The Daily Cinderella: The Jackrabbits are our only hope

Rodger is not getting a lot of sleep and all the teams he likes are losing and his daily newsletters about the NCAA Tournament are getting increasingly distressing.

We are running a little bit dry over here.

Saturday was the end of the line for McNeese and Drake, the two remaining Cinderella-adjacent storylines on the men’s side. As is usual, everybody with an 11-seed or lower lost on the women’s side.

SO GUESS WHAT.

I AM 100 PERCENT IN ON…

…Your Daily Cinderella: The South Dakota State Jackrabbits

LET’S GO JACKS. THESE BUNNIES HAVE HOPS. IT’S RABBIT SEASON, BUT NOT IN THE “SHOOTING RABBITS” WAY.

PLEASE DO NOT READ MY POST ABOUT HOW MUCH I LOVE NORTH DAKOTA STATE FOOTBALL. YOU ARE OUR ONLY REMAINING HOPE.

10-seed SDSU trailed Oklahoma State by as much as 11 in the second half. Their gameplan to come back should’ve been simple. SDSU is 12th in the nation in 3-point percentage, and Oklahoma State has 6’6 Tenin Magassa, ninth in the nation in blocks per game. They needed to start shooting.

But this is no ordinary Cinderella. They’re 81-1 in Summit League play the last five years. They went to the Sweet 16 in 2019. They were ranked in the last AP Poll—24th, but ranked.

Instead, SDSU relied on their speed (typical Jackrabbit stuff) experience, and teamwork to attack Oklahoma State for layup after layup. They outrebounded the Cowgirls 47-23. They stormed all the way back without making a single three in the second half even though that’s one of their strengths, just winding and working and killing their opponent like they’ve done so many times before.

I’m sold. They can’t be stopped. You see the words “South Dakota State” and assume these are a bunch of small-school nobodies, but they’ve won more games and bigger games than just about anybody.

THE JACKS ARE GOING ALL THE WAY. THEY’RE THE TEAM OF DESTINY. THEY ARE GUARANTEED TO OBLITERATE THEIR NEXT OPPONENT, WHICH IS…

…

…

oh crap, it’s UConn.

Most effective destroyer of souls: The UConn Huskies

The women’s NCAA Tournament is mean. The gap between the best teams and the worst is oceanic, and gargantuan blowouts are not uncommon. In this tournament alone, there have been eight wins bigger than the biggest win on the men’s side (44 points.) In Duke’s first-round game, they forced 30 turnovers and allowed just 25 points against Lehigh, presumably while yelling WHERE’S C.J. MCCOLLUM NOW.

But nobody thrives on that meanness like the UConn Huskies, who have turned the first-round blowout into an art form. They hold the NCAA Tournament record for highest scoring win (140 in an 88-point win over St. Francis in 2018) and have five of the top 10 all-time biggest blowouts.

This year’s victim was Arkansas State. A feel-good story, the Red Wolves made the NCAA Tournament for the first time after upsetting undefeated James Madison in the Sun Belt final. The head coach, Destinee Rogers, is the sister of starter Wynter Rogers, making her the first ever Division I coach to coach her sibling.

And then UConn beat them 103-34. (Should’ve been 103-28, but the Red Wolves miraculously chucked in buzzer-beating logo threes at halftime and the final buzzer—the only buzzer-beaters of the NCAA Tournament, wasted on a team down 60.)

The Huskies ran a full-court press for large swaths of the game and kept shooting threes until the closing minutes. They kept whipping full-court passes over the heads of the discombobulated Red Wolves to streaking teammates for easy buckets. They scored as many points in the first quarter (34) as Arkansas State had in the whole game, and leading scorer Azzi Fudd was still outscoring the Red Wolves when she checked out of the game for the final time in the third quarter.

I don’t know what this says about me, but the UConn first-round obliteration is one of my favorite games of the NCAA Tournament every year. They cast aside reason and courtesy for 40 minutes to see how perfectly they can play basketball against an opponent offering no resistance. It’s beautiful and cruel, and I hope they do it every year.

Apologies to their opponents. I will attend your funerals.

Game of the Day: Cal-Pitino

College basketball is a sport where the coaches are more famous than the players, and a few years ago all the most famous coaches retired en masse. Saturday brought together two of the last remaining coaches that uncles and TV talking heads have opinions about: Rick Pitino and John Calipari, two guys born in the 1950s, exploring new basketball adventures in the 2020s.

Pitino is at St. John’s, successfully reigniting the program of his hometown after the 37th coaching scandal of his career made him persona non grata in the States and he had to work a couple of years in Greece, the college hoops version of Elba. Calipari is at Arkansas, trying to prove to Kentucky fans tired with his lack of success in recent years that they were the problem, not him. Both are old enough to get Social Security checks (we’re still doing those, for now) and having to buy elaborate suits in new color schemes.

Both were head coaches in the NBA in the 1990s, which explains Saturday’s game. Have you ever played Grand Theft Auto and parked a semi truck in the middle of a highway and watched all the AI-controlled cars slam into each other and catch on fire? This game was like that. The teams shot a combined 4-for-41 from three, bodies crashing and banging, the players seeing their life flashing in every loose ball. The teams shot a combined 4-for-41 from three. It was beautiful and horrifying.

Arkansas survived. Pitino had to bench the Big East player of the year, R.J. Luis, over his 3-for-17 shooting performanceDespite all their similarities (Italian, 70 years old, tailor on speed-dial, hated by large swaths of the state of Kentucky, does not know what a “3-pointer” is), Pitino and Calipari don’t particularly like each other. They shared a perfunctory handshake as the clock expired.

Personally, I find the focus on coaches to be grating. I think the players on the court and the way the games play out are more interesting than the millionaires on the sideline. But Saturday’s game between the Razorbacks and Red Storm was the best game of the tournament so far, and it had Cal and Pitino written all over it. It was a desperate, hideous game that only could’ve been coached by the last remaining faces of the old guard. In the likely scenario these two never meet again, I’ll remember this game, a throwback from two old-timers still chasing their version of basketball as they inch closer to the sunset.

Bummer-Beater of the Day: John Tonje

Again, no buzzer-beaters. Just misses.

Wisconsin trailed BYU by 11 with just two minutes to go, but John Tonje wasn’t just gonna let his career end. He scored eight of Wisconsin’s final ten points to make it a one-possession game, and of course, the Badgers put the ball in his hands as the clock wound down.

There’s a split second where it looks like Tonje has a step on his defender, BYU’s Mawot Mag, and his teammate has the help defender sealed off. But Tonje had been successful all night at baiting opponents into fouls, getting to the line 16 times, and instead of crashing hard to the rim, he pulls up with a pump fake…. but Mag didn’t bite. That left him stuck eight feet from the hoop. No angle, nobody open, with a taller, longer defender standing between him and the rim. There was nothing he could do but fling the ball aimlessly at the hoop. Instead of a game-tying Wisconsin bucket, we got BYU throwing down a celebratory post-buzzer slam at the other end of the court.

Tonje has had a remarkable career, even in the transfer era. His only Division I offers were his hometown school, Nebraska-Omaha, and Colorado State, where he began his career as a deep reserve player. He scored just five points in his first four games. He finished his career as the rock of an NCAA Tournament team. He scored 37 points Saturday night, the most of any player in the tournament so far, but it wasn’t enough to keep that remarkable career going.

Oh yeah, there’s other basketball happening: Dayton flies away

The Flyers were a 1-seed in the bracket, but couldn’t play the cirst game of the tournament at home because of the First Four. They beat Florida Atlantic, advancing to the second round… but couldn’t play that at home, because UD Arena also hosts the Ohio state high school basketball championships.

So they had to go to UT-Chattanooga. (That’s right. The second March Madness post I’ve written featuring the Chattanooga Mocs’ NIT run.) The Mocs beat Dayton by 15. Wondering what the homecourt atmosphere was like? Check out this screencap of Dayton coach Anthony Grant losing his mind at midcourt over a series of missed calls on Chattanooga, while a Mocs fan’s hand flies into the camera shot.

Amazingly, Dayton has had this exact same thing happen twice—in 2022, they were also a 1-seed in the NIT, and also had to play their second game on the road due to the state championships, and also had to go to Tennessee, and also lost, at Vanderbilt. They’ve had to play 11 consecutive NIT games away from their home venue: four because of the First Four, two at Madison Square Garden when they won the NIT championship in 2010, and two because of the OHSAA championships, and three because they were actually the lower-seeded team.

I love that the people of Dayton are hoopheads, but man, they need to love ball slightly less. They are so generous with their building that it has prevented them from building an NIT dynasty.