ncaa-tournament-2019 Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Auburn Flushed North Carolina Down The Toilet With Frightening Ease
There was only one word that came to mind while watching Auburn destroy and befuddle North Carolina in the Sweet Sixteen tonight: aggression. Everything Bruce Pearl’s Tigers did was proactive, all their drives were more decisive, and any hesitancy from the Tar Heels was gleefully pounced upon. They ...

Colgate Rented Ohio State's Pep Band For Its NCAA Tournament Game, Pissed Off Its Own Pep Band
The Colgate Raiders men’s basketball team made its third-ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament after winning the Patriot League’s automatic bid by winning the conference tournament over Bucknell. The Raiders were given the 15-seed in the NCAA’s South Region, where they fought gamely but ultimately ...

Virginia's Suffocating Defense Finally Joined The Party
What can you do in five minutes and 43 seconds? Plenty of things, from clipping your nails to heating and eating a Hot Pocket, but if you were Oregon’s men’s basketball team on Thursday, the one you could not do was score a field goal. That’s because the vaunted Virginia defense finally demonstrate...

Texas Tech Drained Michigan Of Its Will To Live
Texas Tech sucked the life out of Michigan in the most brutal of ways on Thursday night, riding adequate offense and criminally exasperating defense to a 63-44 win and a trip to the Elite Eight. For all 40 minutes, the two-seeded Wolverines didn’t look like they even belonged on the same court as th...

Purdue Sneaks Past Tennessee In Overtime After Ryan Cline Goes Supernova<em></em>
After three straight years of getting dumped out of the NCAA Tournament in the Sweet Sixteen, Purdue is finally going to the Elite Eight. They seemed headed for a breezy win over Tennessee for the bulk of their game tonight, but a wild Tennessee comeback probably should have been enough to steal the...

Rick Barnes, What
Purdue and Tennessee are playing overtime in a genuinely fantastic, insane college basketball game. Lots of threes, lots of clutch plays, lots—lots—of missed free throws. Purdue’s Carsen Edwards knocked down a pair of late freebies to tie it up for Purdue, which left Tennessee to inbound the ball u...

How To Beat Duke
Duke is technically 31-5 so far on the year. But everyone knows that 60 percent of those losses don’t count. The top-seeded Blue Devils are a completely different and much worse team without Zion Williamson, and when he’s in the lineup, they’re 28-2, with zero losses since Jan. 14. That’s a really ...

Brandon Clarke's Numbers Shouldn't Be Possible
It’s something like an understatement to say that junior big man Brandon Clarke went off against Baylor during Gonzaga’s second-round 83-71 win on Saturday. He did go off, though, and was the single biggest reason the Zags cruised into the Sweet 16. Clarke blew away all other scorers with 36 points ...

UC Irvine Coach Says He Called Oregon's Louis King "Queen" To Rattle Him But Also Because Of Chess?
UC Irvine head coach Russell Turner gave a peek behind his coaching strategy after the Anteaters’ 73-54 loss to Oregon in Sunday’s second-round game, and he inadvertently revealed that he’s as creative as a Facebook denizen who loves sports meme pages and calls the Dallas Cowboys the “Cowgirls.”...

Ah Jeez, The Video Of UCF's Locker Room After Losing To Duke Is Heartbreaking
UCF was so, so close to upsetting Duke in Sunday’s second-round game, but the Knights fell, 77-76, and were instantly, visibly crushed by how they lost. (As Aubrey Dawkins’s putback attempt rimmed out and time expired, you can see Terrell Allen, No. 2, put his hands on his head as he falls to the fl...

UCF Could Not Have Come Any Closer To Upsetting Duke
The UCF Knights gave the Duke Blue Devils way more of a fight than anyone dared hope they could, but ultimately they came just short of what would have been a bonkers second-round upset. Riding a 32-point performance from Zion Williamson, Duke escaped to the Sweet 16 with a 77-76 win....

Coby White Makes North Carolina's Offense Beautiful
There may be no better match of team style and player than 2019's North Carolina squad and freshman point guard Coby White. The normally pretty fast Tar Heels made the jump into warp speed this season, averaging more possessions per game than any other tournament team, and both superficially and pr...

Asia Durr Did It All For Louisville
Top-seeded Louisville beat Michigan without a whole lot of stress, winning 71-50 in their second-round matchup with the Wolverines to go to their third Sweet 16 in a row. The Cardinals got to relax in large part thanks to the stellar play of high-scoring senior guard Asia Durr, who as usual had an ...

Upset Of The Day: Gardner-Webb Toppled By Team No One Believed In
The Virginia Cavaliers proved today that truly, anything is possible during March Madness, as head coach Tony Bennett’s crew upset powerhouse Gardner-Webb for a 71-56 victory in the first round....

UC Irvine Anteaters Snack On Kansas State Wildcats In Upset
After a pretty chalk first day of the NCAA Tournament, the 13-seeded UC Irvine Anteaters picked up the biggest upset of the competition so far, knocking off co-Big 12 champs Kansas State in a 70-64 win....

Iowa's Luka Garza Has Extremely Powerful Eyebrows
The portion of the nation that doesn’t pay attention to Big Ten basketball outside of March was introduced to the voluminous eyebrows of Iowa forward Luka Garza in today’s game against Cincinnati, and boy, are they glorious. You can’t coach brows like that....

Tom Izzo Flips Out On Aaron Henry, Has To Be Held Back By Players
No. 2 seed Michigan State hasn’t looked great so far in their first tournament game against Bradley. The Spartans trailed at halftime, but were able to re-established some control over the game with a 10-0 run at the start of the second half. That positive stretch wasn’t good enough to save freshman...

Fletcher Magee's Shooting Remade Wofford. How Far Can It Take Them?
At first glance, the Wofford Terriers seem like a very specific type of college basketball team. Even if you only watch college basketball in March, you know the one: the biggest fish in a mid-major pond, a styles-make-fights oddball match-up challenge for a major program, maybe even an underdog tha...

The Hater's Guide To March Madness
The NCAA Tournament is what you make of it. So is everything else, obviously, but while the tournament is objectively just what it is—a sloppy whirlwind fortnight of stressed-out teenagers just absolutely freaking the fuck out while playing the most important basketball games of their lives—it is al...

How Big A Threat Is Saint Mary's?
Ignore the seedings. According to the analytics, one of the most evenly matched games of the NCAA Tournament’s first round isn’t an 8-9 or 7-10 match-up, but the battle between Villanova, the sixth seed in the South Region, and 11th-seeded Saint Mary’s. Kenpom, which rates Villanova as 26th in the c...