The Daily Cinderella, Day 5: A Tar Heel Tragedy

Let’s talk about the best AND ABSOLUTE WORST things that happened in college basketball with two days to Selection Sunday.

Today is one of my favorite days on the sports calendar: Championship Saturday, the day before Selection Sunday when basically every league wraps up their tournaments. (A few look-at-me leagues have championships on Sunday, forcing the committee to wait on them.)

We’ve got 21 conference championship games—12 men’s games, 9 women’s—including about 15 or 16 which are true in-or-out games where one team gets an NCAA Tournament bid and the other stays home. The first has already tipped off by the time this hits your inbox; the last will start at about 11:30 p.m. Eastern.

Let’s talk about the best AND ABSOLUTE WORST things that happened yesterday.

Horrifying March moment that I will not be able to stop thinking about for the rest of my life: The Lane Violation

How do you live with a game-losing lane violation? You can cope with missing a shot. What about when you lose on a dream-crushing technicality you could have avoided by simply Being Normal?

UNC’s situation entering Friday was clear: After a disappointing season in which the Tar Heels had lost basically every matchup against a quality opponent, UNC was riiiiiight on the bubble… and their next opponent was Duke, the team they hate the most and the #1 team in the country. (They’d be without Cooper Flagg… but still #1, and still Duke.) A win and they’d surely be in, a loss and they’d likely be out.

The Tar Heels fell behind by 24, but rallied all the way back. Trailing by one point with five seconds, UNC’s Ven-Allen Lubin was fouled, and went to the line to win the game. He missed the first, and now he was only at the line to tie the game. He hit the second… but his teammate Jae’lyn Withers committed a completely unnecessary lane violation, wiping the made shot off the board, dooming UNC to defeat and popping their tournament bubble.

Withers, a 6-foot-9 power forward, had subbed into the game specifically for his rebounding talent in case of a miss. He had one job, and was so focused on it that he didn’t even give his teammate, a 67 percent shooter, a chance to make that job irrelevant.

Normally, lane violations are on the defense. If you’re on the shooting team, why would you invalidate the high chance your guy makes the shot to give yourself a slightly better chance at a board (when you already have inferior rebounding position) in the unlikely scenario your guy misses?

But of course, explaining how bad and dumb this was is pointless. Withers knows that. He knew it from the second his foot touched paint. It’s like pouring salt into your coffee instead of the sugar—you immediately go whoops! that was dumb, and I could have easily avoided it!, except millions of people were watching and will remember him for it for the rest of his life.

Just a couple of days ago, Withers had drilled seven threes against Cal to push UNC a game closer to the tournament. Now the fifth-year senior appeared outside of UNC’s locker room for a media session arm-in-arm with head coach Hubert Davis, literally leaning on his coach for support as he tried to explain the unexplainable, a career-defining brainfart.

I’d rather lose on a billion buzzer-beaters.

Buzzer-Beater of the Day: UCSD

OK, total vibe shift required. Here’s UC-San Diego knocking off top-seeded Hawai’i in the Big West women’s semifinals on a layup with .1 seconds remaining by all-conference point guard Sumayah Sugapong.

You know I hate to see the Rainbow Wahine losing like this, but I guess we’re all in on both the men’s and women’s UCSD Tritons now. Both sets of Tritons are now a game away from their first NCAA Tournaments.

Bummer-Beater of the Day: MTSU

RIP to the Middle Tennessee Bartleby the Scriveners, who trailed Jacksonville State by two points in the closing moments in the C-USA semifinals, but preferred not to take a shot.

Jax State took the lead on a pair of free throws with 22 seconds left, and if you look at the play-by-play, the next entry after those free throws is “end of game.”

(The clip shared by the conference here only captures the last couple of seconds—this courtside video by a Jacksonville State beat writer really summarizes the futility of a 22-second possession without a shot.)

After watching this tragedy of indifference, I couldn’t help but wonder: How many games end like this? What percentage of one-possession games end with the trailing team simply letting the clock expire—no shot, no steal, no foul, no loose ball, just a team dribbling until the clock hits zeroes? I’m guessing most possessions which fit that definition start with like three seconds on the game clock and end with a desperate shot attempt juuuuuuuuust after the buzzer. MTSU had 22 seconds to try something, anything, and did not seem particularly close to getting a shot up when time ran out.

The two players who had the ball on this possession, Jlynn Counter and Justin Bufford, are both seniors. Soon all they’ll have is time, and all they’ll spend a lot of it thinking about the final shot they didn’t take.

Mid-Major Hero of the Day: Harvard Harmoni

The biggest bubble game of the day came in the Ivy League women’s semifinals. ESPN’s Charlie Creme had Harvard and Princeton as the last two teams in the NCAA Tournament field in his bracketology update, and they were playing each other. The winner was likely in, the loser was likely out.

And the winner seemed likely to be Princeton. The Tigers have won five consecutive Ivy tournaments, and had beaten Harvard twice this season. The Tigers were coasting early, and took a 13 point-lead in the third quarter.

But Harvard star Harmoni Turner had one of the best season-on-the-brink performances you’ll ever see. She scored a school record 44 points and rallying the Crimson back from the brink. Turner drilled seven threes and outscored her teammates in a 70-67 win. (No highlights available, but you can watch the full game, for some reason!)

The scoring record Turner broke is her own, from a 41-point performance in a win over Boston College in November. Turner ranked as a 5-star prospect in high school and chose to go to Harvard, a team best known for the lone 16-over-1 victory in women’s tournament history against Stanford in 1998.) The Crimson couldn’t break through in her first three years, but as a senior, she’s singlehandedly powering the Crimson to their first NCAA Tournament bid since 2008. The Crimson are 23-4 with four wins over power conference opponents, and Turner leads the team in scoring, assists, rebounds and steals… and is actually second in turnovers, believe it or not.

The championship game against Columbia is today, but no matter what happens, it seems like Harmoni has Harvard dancing.