March Madness is now over and it all went by in One Shining Moment. There was excitement, disappointment, celebration, letdowns, and champions crowned. However, one thing there wasn’t much of was upsets.
On the men’s side, all four #1 seeds made it to the Final Four for the first time since 2008, which was the only other instance in tournament history that it had happened. On the women’s side, the Final Four was made up of three #1 seeds along with a #2 seeded UConn team that beat the other number one seed USC in the Elite Eight. Other than #10 seed Arkansas making it to the Sweet Sixteen on the men’s side, there are not many upsets to report as everything else was essentially chalked, and the top seeds advanced.
Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, along with the UConn team, finally got their long-awaited championship together and brought the glory back to the storied franchise that Head Coach Geno Auriemma has built over the years. The UConn Huskies won their 12th NCAA National Championship under Auriemma, the most in men’s or women’s college basketball history.
They beat the South Carolina Gamecocks 82-57 and Azzi Fudd won the Most Outstanding Player award of the Final Four after scoring 19 and 24 in the Final Four and Championship game, respectively. The Huskies also had help from star freshman Sarah Strong, who scored the most points in an NCAA tournament by a freshman, along with Kaitlyn Chen, a key transfer from Princeton.
On the other side, Walter Clayton Jr. and the Florida Gators won their first National Championship since 2006 and 2007 in a thriller, beating the Houston Cougars 65-63 with Clayton winning Most Outstanding Player in the tournament. He scored 34 in the Final Four but had a lackluster 11-point performance in the championship game, but still made the right plays when it mattered, most importantly guarding the potential game-winner and causing a turnover in the closing seconds.
As the Gators have been saying throughout this tournament, “Gator Boys stay hot.” Clayton got help from Will Richard, who scored 18, and Alex Condon, who added 12, and most importantly, Albert and Alberta, the school mascots, who hyped the team up every step of the way.
The Iowa teams had a tournament to forget and did not perform up to many expectations. The Iowa Hawkeye women had made the national championship in the previous two years and looked to make another run this year, adding Lucy Olsen. However, those dreams were ruined in the second round of 32 in the tournament, where the #6 seed Hawkeyes fell to the #3 seeded Oklahoma Sooners.
Audi Crooks and the Iowa State Cyclone women came in looking to make some noise as an underrated #11 seed but fell to the #6 seeded Michigan Wolverines in the first round. The Drake Bulldog women, sadly, did not get an invitation to the Madness.
The #11 seed Drake Bulldog men came into the tournament searching to become the next Cinderella story and give us the upsets we wanted. They started the tournament with the upset of #6 seeded Missouri but lost to #3 seed Texas Tech in the second round of the tournament.
The #3 seed Iowa State Cyclone men came in without one of their key star players in Keshon Gilbert, announcing he would be out for the rest of the tournament. Despite this, the Cyclones made it out of the first round but got upset in the second round by #6 seeded Ole Miss.
The Iowa Hawkeye men missed out on the Madness after a lackluster season and let go of Head Coach Kirk Ferentz but added former Drake Head Coach Ben McCollum. Hopefully, next March Madness, these Iowa teams will have more success and make deeper runs in the tournament.
My predictions from my first March Madness article stood pretty strong until Duke’s heartbreaking loss to Houston in the Final Four. The Duke Blue Devils beat my other pick, Alabama, in the Elite Eight and were looking very good throughout the tournament, winning by an average of 23.5 points through four games leading into the Final Four. They held a lead of 64-55 on Houston with about 2 minutes to go in the game. It looked as though all roads lead to Duke playing in the National Championship game for the first time since 2015, the last time they won it all. However, Houston did not think the same.
The Cougars went on a 15-3 run to end the game and had one of the greatest comebacks not only in the Final Four but in the history of the tournament and beat Duke 70-67 to advance to the Championship game and later lost to the eventual champion Florida Gators. This was a top 10 saddest moment I have witnessed in my life, with Cooper Flagg losing his hopes and dreams of winning an NCAA Championship with a gut-wrenching loss and everything going wrong in the final minutes of the Final Four game.
On a better note, the UConn Huskies and Paige Bueckers did end up winning on the women’s side, and she got her long-awaited championship after an injury-riddled journey but got the storybook ending she had always dreamed of. Now she moves on to the next “Paige” of her book, the WNBA Draft, as she is projected to be the number one pick.
The UConn team ended up beating my second pick of USC in the Elite Eight after JuJu Watkins tore her ACL in the second round, the same injury that Paige dealt with and forced her to miss an entire season. Best of wishes to JuJu — I know she will come back better than ever just as Paige did in her journey.
There were many ups and downs in the March Madness tournament this year, and my personal brackets did pretty well but also faced these ups and downs. My issue in previous years has been not predicting the correct Cinderella teams to make a deep run and not picking enough upsets.
This year, I made an emphasis on that and ended up picking too many upsets that didn’t happen, but I still turned in a decent bracket. I picked Florida, Duke, Michigan State, and Tennessee in the Final Four on the men’s side, and every team made at least the Elite Eight, and on the women’s side, I had UCLA, South Carolina, UConn, and Texas in the Final Four which was the true Final Four!
I hope one year I or someone else in the world can do the unthinkable and pick a perfect bracket. The NCAA bracketology experts say there is about 1 in 9.2 quintillion odds to pick a perfect bracket by just guessing and about a 1 in 120.2 billion odds to pick a perfect bracket if you know “a little something” about basketball. It is bound to happen at some point in the future and there have been some close calls recently, creating some hope.
I will be waiting for next March when this whole thing happens again, and I get to make another bracket in hopes of a perfect 63/63 games predicted correctly and watch some more Madness with hopefully more excitement and the return of the upsets.
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