gosh-darn fun. The arguments we’ve all had with parents, siblings, school classmates, office colleagues, and people we meet at the ballpark or on the street have lent so much color and passion to our […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
On the final day of the 2015 NCAA Tournament, we’re looking at great teams that never won it all. In one article, we looked at clusters of teams (the Phi Slama Jama Houston Cougars, for instance) that never won a title in a multiple-year window. In this article, we identify the 10 best single-season teams […]
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John Calipari and the Kentucky Wildcats didn’t win the 2015 national championship, but Calipari won in Lexington in 2012. His groups of great Kentucky teams managed to bring home at least one title when they had a window of opportunity. Several memorably great groups of teams never did bring home a single national crown. On […]
INDIANAPOLIS, IN – APRIL 04: Sam Dekker #15 of the Wisconsin Badgers celebrates after defeating the Kentucky Wildcats during the NCAA Men’s Final Four Semifinal at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 4, 2015 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Wisconsin defeated Kentucky 71-64. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/5/2015
We wrote about it multiple times this week — the memory of the 1991 Final Four in Indianapolis loomed over the heavyweight national semifinal on Saturday night between Wisconsin and Kentucky. Nearly a quarter of a century since Duke ruined UNLV’s unbeaten season in Indianapolis, Wisconsin traveled to the Hoosier heartland to make its own […]
INDIANAPOLIS, IN – APRIL 04: Jahlil Okafor #15 of the Duke Blue Devils reacts after a play in the second half as Mike Krzyzewski looks on against the Michigan State Spartans during the NCAA Men’s Final Four Semifinal at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 4, 2015 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/4/2015
Saturday evening in Indianapolis, the Road To The Final Four had already ended. The roads connecting college basketball’s past and present continued to flow. The direction of those roads led to Durham, not East Lansing. Mike Krzyzewski and Tom Izzo had met before in the Final Four — in 1999 in St. Petersburg, Florida, with […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/3/2015
Thursday, we took a stroll down Memory Lane and looked at one of two Final Fours with a very strong connection to the 2015 Final Four. The 1991 Final Four evoked an obvious UNLV-Kentucky comparison across 24 years, but there was so much more that tied together the past and the present. The other Final […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
We’ve spent all week waiting for the Final Four to start, and the anticipated event is almost here. Yet, when Saturday’s national semifinals end, the turnaround to the national championship game will be very brief. Most of this week has rightly been spent focusing on the national semifinals, but let’s give you at least one […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 4/2/2015
When a fuel-containing object explodes, a burst of light and a wave of heat emerge from it. Such was the case on an otherwise-dull Wednesday afternoon. It was an afternoon bereft of a major sporting event in this down period before the Final Four, The Masters, the start of the Major League Baseball season, and […]
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At this time of the year, you will sometimes hear the question, “Should the Final Four be re-seeded?” Rather than launch into a sweeping denunciation or fervent defense of the idea, let’s take another route: Examine the history of the Final Four since the NCAA tournament began to be seeded in 1979. Let’s see if […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
If you were to mention the 1991 Final Four this week, the first reaction you’d get from every college basketball fan over 35 years old would be something to the effect of, “Oh, you’re going to compare 1991 UNLV to 2015 Kentucky, right?” The comparison between those Runnin’ Rebels and these Wildcats is, of course, […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/31/2015
It is very easy to think that any particularly special achievement — enhanced by the adrenaline or excitement you feel in the present moment — is the best ever. Once in a great while, the euphoria and breathlessness surrounding a given sports moment are not out of step with a genuine analytical appraisal of what […]
