2022 NCAA Basketball Discussion Thread

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Another ACC surprise, as Florida State knocks off Notre Dame 73-72 for their first conference win.

It may not seem like it, but Louisville is still an ACC team and Florida State already won that game.

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Another ACC surprise, as Florida State knocks off Notre Dame 73-72 for their first conference win.

It may not seem like it, but Louisville is still an ACC team and Florida State already won that game.

Are you sure Louisville is an ACC Team? They've been playing like they're back in Conference USA.

No, Louisville was winning in Conference USA.

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I hope Calipari goes to Texas so that we can get the outcome that everyone wants, Rick Pitino coming home to Lexington.

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Is Mark Few a fraud who was riding Tommy Lloyd's coattails all along? Many people are asking this.

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I was in Moraga to watch Gonzaga and Saint Mary's last night. I've been a fan of the WCC for a long time. Most of the time nobody has been good enough to consistently challenge Gonzaga in Spokane, so the game of the year every year has been Gonzaga's trip to Moraga. It's a big game because normally this determines whether the Gaels will make the tournament (except in 2016, when Saint Mary's beat Gonzaga both home and away and was denied a tournament bid anyway). This year that's not an issue, because Saint Mary's is a genuinely great team, top ten in all the computer rankings, and they were favored in this one. I'd never been to a game at Saint Mary's before, so I felt like I had to be at this one or I'd regret it for a long time. I had great seats, although I had to pay through the nose to get them.



As you can see from the picture, this is a tiny venue. There are at least ten high school gyms in Indiana that have twice the capacity. On one side there are seats, but the side I was on was all benches: the student section (visible in the foreground) in the lower half, and general admission (where I was) in the upper half. I got there very early and had my choice of location, so I ended up right around midcourt in the second row from the bottom in the general admission section.

Because half of the arena has no actual seats, there's no hard limit to how many people can be in the stands. The announced attendance was a nice round 3,500, which is conveniently the same as the listed capacity. Saint Mary's is known for overselling games and there's just no way there were only 3,500 people present. On the general admission side, everyone had to stand because otherwise it was impossible to see over the students (who were also standing) and because with all the people present there wasn't any space to sit down anyway. The only time all game that I was able to sit was during halftime when people were out in the concourse.

Putting so many people in such a small space meant that the game was both extremely hot (hence the constant condensation on the floor) and incredibly loud. Even when it got quiet it was still loud, and when the Gaels did something to get the crowd going the noise was such that I had a hard time hearing myself think. I can't imagine having to come into that environment and play a basketball game.

The game itself was great, one of the best of the year. Gonzaga took the lead early, opening it up to double digits in the first half, and led by eight at the half. Saint Mary's brought the game within three six minutes into the second half, but Gonzaga opened it back up again, and with seven minutes to play Gonzaga was up by eight. At that point, the Gaels' best offensive player, freshman Aidan Mahaney, was 1-for-10 with two points. Over the rest of the game, he was 7-for-9 with sixteen points, with the crowd getting louder and louder with each basket as Saint Mary's completely erased the lead and pulled away in overtime to win by eight.

I came away from the game with a lot more respect for Drew Timme. Before he had Corey Kispert and Jalen Suggs and Chet Holmgren, but now he’s the only guy opponents care about. The woman next to me was very excitedly telling me about how she had two daughters who went to St. Mary’s and were on the dance team right up until tipoff, when she exclaimed to me "I just hate that Timme!" I think he’s probably the most famous player in college basketball right now and every opponent has the Gonzaga game circled on the calendar and all the fans hate Gonzaga (there was a loud "[inks] Gonzaga" chant at one point) and everyone is keyed in on him and he just keeps doing his thing.

Mahaney was the story people were talking about, but the best player on the Gaels was center Mitchell Saxen, who played Drew Timme basically to a draw. The way Saint Mary's won was particularly impressive to me. With thirty seconds left in regulation I looked at the scoreboard and saw that Gonzaga had only made two three-pointers, which I had noticed, but also that they had only three assists for the whole game. They play at a glacial pace and it’s just impossible to move the ball around against them. It makes you think of a different Bennett! I think this victory was important, even if it was at home, because they beat a very good team even as they were ice cold from the field. It’s a lot less likely for the defense to slump in the tournament. As long as they don’t turn the ball over on offense (and they don’t turn it over a ton) they’ll keep winning. I hope that they can make a deep run in March.

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I have a spreadsheet that takes the rankings from kenpom.com, assigns an autobid to the highest-ranked team from each conference, fills out the at-large spots by efficiency ranking, and then seeds a bracket by efficiency ranking. It's not meant to replicate an actual bracket for multiple reasons, one being that the bracket isn't set this way and another being that it ignores all the rules against same-conference matchups, but I think it's interesting to look at. Through last night's play, this is what it spits out:

1 Houston vs. 16 Grambling St./SIU Edwardsville
8 Iowa vs. 9 Miami FL
4 Maryland vs. 13 Dayton
5 Virginia vs. 12 Kent St.
2 Saint Mary's vs. 15 Youngstown St.
7 TCU vs. 10 Kentucky
3 Texas vs. 14 UC Irvine
6 Illinois vs. 11 Mississippi St.

1 Alabama vs. 16 Texas A&M Corpus Chris/Wagner
8 Michigan St. vs. 9 Texas A&M
4 Iowa St. vs. 13 Sam Houston St.
5 Auburn vs. 12 Charleston
2 Kansas vs. 15 Colgate
7 Kansas St. vs. 10 Utah St.
3 Baylor vs. 14 Furman
6 Arkansas vs. 11 Duke

1 UCLA vs. 16 Norfolk St.
8 Providence vs. 9 North Carolina
4 Gonzaga vs. 13 Yale
5 San Diego St. vs. 12 Oral Roberts
2 Purdue vs. 15 Montana St.
7 Rutgers vs. 10 Florida Atlantic
3 Arizona vs. 14 Marshall
6 Xavier vs. 11 N.C. State/Florida

1 Tennessee vs. 16 Longwood
8 Oklahoma St. vs. 9 Nevada
4 Marquette vs. 13 Iona
5 Indiana vs. 12 Liberty
2 Connecticut vs. 15 Vermont
7 Boise St. vs. 10 Memphis
3 Creighton vs. 14 Drake
6 West Virginia vs. 11 Oregon/Northwestern

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Nebraska is my least favorite team in the country this year. Instead of playing defense, the Huskers opt to make no plays on the ball and just stand still in hopes of provoking a collision with a player on the other team actually trying to do something, and this tends to work because college officials love calling offensive fouls more than anything in the world.

I don't recall Fred Hoiberg practicing this sort of anti-basketball with his teams at Iowa State, but it's unbearable now. It'll be awful when this team beats Maryland tomorrow.

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Still, Georgia Tech has a long way to climb before it is competitive in the ACC, and one good coaching hire won't change that.

It's the ACC, you don't have to be any good to be competitive there. Any good hire would obviously make Georgia Tech competitive.

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It's frustrating that the NCAA doesn't really care about women's basketball, as shown by the way that South Carolina, like Connecticut in the past, gets the predetermined advantage years in advance of not having to leave its state at any point before the Final Four. This was my favorite Maryland team of the last decade, and after the great year they had they got the death penalty of having to play South Carolina on the road while a whole bunch of far worse teams got far easier paths.

In spite of that, Maryland came out playing great and jumped out to a six-point lead after the first quarter, so Dawn Staley had a conversation with the officials. Maryland's two best players, Diamond Miller and Shyanne Sellers, promptly picked up two fouls each and had to sit. That wasn't enough, because Abby Meyers decided that she would play the game of her life for Maryland in the final game of her college career. Of course she was promptly assigned two fouls, too. Early in the third quarter, she got two more fouls on the same defensive possession; both were bad calls but the latter was truly remarkable, the moment I realized that Maryland couldn't possibly win. With about seven minutes left in the fourth, Maryland having earlier in the quarter narrowed the deficit to six points, Abby Meyers absorbed contact while playing defense with her feet clearly set and clearly outside of the restricted area. Doesn't matter, five fouls, you're out, that's it for your career.

Before I turned the game off with a few minutes left, South Carolina had fouled four times in the whole second half. This is remarkable if you know the style of South Carolina's play. It's inconceivable if you saw the defense that South Carolina was playing yesterday. Normally the price of playing extremely aggressive physical defense is picking up a bunch of fouls, but not if you're the team foreordained to win and you're playing at home.

South Carolina is a great team and this could have been a great game if Maryland had been able to play in it. Nobody cares because ESPN is already hyping up the forthcoming matchup between Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark (the only two players whose name anyone ever says, with the possible exception of Angel Reese), but Maryland head coach Brenda Frese is going hard on the retweets today, as well she should. I don't know how she was able to make it through the game without getting tossed.

I was in Minneapolis for the Final Four last year; the event was fun but the basketball was not. Last year the foremost practitioners of anti-basketball in the Final Four were South Carolina and Stanford; this year Stanford is gone, but we have a worthy replacement in terms of turning games into unwatchable garbage. My prediction for the championship game is South Carolina 28, Louisiana State 11.

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Naturally, one game after South Carolina gets to play football, they actually have fouls called against them for the first time this season. The reason this happened is because the powers that care be more about Caitlin Clark than about South Carolina, and the reason for that is that Caitlin Clark, like every media darling in women's college basketball, is white. On Monday South Carolina wasn't facing the great white hope and so they won easily. If Iowa started five black players instead of five white players, South Carolina would have won by twenty.