Final Four newcomers: Grab your name tag at the door
Everyone’s heard of UConn. All these other guys? They’ll needname tags at the Final Four.
When they travel to Houston next week to play for the nationaltitle, Florida Atlantic, San Diego State and Miami will be makingtheir first appearances at college basketball’s grand finale, thefirst time since 1970 that three first-timers all showed up in thesame year.
If the unfamiliar names — to say nothing of the seedings — areany indication, fans might look back on 2022-23 as the season whentrue parity finally sunk down deep into the bones of America’sfavorite basketball tournament and turned March Madness into atotal free-for-all, all the way to the last weekend.
There will be no No. 1 seed at the Final Four for the first timesince 2011. Instead, there will be a 9 seed in Florida Atlantic, apair of 5 seeds in SDSU and Miami, and a 4 seed in UConn. Thecombined seed total of the four teams is 23, the second-highesttotal since the seeding began in 1979. This marks the first timethat not a single top-3 seed made it.
The matchups for Saturday: San Diego State against FAU, in anot-so-classic 5-vs-9 matchup. (San Diego State, a 57-56 winnerover Creighton on Sunday, is a 1.5-point favorite, according toFanDuel Sportsbook.) Who saw that coming?
In the later game, it’s the Hurricanes as 5 1/2-point underdogsagainst UConn, which is the prohibitive favorite, at minus-135, tobring a fifth national title home.
If UConn does win, it will join Kentucky, North Carolina andKansas as the fourth school to win the championship under three ormore coaches. Dan Hurley would join Jim Calhoun and Kevin Ollie inthe winner’s circle for the Huskies.
In the past, some of the upheaval in the brackets could havebeen pinned on the single-elimination format and the tournamentselection committee, which sometimes overvalues its top seeds —this year, that included first-round loser Purdue and seven-lossdefending-champion Kansas — while clearly underrating others.
No team got undervalued more than UConn (29-8), which had 25wins coming in, a No. 8 standing in the NET rankings — which looksat quality wins among other factors — and the still-developingpotential of junior Adama Sanogo, who has averaged 20 points andjust a touch under 10 rebounds in four tournament games.
But all the other factors upending college sports — namely, NILdeals and the transfer portal — played a role here, too.
Heading into the Elite Eight, Miami coach Jim Larrañaga — whobrought George Mason to the Final Four as an 11 seed 17 years ago —said the portal was the basketball equivalent of speed dating.Worked for him. The third- and fourth-leading scorers for theHurricanes (29-7), Nijel Pack and Norchad Omier, both came to The Ufrom the portal.
Also down in South Florida, FAU got three key players, including7-foot-1 Russian center Vladislav Goldin, from elsewhere. All movedto the campus in Boca Raton after less-than-successful stays atbig-conference schools. No one was quite sure how coach Dusty Maywould blend all these new faces from different places. Turns out,he did pretty well. At 35-3, nobody has more wins this season thanthe Owls.
“We already had a good chemistry last year, and the pieces thatwe added just complemented everything we had going on,” said BryanGreenlee, in his second year at FAU after coming over fromMinnesota.
A longtime power in the Mountain West Conference, San DiegoState was 30-2 and projected for a No. 1 seed in 2020 when theseason was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Three years later, the Aztecs (31-6) are two wins away from thetitle. Their top two scorers, Matt Bradley and Darrion Trammell,are — you guessed it — products of the transfer portal, thoughcoach Brian Dutcher brought them in as much for defense as scoring.SDSU made it this far behind a defense that held top-seeded Alabamato 32% shooting in the Sweet 16 and held Creighton to 11% from3-point range in Sunday’s win.
Asked what to expect from the Aztecs in Houston next week,Dutcher said, “I would think pretty good defense, to startwith.”
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