The Daily Cinderella, Tournament Edition: WE'RE UNDERWAY
March Madness minutiae, in your inbox, every day.
Hey all, it’s time for The Daily Cinderella: TOURNAMENT EDITION. I’m going to be posting after every day with men’s or women’s NCAA Tournament games. I’m also gonna try to sprinkle in some moments from the rest of the college basketball world here. I’ll be keeping an eye on the NIT, the WNIT, the WBIT (which is more legit than the WNIT, it’s a long story), the CBI, the CIT, and whatever the hell the College Basketball Crown is. Subscribe below to get this post in your inbox every day Tournament games are played:
TBH, the first day of the tournament wasn’t a thriller—no buzzer-beaters, no upsets bigger than a 5-12, and only a handful of solid memes. You thought that was going to stop me from writing about, like, seven awesome things I saw? You must be new here. You just passed the subscribe button, though, so you hopefully won’t be new here for long.
Your Daily Cinderella: Drake
The stars of the Division II NCAA men’s basketball tournament have are now the stars of the Division I NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Drake, whose team more or less entirely consists of players and coaches from the Northwest Missouri State Bearcats program which won three straight D-II titles between 2019 and 2022, beat Missouri by 10 after dunking all over them:
The Bulldog-Bearcats led by as much as 15. Although Mizzou cut the lead to one in the second half, Drake played like they’d been there before—and they had, time and time again, in Division II. While Mizzou was missing the tournament the last few years, their not-quite neighbors up near Nebraska were going on deep runs every March. It’s possible the best team in the state was not even a member of Division I.
I identified Drake as one of my favorite teams in March Madness a few weeks ago. My former colleague Steven Ruiz at The Ringer wrote about how Drake assembled their team and why it works. But probably the biggest reason is that they have Bennett Stirtz, the 6’4 wizard who looks more like an NBA Draft pick than a kid who no coach called. Stirtz was a wizard on Thursday, scoring 21 points on 11 shots, including a one-footed 3-pointer that seemed like a whimsical flourish until it swished through the hoop:
The biggest reason I love this tournament is because it stands as an irrefutable counter-argument to the idea only the biggest, richest leagues matter. It’s an egalitarian event that doesn’t care where you’re from or how big your school is, as long as you’re winning when the final buzzer sounds. Some conferences have TV networks dedicated to proclaiming that they have a monopoly on talent and success, but we don’t have to listen anymore when Teeny Tiny Tech gets more buckets than Blue Blood U.
The Bulldog-Bearcats put a new twist on that. Not only were they a team from the Missouri Valley Conference beating up on the SEC, most of the team’s players were overlooked by the entirety of Division I basketball. Their success hints at layers of talent that even this far-reaching tournament, a completionist’s fantasy open to every team from every conference, has ignored.
It’s a win for Drake. (Rare these days.) It’s a win for Northwest Missouri State. And it’s a win for everybody playing in the lower levels of any sport, trying to tell anyone who will listen that the best players at their level are actually pretty good, daydreaming about what would happen if they ever got a shot at the top tier.
A series of screenshots they can never take from us
St. John’s, 30, Nebraska-Omaha, 28
Auburn 32, Alabama State, 31
UNC-Wilmington 48, Texas Tech, 47
All three teams lost by double digits—Omaha by 30, Alabama State by 20, Wilmington by 10. But screenshots live forever.
Surprise hero of March Madness: Will Wade
Will Wade coached the hell out of McNeese’s win over Clemson. The Tigers probably had a pretty good idea what to expect out of their first-round opponent after watching tape of dominant win after dominant win in the Southland Conference. Then Wade came out in a matchup zone they hadn’t played all year.
Clemson looked flummoxed. Just no clue what to do. Standing, passing, bricking. Soon, it was 40-16, and famed Clemson mascot The Cocaine Tiger looked for the first time ever like his high had run out.
“We’re junking the game up,” Wade said in a sideline interview. “The junk is working.” McNeese took a 40-16 lead—freakin’ forty to sixteen—which was big enough to hold down the stretch in a 67-65 win, an all-time Deceptive Scoreboard game.
Completely failing to overshadow McNeese’s win is the fact that Wade is almost certainly headed to be the next coach at NC State. (The last time I talked about McNeese, I linked to a report that said Wade had already declined the NC State job—that appears to be very false. I am not plugged in and only linking to other people. Please be mad at their reports if they are false.) It does not exactly seem like Wade is checked out—he was sprinting up into the crowd to personally hug every McNeese person in the building and screamed GO POOOKES while the McNeese band boomed his personal theme song, Gangster’s Paradise. A perfect March moment.
In the old model of college athletics—you know, the one where Wade got fired for trying to give a talented basketball player money, the thing everybody agrees is OK and good just a few years later—a coach leaving a small school after an NCAA Tournament run was just another example of how players were squeezed for their talent while others got rich. A coach would convince a kid to play for some school you’ve never heard of, they’d win a bunch of games together, and then the coach would go off to make a few million dollars while his players were stuck behind playing for some other guy. Everybody knew it was shameful, but what was the coach gonna do—not take the payday?
Now, the whole thing seems a bit fairer for everybody. I liked Matt Norlander’s column about how Wade is being the rarest thing in college sports—competely, totally honest. The media knows he’s leaving, the fans know he’s leaving, the players know he’s leaving—he’s been up front about where he sees them playing next year. Good! That lets every stakeholder here make the right decisions for themselves. Some of Wade’s players are playing hard for him because they expect to join him at NC State (or wherever is next.) Others are playing hard because they’re trying to audition for their next coach.
And it also gives everybody a sense that what’s happening now is important. Time is running out here. If these players and coaches half-ass these precious days because they’ve got sour grapes about what comes next, this special moment will end even sooner. Wade seems legitimately overjoyed to be bringing unprecedented success to the school which allowed him to revive his career.
The future is always going to come eventually, sometimes much faster than we want it too. Trying to ignore that inevitability is an easy way to get hurt. But if you focus on making the present truly special, March can last a lifetime.
Bummer-Beater of the Day: A Tragic Triton Trey Try
As UC-San Diego roared back against Michigan, they found a play to exploit the Wolverine’s unmatchable size. They got the ball in the hands of 6’5 Tyler McGhie, who led the team in 3-point makes this year, and worked a switch to get the less-mobile of Michigan’s two 7-footers, Danny Wolf, on him. McGhie faded back and to the left, drilling a three over Wolf to tie the game.
Trailing by three in the final seconds, the Tritons went for it again. Although they had 19 seconds and probably could’ve extended the game to two or even three possessions, they knew the look they wanted and knew they could get it.
They worked the switch again. They got Wolf on McGhie. He faded back and to the left. It was a good shot… just long.
And thus ended the longest active winning streak in college basketball, the best season in UC-San Diego’s history, and a Cinderella run that never started. Sometimes things work until they don’t.
What was that???? Georgia
Georgia got pantsed by Gonzaga, which was actually pretty useful, because they had their pants on wrong.
The Bulldogs took a 27-3 lead on the Bulldogs, a scoreline which had the double effect of reminding Georgia fans about football, a sport where their team is actually good, but also maybe reminding Georgia fans about the Atlanta Falcons.
I could’ve skipped over this, but unfortunately, the whole thing was convenient to my #1 take—that the NCAA overvalues mediocrity in big conferences while ignoring excellence in small ones. Georgia went 8-10 in SEC play (including a stretch of nine losses in 11 games) before losing in the first round of the SEC Tournament. This performance was not only good enough to make the tournament field, but with room to spare—they were a 9-seed! Gonzaga was ranked 7th IN THE NATION Ken Pomeroy’s rankings and was an 8-seed IN THEIR OWN BRACKET. Guess who got their ass kicked?
There’s Other Basketball basketball too: A NIT Epic
Middle Tennessee, last seen not attempting a shot on their final possession of their conference tournament, had plenty of chances to redeem themselves in t UT-Chattanooga. But the Mocs won, 109-103… in three overtimes. That’s almost an extra half!
Trying to find out whether this was the longest NIT game ever was actually a bit of a journey. You can search for pretty much anything in the Sports-Reference database, but they obviously don’t have a function to help you search specifically for NIT statistics, because why would they. I was able to search for triple OT games by date, which allowed me to see that Louisiana-Monroe and Texas Southern played a triple OT game on March 28th a few years ago, but that was actually a CIT game.
My next stop was the official NIT website, but the NIT is actually run by the NCAA, which has bigger fish to fry right now, so the section of the NCAA website dedicated to the NIT is pretty barebones and doesn’t seem to have an official record book. I did find a record book from 2017, which indicates that triple OT is, in fact, the longest game in NIT history. It hadn’t happened since 2000, back when the tournament had more of an air of prestige—that game had Georgetown and Indiana in it.
Really all of the NIT is extra basketball. The teams have already been eliminated from national championship contention, and the event has lost its luster with power conference teams declining bids and TV networks launching new events. And that means this game was The Most Extra Basketball of All Time. And for that, I salute MTSU and UTC. That’s exactly what I’m looking for in this column.