Could there really be one more twist?
In this, the most delightfully bizarre NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament anyone can remember, where to become the favorite has been an accursed chalice, where your best hope for a solid bracket was the old blindfold-and-point method, might we see one final head-shaker to cap it all off?
“One more,” San Diego State’s top scorer Matt Bradley, whose team takes on UConn with the ultimate prize at stake, told reporters. “When you keep winning these games you just want one more, one more, one more. That’s been the mentality for us.”
There has been every kind of upset imaginable since March 16, all the way from 15 and 16-seeds surging, to the top lines tumbling en masse. Monday sees the potential for well, one more, for rarely is a betting line such as 7.5 seen in a contest of this magnitude.
That’s how dominant No. 4 UConn has been, from the beginning of the tournament to now. It also serves as an indicator that mid-majors who defy history by going far (the last mid-major national champ was UNLV in 1990) still have to deal with a dash of disrespect from gamblers and spread-setters alike.
With the Huskies, head coach Dan Hurley has a gilt-edged juggernaut on his hands, a 30-8 squad that had virtually all its losses in a strange little clump in January and has otherwise been mostly imperious.
Behind Adama Sanogo’s big-man brilliance, Hurley’s men are a worthy favorite, and while numbers and precedent have been no help to anybody trying to pick a winner in the 2023 tournament, here you go anyway.
These are a pair of stats that have been trotted out a lot but bear repeating. Only five teams in NCAA Tournament history have had double-digit wins in each of their first five tournament games. And, since expansion in 1985, only four teams have enjoyed a margin of victory greater than UConn’s average of 20.6 up to this point.
Unsurprisingly, momentum has favored those dominant squads of the past. This year, as the top lines tumbled, UConn began to look mighty, quietly so through the tumult of the first weekend, then with resounding noise in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, perhaps highlighted by a thorough trouncing of Gonzaga. On Saturday, as San Diego State needed a dramatic buzzer-beater from Lamont Butler to see off Florida Atlantic, UConn swatted aside Miami by a comfortable 13 points.
The easy narrative is to paint San Diego State as the “little program that could,” but that’s failing to give proper credit in some ways. The team’s defense has been formidable for a decade, through different iterations and generations, and is the calling card of the squad.
The Aztecs have their city behind them and a subplot of frequent discussion – given all the flux in the realignment game and its geographical spot – is how a national title in basketball might make the university even more potentially appetizing to the Pac-12 or the Big 12.
The city of San Diego turned out in all ways this past weekend, best summed up by the Padres’ crowd at Petco Park going bananas when Butler’s bucket dropped.
On Monday night, the biggest factor for this San Diego State team is that they are so senior heavy, seven players, including influential guard Darrion Trammell, in the nine-man rotation. They’ve seen a lot. This is a challenge beyond all others, but it won’t faze them.
The Aztecs will play suffocating defense from start to finish, and you don’t need a degree in astrophysics to figure out that they will try to pressure the heck out of Sanogo and take their chances that some other hand doesn’t get too hot to handle.
“We’re going to play defense like our lives depend on it,” Trammell said.
The Aztecs will hope their experience and leadership can prevent a similar UConn outburst to the one that opened up their semifinal, and see where things go from there.
It has been a strange type of tournament and a title game with a difference to match. A No. 4 vs. a No. 5, the kind of matchup that passes without much notice in the second round, when things are still new and possibilities appear boundless.
Instead, it is for all the marbles, which is why everyone is scrambling to make sense of it all. Including, in a sweet little tale, Aztecs head coach Brian Dutcher’s 89-year-old father Jim, whose flight from Minneapolis to Houston got canceled ahead of Saturday’s game and was still trying – early Monday – to make it to Texas to see his son coach.
A nerve-wracking experience indeed, but hey, this year, in this tournament, fortunes can change quickly. Even now perhaps, with so many twists already inked. And, who knows, maybe one more to come?
