The Daily Cinderella, live from the Sweet 16

I got to cover the NCAA Tournament last night. Here's what I saw. (And also more coverage of the UT-Chattanooga Mocs' run through the NIT.)

Hey all, I got to cover the Sweet 16 games in Newark last night. That’s right folks: There currently exists an NCAA Tournament credential for Read Rodge, the newsletter with a stupid name you’re reading right now.

A brief on-the-scene report:

• The rumors that Duke has a lot of fans from New Jersey are true.

• I wasn’t surprised that BYU fans showed up in droves—they travel everywhere and this was their first Sweet 16 in 14 years. I was surprised to see an entire section of them sticking around for the entire second game, after BYU was eliminated, though—fans normally don’t do that! I suspect Broadway shows are gonna be packed with BYU fans this weekend.

• Admittedly, tough to tell between the BYU fans and the Duke fans. Both in terms of both schools wearing royal blue as their primary color (Duke’s is a bit darker, I think) and… uh… demographically.

I’m hoping to write something big and good on whichever team wins Saturday night’s game to go to the Final Four. But for now, your usual Daily Cinderella newsletter with an on-the-scene report on a record-setting BYU-Alabama game.

Buzzer-Beater of the Day: A big-screen game-winner

Arkansas led Texas Tech by as many as 16 points with just 10 minutes to go, but the Red Raiders closed the game on a furious run, hit a game-tying three to force overtime with ten seconds left, and won in overtime. The full highlights are available on Youtube, but I’m bringing you a slice of a premium sports-viewing experience.

If you ever go to an NCAA Tournament game, they will show live look-ins of the other NCAA Tournament games on the big screen. It's oddly one of the most fun parts of attending the tournament—15,000 fans, seconds removed from yelling at the refs and each other, staring up at the big screen, OOHing and AAHing in unison as they find out whether their brackets are busted. In Newark last night, they continued showing Arkansas-Texas Tech on the Jumbotron as media members packed up their laptops and stadium workers closed down the stadium. I hung out in the totally stands and watched overtime on the biggest screen possible when I really should’ve been sitting in Arizona’s post-game press conference so I could bring you this video of Darious Williams’ game-winner:

The majesty of Kevin Harlan booming through the speakers. The joy of my personal sports theater:

The play after Williams’ shot was Arkansas’ first real bitter taste of the Having John Calipari Be Your Head Coach Era—despite having a timeout, Cal’s best plan was to simply give the ball to DJ Wagner, letting him dribble until the clock was almost out, and miss a shot. But of course, Arkansas really should’ve won this in regulation… and I’m not just saying that in a “you were up 16 with 10 minutes left” way. The shot which sent the game into overtime was a well-contested, three from well behind the line by Williams, a 33 percent shooter who was 1-for-9 from beyond the arc on the night… and he swished it.

That’ll stick with you for a decade or three.

Performance of the night: 3333333333333333333333333

I got to watch the greatest 3-point shooting performance in NCAA Tournament history. Alabama shot 25-for-51 from three against BYU, breaking the NCAA record for 3-pointers in a game set in 1990 by Paul Westhead’s run-and-gun Loyola Marymount team. Mark Sears led the way with ten threes; the team only attempted 15 total shots from inside the 3-point arc.

My seats at the game were comically high, way up in the hockey press box above the stadium catwalks. After getting off a few jokes about oxygen deprivation, I realized I was actually totally able to tell the story of BYU-Alabama from my vantage point. The teeny-tiny dots hundreds of feet below me explained a matchup defined by x’s and o’s and spacing.

BYU’s Kevin Young and Alabama’s Nate Oats are stylistic comrades, both preferring the modernized, optimized NBA-style philosophy of threes, dunks, and spacing rather than the college world of zone defenses and motion offenses. Earlier this year, we wrote about how BYU has transformed itself under Young, a first-year college head coach who had spent his coaching career working up the coaching ranks before accepting the job at the school named after his great-great-great-great-granduncle.

“It's funny because I don't know a lot of college coaches,” said Young, “(Oats) is probably one of the few coaches I do know pretty well. He came to training camp with the Suns… we did talk a little bit leading up to the season just about the spacing.”

Young’s team is happy to launch threes, with 47.6 percent of their shots coming rom behind the arc. Unfortunately, they’re also happy to allow threes, with 46.2 percent of their opponents’ shots coming from behind the arc, 350th out of 364 college basketball teams. That was fine against average college teams, which don’t have the personnel or the vision to outshoot the Cougars.

Against Alabama though? A recipe for disaster. “BYU with their personnel, we knew that once they started going under, they always collapse,” said Oats. ”They got away with it against some teams that don't space like we do.” They knew what to expect, they knew how to handle it, and they knew how to hit shots.

Up in the rafters, I could see that Alabama’s dots streaking down the court and spreading into space, and I could see that BYU’s dots were unwilling and unable to handle that. No cheering in the press box, I know… but I couldn’t stop yelling GUARD THE SHOOTER!!!!! every time I saw an Alabama player spotting up without a Cougar in sight, like a moviegoer yelling DON’T GO IN THERE at a horror movie protagonist. And much like that moviegoer, the team couldn’t hear me and my requests were ignored.

Surely, tape of this game will be enough to convince every hardened college hoops coach to triple down on the old ways, doing whatever they can to ensure they never allow 25 threes in a game. That’s good news for the schools who can figure out how to play this way. As BYU stockpiles future pros, they’re hoping to be the team to hit 26 threes in an NCAA Tournament game.

Oh yeah, there’s other basketball happening too

OK, done with all that. Welcome back to Moc Drafts, the part of this newsletter where I once again write about the UT-Chattanooga Mocs run through the NIT. Our heroes overcame a 16-point deficit in the quarterfinals against Bradley, winning the game on back-to-back threes by Trey Bonham in the last minute.

Our Mocs hadn’t won a postseason tournament game since their 1997 Sweet 16 run—a combined 0-5 between the NCAA Tournament and the CIT—and now they’re going to Las Vegas for the NIT semis. It’s time for Honor and Bash to win the whole damn thing. (As you all know, the Mocs have players named Honor Huff and Bash Wieland.)