College basketball fans were getting familiar with UConn-Duke, at least as a postseason rivalry. The programs had met in a regional final in 1990, won by Duke at the buzzer. They played in the 1999 NCAA final, when UConn won a great championship battle. The 2004 UConn-Duke game provided another memorable chapter.
The 2001 Duke basketball team was on a mission–to claim the third national title for head coach Mike Krzyzewski and give him, and their program, a unique place in college basketball history.
The Arizona Wildcats had been knocking on the door of a national championship for at least ten years, under the building of Lute Olson, one of the great architects in college basketball history when it came to building a program from the ground up.
Kentucky and UMass were not only ranked 1-2 in the country, but either one or the other had been ranked #1 in the country for all but three weeks in December and they held the top two spots from Christmas forward. Ironically, given his future in Lexington, it was John Calipari who was coaching UMass as they were in their fifth year of national prominence.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. The 2008 NCAA Tournament was the coming-out-party for three future NBA stars. We look back at how all three dominated their regionals and were honored with the Most Outstanding Player Award.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. This article focuses on the 1996 UMass basketball team of John Calipari and Marcus Camby that after several years of knocking on the Final Four door, finally beat it down.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. This article focuses on the 1989 Illinois basketball team, who produced the school’s first Final Four run in nearly forty years.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. 1986 saw one of the great moments in LSU basketball history, as the Tigers became the lowest-seeded team to reach the Final Four and took out three straight national powers in the process.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. The 2003 Marquette Golden Eagles made the Final Four and returned their program to the national stage. It was also the coming out party for a future star in Dwayne Wade.
The 1979 NCAA Tournament has a special place in college basketball lore. The championship game, featuring Michigan State and Magic Johnson against Indiana State and Larry Bird remains the highest-rated NCAA final to date and is rightly seen as a watershed moment for basketball at both the college & NBA level. But the 1979 NCAA Tournament deserves to be remembered for something else—the beginning of a phenomena that continues today and it’s the gutted bracket.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. This article commemorates 2007 Ohio State Buckeyes basketball. They changed the game with a dynamic recruiting class, played some epic NCAA Tournament games and came up one win short of a title.
The four days of NCAA Tournament basketball ahead don’t have the whirlwind quality that last week’s first and second-round games did. For the most part, true Cinderellas have gone by the boards—only Ohio really fits the quality this year. Otherwise, 7th-seeded Florida or 10th-seeded Xavier have to pass for America’s miracle team. And on the other extreme, this isn’t a weekend about settling a championship like we have coming up in New Orleans. But if you want a balance between a lot of basketball flying back and forth on the TV screen, along with the tension of raised stakes, then the twelve games from Thursday to Sunday are as good as it gets in sports. TheSportsNotebook is opening up the time machine, as it were, to pull out the best weekends that each regional has produced.