0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/11/2016
Many a soul has experienced a miserable night in Las Vegas, the kind of night when nothing is redeemable and everything must start from scratch. The Boise State Broncos know the feeling. * Weeks ago, Boise State lost a game at Colorado State. It should have been awarded a victory, but this shot by James […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/10/2016
Seasons are ending, or at the very least, dreams of the NCAA tournament are ending for schools such as Georgetown and Clemson. The Hoyas and Tigers are joining the hundreds of teams being eliminated from conference tournaments in these first two weeks of March. While 36 teams will make the NCAA field after failing to […]
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In the 2008 NCAA Tournament, Fran McCaffery’s Siena Saints thrashed Kevin Stallings and the Vanderbilt Commodores. In that moment, two coaches stood on opposite sides of a March ambush, one the author and one the unfortunate recipient. In each of the past two seasons, McCaffery and Stallings — years removed from their clash in the NCAAs […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/9/2016
When any competitor reaches an elevated place, only to fall from that height and spend years trying to climb back up the mountain, frustration is the natural human response. Frustration has characterized much of the past several seasons for Pittsburgh basketball coach Jamie Dixon. Accordingly, Panther fans have not been terribly pleased with their leader. […]
8 Mar 1996: Tim Duncan of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons lays the ball up as Chris Alexander #30 of the Virginia Cavaliers looks on in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Mandatory Credit: Doug
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/8/2016
The ACC Tournament began Tuesday afternoon, accelerating the parade of conference tournaments. The flurry of conference tournament basketball will reach its crescendo on Thursday and Friday, arguably the two craziest weekdays of the entire season. The conference tournaments possess an uncertain identity in college basketball. In the ACC, the conference tournament is sacred — largely […]
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The First Four is about to have its moment. This year, near the end of a season defined largely by the inability of teams to separate themselves from the field, the idea of the First Four seems more relevant and needed than ever before. Plenty of people — myself included — would rather live in […]
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Monday, Bloody Monday. The Monmouth Hawks and the Valparaiso Crusaders, two teams with complicated mid-major resumes, could have reduced the size of the bubble had they won their respective conference tournaments. Given that the Wichita State Shockers failed to win the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament over the weekend, the bubble was already growing as March […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/7/2016
College basketball teams — not being as responsible as NBA teams — blow big leads all the time. Over the past week of zany conference tournament action, Austin Peay overcame a 19-point second-half deficit to win the Ohio Valley Tournament. Northern Iowa led Evansville by 17 in the second half of the Missouri Valley Tournament […]
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It is a question that’s impossible to ignore during this week on the American sports calendar: How much is a college basketball conference tournament championship worth? We’re not referring to the one-bid conferences here. It’s obvious that winning the SWAC or MEAC or Big West means everything to the schools involved. This is really a […]
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Human beings can always use a timely reminder about anything from relationships to job applications to family obligations, anything under the sun. This includes the NCAA tournament. The bubble race is its own separate drama — plenty has been written about that, and plenty will continue to be in the lead-up to Selection Sunday. However, […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Anyone ready for Championship Week? The big bracket is the one announced next Sunday on CBS, a little after 5:30 Eastern time. Before we arrive at that moment, however, we have a week filled with other bracketed tournaments, the conference collisions which will set the selections and seedings for the field of 68. The brackets for […]
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The Madness of March is delightful… but not 100 percent of the time. This is a great month, but precisely because it’s the one month when every American sports fan really cares about college basketball, March is a good time to study the landscape. This is when it’s important to reveal (or magnify) the excesses […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/6/2016
Roy Williams’s resplendent Hall of Fame career runs through some of the central veins of college basketball history. The sometimes-painful irony of that fact is that it’s all too close to the path carved out by his most famous predecessor and mentor, the late Dean Smith. Williams and North Carolina won another regular season ACC […]
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See the asterisk in the title of this piece? Words are attached to asterisks. In this case, the words are “not really.” No, the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks did NOT clinch an automatic bid to the 2016 NCAA Tournament on Saturday night in Huntsville, Texas. A decisive win over the Sam Houston State Bearkats lifted […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 3/5/2016
Billy Kennedy and the Texas A&M basketball program both share one fundamental trait on the final weekend of the 2016 regular season: They’re both healthier than they’ve been in years. Just a matter of weeks before he coached his first live game at Texas A&M in 2011, Billy Kennedy was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Kennedy was the […]
