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Day 2 of the 2023 NCAA Tournament
As Friday turned into Saturday, I must admit that I wished the late games were blowouts so I could just go to bed. The promise of exciting finishes kept Mrs Notes and I awake and we were rewarded with a couple good ones.
Arizona State looked like it was cruising to an upset when TCU stormed back and made of game of it. Both teams hit clutch shots down the stretch, with TCU coming away with the victory.
The rumbling about Penny Hardaway's coaching ability will undoubtedly crescendo after Memphis lost to Florida Atlantic (yet another Owls). A 9 beating an 8 is barely an upset and this was a gritty back and forth contest. But it's one more example of the futility of the Hardaway era (which just ended year five).
FAU's Nicholas Boyd drove the lane and nailed a floater to secure the victory, the first NCAA tourney win ever for the surprising large (30,000 students) state college in Boca Raton.
The exciting finish to FAU-Memphis is why I am bleary-eyed this morning.
TCU-ASU also had a fun ending.
The contingent from 14 seed Grand Canyon University arrived in Denver. Well, most of it. Team? Check. Cheerleaders? Check? Band? Yep. Cheerleader and band gear. Uh huh. Team gear and uniforms? Needle scratch. The airline lost their uniforms, practice gear, everything.
Baylor is also playing in Denver. Baylor is coached by Scott Drew, whereas younger brother Bryce Drew helms GCU. Baylor loaned Grand Canyon a set of practice gear - otherwise it was t-shirts and cargo shorts.
A new set of uniforms arrived well before the Friday tipoff.
Grand Canyon lost to Gonzaga by 12. Mrs Notes approves of their team colors.
Fairleigh Dickinson!!!!!
Sorry to brag, but I sorta called this one. My first post of the day focused on Purdue coach Matt Painter and his outdated style of play. It was on full display today. Statuesque big men nailed to the post clogging up driving lanes is so 2008.
Purdue's Zach Edey got his - 21 and 15. But Edey and the rest of the Boilermakers had a distinct deer in the headlights vibe down the stretch. FDU, the shortest team in the tourney, just kept coming. Relentless on both end of the floor. FDU's front line goes 6'6", 6'4" but they harrassed Edey every time he touched the ball. Two of their guards are under 5'9", but they are quick. The Knights had no fear. They earned one of the two biggest upsets in tourney history.
When I mentioned that Princeton was one of two Jersey teams in the tourney, how many of you knew that Fairleigh Dickinson was the other?
FDU is located in Teaneck, NJ, a couple miles from the George Washington Bridge. It is named after an early benefactor, Fairleigh S. Dickinson, the founder of Becton Dickinson (now a gigantic medical device company). Founded in 1942 as a junior college, they soon became a four-year college to take advantage of the GI bill. In 1956, Fairleigh Dickinson became a university and moved to a new campus. The new FDU bought the Twombly-Vanderbilt estate, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (of Central Park fame).
The top famous alumus was described as a model and murderer (Playboy and the murder story is too sad to repeat). Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell also went there.
Peggy Noonan graduated from FDU. Current WSJ columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, I disagree with almost everything she says. However, among many others, she wrote the speech that Reagan gave after the Challenger explosion. Saying that the astronauts "slipped the surly bonds of earth ... and touched the face of God" is pretty good stuff.
The Twombly-Vanderbilt mansion is the centerpiece of the FDU Florham Campus.
That breeze you just felt is the collective sigh of relief coming from the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky. After four freaking years, we finally won a tourney game.
Oscar was a beast. 25 freaking rebounds. That just doesn't happen.
Our former player, Bryce Hopkins, didn't have a great game. 7 points, 8 boards. The guy Hopkins couldn't beat out, Jacob Toppin (brother of Obie), had 18 and 6. They shared a heartfelt hug at the end, which was nice to see.
A pretty poorly played game on both sides (both teams scored in the low 20s in the second) but I'll take the win.
Iona led UConn 39-37 at the half. They had to shoot almost 70% to do it. That couldn't last.
UConn's Adama Sanogo took over in the second stanza. He finished with 28 points and 13 boards. UConn outscored Iona by 26 in the second half.
Bill Murray reacts when Sanogo improbably hit a 3-pointer. Murray's son Luke is an assistant at UConn.
The Gaels were on a collision course in the second round. The 5 seed Saint Mary's Gaels did their part, taking out VCU. The Iona Gaels got Sanogoed in the first round. A Gael is a member of the Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Iona is an island on the western coast of Scotland known for Iona Abbey. So that tracks. But Saint Mary? I'm pretty sure she didn't speak Gaelic. Actually, they were called the Gaels because there were so many Irish guys on the team in the 1920s. The person who named them was Grantland Rice, one of the first great American sportswriters.
Iona University is in New Rochelle, NJ (home of Rob and Laura Petrie).
Saint Mary's College is in Moraga, CA (which is home to many Olympic swimmers including Matt Biondi).
Iona Abbey.
Rob and Laura Petrie
An upset (finally)
Hey, that’s Jeff Capel! He’s looking a little looser on the Pitt sideline than back in his buttoned-up Duke days. His 11th seed Panthers suffocated Iowa State today, holding the Iowa State Cyclones (great mascot) to 18 points in the second half. After coaching stops at Oklahoma and VCU, Capel has been at Pitt for five years, four of them not so great. His team went 23-11 this year and Capel was named the ACC coach of the year.
Pitt's Jeff Capel
Marquette took care of Vermont easily. Vermont are the Catamounts, which means cat of the mountains. Catamounts, the largest of the "small cats", are native throughout the Americas. This vast range has led to many names for this critter, whose scientific name is Puma concolor. In fact, according to Guinness, Puma concolor holds the record for the animal with the most names. These include puma, cougar, panther and mountain lion.
I did a Google image search on cougar and this came up for some reason.
Cal Santa Barbara led Baylor by a point at the half. The Gauchos (great mascot) ended losing by 18. Their thoughts have probably already turned to surfing.
The cost of living in Santa Barabara is so high that some students are forced to live in their cars.
The upset that wasn't
Who says you can’t go home again? Sean Miller established himself as a coach to be reconned with at Xavier. Sean Miller then established himself as a coach who cheats at Arizona. I won’t rehash the whole scandal, but basically several adidas schools got in NCAA trouble for paying players during the recruiting process. This eventually led to dozens of Arizona wins getting vacated and Miller fired (ditto Pitino at Louisville, another adidas school). I have to admit, the amounts of money seem quaint in 2023. $5,000? The athlete with the most lucrative NIL deal is LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne. She also is a social media star with over 6 million TikTok followers. Dunne’s NIL deal with American Eagle, etc. is worth well over a million bucks a year. Nonetheless, paying players back in 2017 was not allowed. The investigation dragged on and on but the axe finally came down in 2021 costing Miller his job.
Xavier was clearly keeping an eye on the situation in Arizona. After four seasons as Xavier coach, Travis Steele had failed to impress, not even coming close to getting an invitation to the big Dance. Xavier fired Steele in March 2022 and rehired Sean Miller three days later. The Musketeers had a solid season, finishing 26-9 and second in the Big East.
Xavier's Sean Miller. His brother is Archie Miller, former Indiana coach and current coach of Rhode Island.
LSU's Olivia Dunne.
Kennesaw State University, a public school in the Atlanta suburbs established as a junior college in 1963, should have been a good matchup for Xavier. KSU coach Amir Abdur-Rahim likes to play zone defense. The easiest way to beat a zone is to shoot over it. Xavier was #2 in the country in 3-point percentage this season at almost 40% a game. Today, Xavier was 2-12 from deep. Not surprisingly, Xavier found themselves down 13 with 10 minutes to go. The KSU Owls (several owls in this tournament) played relentless 2-3 and (occasionally) 1-3-1 zones. Then they ran out of gas. Which was surprising since KSU played 11 guys, whereas Xavier basically only played 6. KSU’s bench outscored Xavier’s 19-1.
Starting at about the 10-minute mark, Xavier went on a15-0 run to lead by a bucket as the game headed down the stretch. After missing 9 shots in a row, the Owls finally hit a couple free throws to tie the game with 3:46 to go. 8 minutes without a field goal.
The ending was tense and strange. Xavier players got into a heated verbal altercation. With each other. Both teams blew layups with seconds remaining. Xavier 7-footer Jack Nunge came up with a huge block in the lane with time expiring to save the game and their season. Xavier’s Jerome Hunter scored a career best 24.
Two good coaches in this game. Amir Abdur-Rahim is going places. His first season at KSU in 2019, his team went 1-28. This year they were 23-8 and Abdur-Rahim was named the ASUN coach of the year.
Amir Abdur-Rahim has 12 siblings. His brother is Sharif Abdur-Rahim, who played 13 seasons in the NBA and won a gold medal on the USA Olympic basketball team in 2000 in Sydney.
Kennesaw State has campuses in Kennesaw and Marietta, Georgia.
Cool logo.
Adapt or Die
Purdue prefers their big men to be huge – in recent years they have consistently had guys 7’2” feet or more on the roster. Matt Harms, at 7’3”, was the tallest player ever in the Big 10. When Harms transferred to BYU, coach Matt Painter found an even taller replacement: 7’4”, 305-pound Canadian Zach Edey, who is now a junior. Edey grew up dreaming of playing in the NHL, not the NBA. It wasn’t his height that ended his hockey career; it was the fact that they couldn’t find skates for his size 20 feet. Not surprisingly, Purdue runs plays through the post more than virtually any team in the country.
Purdue may be an extreme example, but the Big 10 refuses to join the 21st century in terms of style of play. Literally. The last NCAA title from the Big 10 was Michigan State in 2000. The Big 10 still prefers its big men to be gigantic plodding monsters and its guards willing to get the ball to them resigned to the fact that the post may as well be a massive void from which the ball will never return. Purdue also seems to think that Indiana is a hotbed for hoops talent. Four of this team’s starters are Hoosiers (the fifth, of course, is Edey) and 10 of their 16 players hail from Indiana. Sorry, Jimmy Chitwood is not walking through that door. Purdue coach Matt Painter also eschews transfers, another staple of the NIL era. Painter doesn’t get one-and-done players because they don’t want to play his style (Edey was barely ranked coming out of high school). Painter rationalizes this by saying he prefers 4-year players anyway (Top prospect D.J. Wagner? “I wouldn’t take him.” Remember that when Wagner is leading my Cats to the Final Four next year).
I’ve got nothing against Zach Edey, a quiet kid who is a fantastic college player. But, just like Oscar Tshiebwe and Drew Timme, there’s no place for him in today’s NBA. And my bet is that Purdue’s anachronistic offense will lead to yet another early exit in this year’s tourney.
Edey played hockey and also baseball growing up in Toronto. He didn't take up basketball until 2018, when he had reached 7'2".
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