The Daily Cinderella: A daily roundup of March Madness Minutiae

Including the buzzer-beater of the day and granny-style free throws.

Hey all, great news: I’m going to be doing daily newsletters about college basketball for the foreseeable future It’s going to be just like what I did for the Olympics: I’m going to spend an ungodly amount of time streaming sports every day, write a couple thousand words about it, and you’re going to subscribe and get it in your inbox. Sound good?

The Daily Cinderella: Wofford and Kyler Filewich

Last week, Ken Pomeroy gave the 6-seeded Wofford Terriers a 13.1 percent chance of winning the Southern Conference tournament and securing an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. That’s low—but higher than the chances of Wofford’s super-senior center, Kyler Filewich, hitting two free throws in a row. Although Kyler leads the SoCon in rebounding and field goal percentage, the big boy shoots 31.8 percent from the line. That means the odds of him hitting both shots on a trip to the line are about 10.1 percent. (Yeah, that’s right—I can also do math, Kenpom!)

Filewich has adopted the underhanded free throw style universally known as “granny-style”, even though there is no evidence that it is preferred by grandmothers. Well, Filewich must be the world’s new burliest grandma, surpassing Edna “The Big Boomer” Brigsdale, a 76-year old lumberjill from Duluth, Minnesota. The theory behind the underhanded free throw is that the delicate delivery softens the impact with the rim, allowing shots which would otherwise clang off cold iron to lightly tumble into the rim. Anyway, our big boy Kyler, hucking the ball off the backboard like a drunk trebuchet.

After going a combined 0-for-14 from the line over a three game span in late January, Filewich realized he needed to do something. ““That’s when coaches told me, it’s worth a shot for the last month of your career,” Filewich told the Myrtle Beach Sun News in an article about how Hall of Famer Rick Barry even flew in to work with Filewich for a day on his form. (In case you’re wondering how busy Rick Barry is these days: He’s willing to fly to Spartanburg, South Carolina, presumably at his own expense, likely involving multiple connecting flights, to help a random mid-major basketball player work on his shot.)

While underhanded free throws are often prescribed as a panacea for bricking bigs like Shaq and Dwight Howard… it’s also possible to suck at shooting underhanded free throws. Filewich is just 18-for-51 since switching on February 5th, a dismal 35.3 percent. In the first two rounds of the SoCon tournament, Filewich was 2-for-10.

It really looked like Filewich’s bricklaying might cost his team a shot at the NCAA Tournament. Last night’s championship game with Furman was a barnburner, tight until the end, with both teams catching fire from deep. Filewich started the game 1-for-5 from the line, and Wofford trailed by as much as six in the second half.

But with five minutes Filewich stepped to the line and hit both free throws—his first time hitting two shots back to back in a month. The crowd erupted as our Brick King ran down the court with a massive smile on his face.

Was Filewich’s 3-for-7 shooting night the difference? No—Wofford won because they shot 14-for-28 from three. But to me, this is what March Madness is all about: Players and teams making weird, inadvisable basketball decisions, kinda sucking, and somehow getting everything to click and creating a moment for the world to marvel at. We’ll be rooting for Kyler to go 2-for-13 from the line in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, with those two makes coming to seal the upset over some 3-seed whose players are dumb enough to shoot the ball normally.

Buzzer beater of the day: Oregon State

Oregon State has hit back-to-back game-winners to reach the WCC championship game. On Sunday, Kelsey Rees turned a busted play into a buzzer-beater to beat San Francisco in the quarters. And in Monday’s semis against top-seeded Gonzaga, Kennedie Shuler ran into a wall of Gonzaga defenders but put a shot in off the glass anyway to win the game. Sorry, I couldn’t find any embeddable videos—here’s a video of beavers. (Really underrated mammals. Cute, unique, diligent, cornerstones of the ecosystem, 10/10.)

Oregon State women’s basketball made magic last March, fighting all the way to the Elite Eight—and then immediately exploding alongside the Pac-12 conference. You can see former Beavs sprinkled around the country, leading some of the best teams in the country: USC’s Talia Van Oelhoffen and UCLA’s Timea Gardiner were on opposite sides of the thrilling Big Ten championship game on Sunday; Raegan Beers was all-SEC first team for Oklahoma; Donovyn Hunter helped TCU go from last place to a Big 12 championship.

But the remaining Beavs are building a new dam entirely out of buzzer-beaters. When they beat Portland today with a third straight buzzer-beater, they’ll be in the NCAA Tournament.

Bummer beater of the day: LIU

Reaching back into my backlog of March moments to something I saw on Saturday. Long Island University has had a remarkable turnaround under Rod Strickland—YES, THAT ROD STRICKLAND–going from 3-26 two years ago to a 12-4 record in conference play this year. (There’s hope for Doug Gottlieb!)

The Sharks were hosting the conference semifinal on Saturday in Brooklyn and the game was tied in the final seconds. After an end-to-end sequence that saw LIU miss two shots and hustle back in transition, freshman center Shadrak Lasu fouled St. Francis’ Juan Crawford on a three. Before Crawford could even step to the line, Lasu collapsed on the floor in tears.

This screencap doesn’t quite capture the gutting nature of the moment: Right after this shot, Lasu crumbled all the way to the floor in the middle of the huddle where cameras couldn’t catch him, and needed to be helped to his feet and off the court by teammates and coaches. SFU hit all three shots, and will play for the conference title against Central Connecticut.

I wanted to spotlight the moment not to be cruel to Lasu, who’s got a bright future after leading the NEC in rebounds as a freshman. It just serves as a reminder about What March Means. This was a semifinal in a small conference in a tiny gym that I wouldn’t have noticed without an ESPN Plus subscription and a boring Saturday afternoon, and it meant the whole world to the guys on the court. And while March is filled with buzzer-beaters and special stories, basically every team in the sport ends its season with a loss.

Never Made The Tournament Heroes of the Day: The March of the Penguins

There are teams that have never made the NCAA Tournament… and then there are teams that have never even gotten to their league’s conference championship game, which they’d need to play in and win to reach the NCAA Tournament. These are the Bruno Caboclos of college basketball—permanently one game away from being one game away.

Until this week, Youngstown State seemed stuck in Cabocloville. In 2023, they finished first in the Horizon League for the first time ever… and lost their conference semifinal. Last year, with a starting lineup composed of five seniors, they finished second in the league. Still, they lost in the quarters. Head coach Jerrod Calhoun accepted the futility of Penguin-dom and got the hell out of there, accepting a job at Utah State.

But YSU has beaten Northern Kentucky and Cleveland State to reach the Horizon League title game. Again, no embeddable video, so here’s a video of penguins.

The Penguins play Robert Morris tonight for the title. A win puts them in the tournament. A loss, and congrats: You’ve unlocked that new type of depression that comes from getting close and failing to achieve your goals. Hard to have that when you lose before the finals!

A Good Idea That Totally Backfired: The Gauntlets

In recent years, we’ve seen widespread adoption of THE GAUNTLET, a bracket format which gives the best teams in one-bid leagues the best chance of making the NCAA Tournament. It works like this: The two best teams in the leagues get auto-byes into the semifinals while everybody else has to play their way up a long, long ladder to get there. (Nobody has done a bracket where the best team gets an auto-bye into the conference championship game… yet.) Here’s the Sun Belt women’s bracket, which gave James Madison and Arkansas State a sextuple bye into the semis.

It makes sense. Since the conference makes money and earns prestige the farther its teams go in the NCAA Tournament, it has a vested interest in sending its best teams. Clearly, the Sun Belt’s best team this year was JMU, which went 18-0 and ranked 59 spots higher than anybody else in the league in Bart Torvik’s rankings. Why let them lose early?

But it didn’t work. Arkansas State beat JMU 86-79 in overtime of the championship matchup yesterday to secure the school’s first NCAA Tournament bid:

The Dukes are now one of the first four out in ESPN’s bracketology despite literally winning every game in conference play. I’m hoping the Dukes make it in, but it’s going to be tight. (The Gauntlet also failed in the men’s Sun Belt tournament, as #1 and #2 seeds South Alabama and JMU both lost their semifinals… but they’d finished the season in a 4-way tie for first with Arkansas State and Troy, so it hardly feels like an injustice.)

The originator of The Gauntlet is surely the WCC, which adopted the format as early as 2003 to protect Gonzaga in the men’s tournament. The gambit worked on the men’s side for the WCC, but it doesn’t really need it anymore—both Saint Mary’s and Gonzaga are tourney locks. But on the women’s side, top-seeded Gonzaga lost to Oregon State, as we already wrote about.

The Gauntlet fails because it is an insult to the Gods of March. I understand what these leagues are trying to do—but it is hopeless. It’s like Oedipus’ father casting his baby to die the countryside, hoping to defeat the prophecy that his son would murder him and take his throne, only to be slain by a boy running away from the place he thought was home. The Fates fill out their bracket, and the rest of us watch.