BY NICK FRIES
With every college basketball fan’s favorite time of the year officially over, it’s time to judge the performances of a few of this March’s big name teams.
The Good: Kentucky (Won championship) and Louisville (Lost in Final Four)
There’s no way Kentucky can’t be listed here. The Wildcats were dominant, winning every game by at least seven points. Sports fans have long speculated what it would look like to see a college team play an NBA team, and for a few minutes during the championship game, we got a good idea. Rumors of cheating aside, Coach Calipari put together one of the best teams in recent college basketball history.
Louisville didn’t overpower opponents by any stretch of the imagination, only beating the competition by a few points for a large part of the time. But the Cardinals get credit for turning their season around late. They dropped four out their final six games of the regular season, but came out strong in the Big East tournament and won the title. They then blew out Michigan State in the Sweet Sixteen and found themselves exceeding expectations before falling to UK in the Final Four.
The Bad: Duke (Lost in round of 64) and Missouri (Lost in round of 64)
Duke and Missouri both tie for this prize. Both teams were #2 seeds, and both teams fell in the first round to their #15 seeded opponents. Duke lost to Lehigh by five points, and Missouri fell to Norfolk State by two. These weren’t VCU Cinderella teams either: both Lehigh and Norfolk State got blown out in the round of 32. So Florida and Xavier have the two failures to thank for an easy path to the Sweet Sixteen.
The Ugly: Michigan State (Lost in the Sweet Sixteen)
It wasn’t a usual Michigan State team on the floor at the US Airways Center. State is known for its fight; it’s a scrappy team with a lot of heart. Tom Izzo, in fact, was the Big 10 Coach of the Year. But in the Sweet Sixteen, #4 Louisville exposed the #1 seed, leading to a blowout. The Spartans only lost by 13, but the score doesn’t tell the whole story. The nation watched a team simply give up in the final minutes, perhaps foreshadowed by MSU losing its final two games of the regular season to fall back into a tie for the Big 10 Championship.