The Daily Cinderella: Selection Sunday

Celebrating a successful run for 3 of our chosen Champ Week heroes and an Ethical Buzzer-Beater, but mourning another late-game tragic brainfart.

We’ve reached Selection Sunday, the end of the road for Champ Week… BUT ALSO THE BEGINNING OF A LARGER, EVEN BIGGER ROAD.

As soon as the brackets drop, I’m going to go into my Bracket Cave and produce my annual Upset Picks video. After successfully picking upsets every year from 2019 to 2023, I went ofer last year thanks to brutally bad foul call on my beloved Samford Bulldogs, but I’m still 4-for-16 all-time picking 13, 14, and 15-seeds, which I think is pretty good. I’ve spent most of the last 365 days lifting weights and watching videos of famous NCAA Tournament upsets to prepare to redeem myself. I’m hoping to get that video out tomorrow morning—I think I’ll probably blast that out to all of you, but I’d appreciate it if you subscribed to my Youtube channel as well.

I’m not going to drop a Daily Cinderella tomorrow morning, but I will have a 3 Sports You Missed update to keep everyone who subscribed for Olympic sports content and doesn’t care much about March Madness stuff happy.

Your Daily Cinderella: UC-San Diego

We did it!

Last week I wrote about three men’s teams who needed to make the NCAA Tournament OR I WOULD CRY. This was a weighty threat. It’s pretty upsetting to imagine me, a 34-year old man with a beard and glasses, breaking down in tears over a sporting event. It’s depressing. Even thinking about it is probably making you a little bit uncomfortable.

Luckily, all three teams got the memo. Perhaps they had team managers make AI mockups of me crying and distributed them to the team. Inspired, all three won their conference tournaments: UC-San Diego sealed our 100 percent record with a win over UC-Irvine in the Big West championship game:

On the one hand, I’m amped. I’m so glad I locked in on these three squads as My Teams. All of them faced serious threats in their conference tournaments—the Tritons trailed by nine early against Irvine, High Point and Drake both trailed by double-digits in their semifinals. Watching them was the perfect amount of nerve-wracking and thrilling, and I feel like I’ve already won March Madness with all three getting into the tourney.

On the other hand, I am alarmed by my immense power. What else should I threaten to cry about?

Buzzer-Beater of the Day: Akron zips past Miami

Let’s enjoy an Ethical Buzzer-Beater—not one of those moments where a single shot pushes the sub-.500 team past the one that steamrolled their conference, but a game-winner by the best player that sends the best team to the NCAA Tournament.

Miami (Ohio) went the hell off in the MAC championship game, shooting 15-for-from 3 and taking an 18-point lead. But they didn’t deserve the win. Akron battled all the way back, got a stop on Miami’s final possession, and quickly got the ball into the hands of Nate Johnson.

Akron went 17-1 this year. They deserved the bid. They were led by Johnson, the first player to win both MAC Player of the Year and MAC Defensive Player of the Year since Bonzi Wells. This was their championship to win—and when they ruin a much better team’s season with another buzzer-beater next week, I’ll cheer for them too.

Bummer-Beater of the Day: Fouling Up Zero

The climb began for South Carolina State in early February. After starting the season 9-12 and 3-3 in conference play, the Bulldogs won 11 in a row, tying for the best record in the MEAC and fighting all the way to the MEAC championship game, to the doorstep of an NCAA Tournament bid. The Bulldogs were driven by a singleminded focus on forcing opponent turnovers, ranking sixth in Division I in TO%.

The climb continued in the final minute of the MEAC championship game against Norfolk State, which they trailed by eight points with a minute to go. The Bulldogs hit a three to cut the lead to five. They forced a turnover, and hit a layup. After a made free throw by Norfolk, they forced another turnover, and hit another layup. The Spartans called timeout to avoid a third failed inbounds… and then committed another turnover, with SCSU’s Jayden Johnson, who batted the ball to senior Caleb McCarty, who laid the ball into the hoop to tie the game.

But when the ball was inbounded, McCarty chased down NSU’s Christian Ings and intentionally fouled him, apparently not realizing the basket he’d just scored had tied the game. (Like so many of the players whose heartbreaking performances we’ve highlighted in recent days, McCarty is a senior.)

To commit to rallying back from a big deficit with so little time remaining, SCSU had to forget the score—it’s hard to commit to the aggressive play required for the comeback when you know how slim the odds are. They just forgot to re-remember the score when they’d accomplished their goals.

Unbelievably, it’s the second time in two years this has happened—last year, Kent State lost the MAC championship game when they committed an intentional foul after taking the lead on Akron, probably even more upsetting than SC State fouling in a tie game. (My sincere apologies to any Kent State readers—I wrote about how bad your football team is, highlighted Akron’s win this year, highlighted Kent State’s loss last year… rough. Let’s get you guys to the tourney next year.)

However, you’ll notice that in the Kent State clip, four of the five players seemed to understand the situation and got back on defense. In the SC State clip, most of the players still seemed set on continuing the aggressive full-court press even with the score tied. It seems like some blame should fall on the coach, who had the opportunity to huddle up with his players seconds earlier, and apparently hadn’t told them to back off if they actually tied the game.

I’d also like to provide an additional bit of context. This was played at the Norfolk Scope, an arena built in the 1970s to host the ABA’s Virginia Squires. Old Dominion used to play home games there, but not in the last few decades. The building’s current tenant appears to be the Norfolk Admirals, a minor league hockey team. If you watched the game, you may have noticed the arena has four 3-point lines painted on the court, one of which is the old women’s college 3-point line, which hasn’t been used since 2021.

All this to say: if your building doesn’t have up-to-date 3-point arcs, it probably is not filled with cutting edge Jumbotrons and banners letting everybody know the score at all times. I found a floor-level clip filmed by a local Norfolk TV station to try to see where the players would have been able to see the score… and it looks like the scoreboard was directly behind a VIP hospitality section, incidentally, packed with Norfolk State fans, obscuring SCSU’s ability to see the score.

It’s easy to know the score when you’re watching on TV and it’s in a little box on the bottom of the screen. It’s almost harder when you’re in the middle of the climb. South Carolina State climbed all the way to the top of the mountain, so singularly focused on the climb, pushing all rational thought from their brains to lock in completely on their task. They didn’t even realize they’d reached the summit, churning their legs until they they tumbled down the other side.

Best losing effort: Katie Dinnebier

It’s hard to imagine an individual player deserving an NCAA Tournament spot more than Drake’s Katie Dinnebier. The senior has won back-to-back MVC Player of the Year awards, leads the nation in assists, and is sixth in scoring. (She was sorta overshadowed by another women’s hooper in Iowa the last couple of years.)

Drake needed to win the MVC to make the tournament, but fell behind by 15 points in the first quarter. That meant we were going to get 30 minutes of Buckets Mode Katie. She scored a career-high 45 points… and the Bulldogs lost, 96-90. (I truly can’t find any clips of the game online. This endeavor has taught me a lot about the availability of women’s basketball highlights.)

Believe it or not, this is not the highest-scoring conference tournament loss on record—once again, Iowa steals the spotlight, Megan Gustafson had 48 in a loss in the 2018 Big Ten tournament. (It would be a record on the men’s side—nobody has ever done better than Klay Thompson’s 43 in a Pac-10 tourney loss.)

Biggest Bracket-Buster: The Arena Roof

Conference championship week is a real boon for the second- and third-tier arenas of our nation. I’m not talking about NBA and NHL arenas, which are expensive and have busy schedules. I’m not even talking about G-League arenas, or impressive mid-major home venues. I’m talking about the civic centter in Johnson City, Tennessee. I’m talking about the place the minor league hockey team plays in Pensacola. I’m talking about the Norfolk Scope, and its barely visible scoreboard. I’m talking about the Orleans Arena, attached to the off-strip Orleans Casino in Vegas. (Two conferences booked that one.)

I’m guessing the priorities for a conference seeking a building go something like this:

• Located somewhere near the majority of our fanbases

• cheap

• 5,000-ish seats, probably not gonna need that many but makes it feel important

• facilities not so bad that coaches and ADs actively complain about it

• cheap

• city has hotels

• cheap

• roof???

If you’re in charge of one of these buildings, your year is filled with monster truck shows, one-hit wonder concert tours, and for one glorious week a year, a Division I conference championship, keeping your building prestigious and occupied for days at a time.

Which brings us to the C-USA championship at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The VBC was built all the way back in 1975, so long ago that nobody seemed to take issue with naming a building named an Actual Nazi. (Although it kinda seems like we have looped back around and ended up in another era when we’re gonna name stuff after Actual Nazis.) The building mainly serves as a minor league hockey venue.

Long story short, right as the CUSA championship game was about to tip, Jacksonville State’s head coach noticed water dripping onto the court. The building’s roof had popped a leak that would take nearly an hour to fix.

The solution? Arena staff just kinda suspended some tarps below the hole in the ceiling. (Shoutout to Thomas Ashworth, a Jacksonville State beat reporter at AL.com whose videos and images from Huntsville have now been in back-to-back Daily Cinderella entries. He’s probably the MVP of this column, behind the Oregon State women’s basketball team.)

Seeing the workaround by arena staff, I was struck with a wave of pathos, water leaking from my brain’s emotional roof. It’s probably their biggest week of the year, and when their building’s uncooperative roof threatened the whole thing, they climbed ladders and gangways hundreds of feet above the ground to execute the most makeshift solution possible. It reminded me that championship week (and the NCAA Tournament) would not be possible without hundreds of staffers at dozens of these venues. We salute you, maintenance staff of the forgotten arenas of America!

Unfortunately, their work meant the teams eventually able to play the game. Liberty won.