Chaos is Bliss

One day of must-watch games and upsets galore offered the best argument yet for why everything mattered, even if nothing really changed.

Tipoff

As professional baseball dithered and mulled over contracts and expanding its exclusive club of playoff teams in sunny Jupiter, Florida, college basketball reminded everyone how thrilling a day of chaos could be. The argument about expanding the playoff pool in any sport is old with well-established battle lines. A common refrain is that more teams eligible to make the playoffs must mean that the regular season no longer matters. College basketball has one of the largest fields of teams in its playoffs. When the dust settled on Saturday, February 26th, 7 of the top 10 teams in the AP Poll had lost. Men’s college basketball was rarely more compelling.

There are few sports where chaos is a feature, not a bug. There are only a handful of teams in college football or the NFL that have a real shot. Tennis has been dominated by the same 4 men for the past 2 decades. College basketball offers the thrill of the unknown. Once you have filled out your brackets and start watching the games in the tournament, every close game offers that adrenaline fix you need to sit through another video conference. You become an instant expert on that senior from the high plains with the lumberjack beard, using jab steps, pump fakes, and step-backs to embarrass the future NBA Draft Lottery pick attempting to defend him. You never knew a team could be called the Jackrabbits or Lady Techsters and be taken so seriously. The last Saturday of February was a glimpse into the glorious chaos ahead.

As for the long-term implications of a Saturday in February, not much changed. Gonzaga remained the #1 team in the nation. The blue bloods of Duke and Kansas remained focused on winning their conference titles and securing a 1 seed. Some things did change. Wisconsin fans began to ask “why not us?” The slimmest of hopes of joining the elite emerged. Hopes for making it to New Orleans appeared just a little bit brighter. A world of possibility, that anything could happen, was in full view. As the dark days of winter receded, the shining lights of spring emerged. This is March.

The Mixtape 

The Field of 68 team puts out lots of great content each week. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

  • America’s favorite game this time of year is “Frauds or for Real?” On the DTF Podcast, Rob Dauster, Terrence Oglesby, and John Fanta took a look at each of the 7 teams in the AP Top 10 that lost last weekend and asked if they were legit National Title contenders or masquerading as ones. John Fanta took a shot of espresso and recalled his experiences watching Ed Cooley and the Providence Friars clinch the Big East regular season title for the first time in program history.

  • You have bracket questions, Field of 68 has bracket experts. It’s a match made in heaven. Every Monday and Friday, Fielding the 68 takes a look at the brackets with the experts. Greg Waddell hosted Jonathan Wariner of Making the Madness and Andy Bottoms of Inside the Hall to take a look at the brackets in the wake of the wild weekend. There are as many as 8 teams pushing for a 1 seed with less than 10 days before Selection Sunday. Who gets the 1 seeds???

  • While the games are exciting, the coaching carousel is just getting warmed up. ESPN’s Jeff Borzello and his glorious hair joined Jeff Goodman and Terrence Oglesby on After Dark to talk about which coaches are on the hot seat. Nobody knows the coaching job market better than Borzello and Goodman. The mentee and his former mentor dish out the gossip.

Check out Field of 68: After Dark for live shows throughout March and into April. The Field of 68 team will be on site at Madison Square Garden, the Barclays Center, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, and more throughout March Madness. Tune in for the most in-depth live coverage and analysis of college basketball.

War Torn: How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is impacting college basketball

In lieu of Four Point Play this week, the Field of 68 is proud to present a special edition of the Goodman & Hummel podcast. This episode features four of the seven Ukrainian-born players in Division 1 men’s college basketball. Jeff Goodman interviewed Dima Zdor of Grand Canyon, George Maslennikov of Canisius, Volodymyr Markovetskyy of San Francisco, and Max Shulga from Utah State about their experiences playing college basketball in the United States during this tragic war.

Thursday Superlatives

Each week, we will shine a light on a team and an individual player that has captured the hearts of the world of college basketball.

  • Team of the Week: Baylor

    • Through all the injuries, through the brutal Big 12 schedule, through the pressure of carrying the weight of being reigning National Champs, the Baylor Bears are back to the top of the polls. For a time, it looked like head coach Scott Drew was going to struggle to keep the ship afloat. Season-ending injuries to big man Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua and guard LJ Cryer did nothing to prevent Baylor from taking care of Kansas in Waco on “Upset Saturday.” Perhaps even more impressive, the Bears went to Austin and took down Texas less than 48 hours later. The Bears entered March with a clear case for a 1 seed in the upcoming NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

  • Player of the Week: JD Notae, Arkansas

    • Few teams are playing as well as Arkansas, winner of 14 of the past 15 games, including one very close matchup against LSU on Wednesday night. On Saturday, one of the brightest stars of the day was the Razorbacks guard. Notae scored 30 points, one off his season high, to go along with 8 assists to help take down Kentucky in Fayetteville. Notae was a maestro in ball screens, navigating around and occasionally over the Kentucky defenders to score from all over the court. Noate has a habit of playing big in Bud Walton Arena. He scored 28 against Auburn earlier in February.

Box Score

Basketball can be told through the numbers. We take a look at some of the numbers from the last week of college hoops.

  • 5,392. The average ticket price for the UNC-Duke game on Saturday, March 5th is $5,392 according to Front Office Sports. The game will be the last time Coach K is on the sidelines for Duke. (Bleacher Report)

  • 45. Liberty’s Darius McGhee made 45 3-point field goals in February. That ties his own record for most 3’s in a month (December 2021) and is the most since Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield made 50 in January 2016. (Jared Berson, ESPN Stats & Info)

  • 41. With 5:51 remaining in the 2nd quarter, #4 Louisville women’s basketball was on top of #14 Notre Dame by a score of 45-4 in their game on Sunday, February 27th. Louisville would hold on to win the game. (ESPN)

  • 5. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), due to a combination of injuries and transfers, was down to 5 players on its roster for the opening round of the Horizon League Men’s Basketball Tournament. No substitutes, no bench. All 5 remaining players on the roster played the entire game, losing 69-58 to Oakland. It was the first time a team only played 5 players in a game since Jacksonville State did so in 2000. (ESPN Stats & Info)

  • 7. I assume that if you are reading this newsletter, you follow college basketball more than the average person. You are a person of class and culture, after all. Anyway, seven of the top 10 teams in the AP poll all lost on Saturday, February 26tj, the most in a single day in history. (ESPN Stats & Info)

Around the Rim

This section highlights some of the best writing on college basketball to hit the web. Consider these your extra credit assignments for spring semester.

The premise of the slow cooker is that you can put all the ingredients for dinner into a pot, set it to cook on low heat for 8 hours, and come home to a home-cooked meal without the fuss of having to do any work. This idea has been so successful that it has spawned an entire line of cookware. John Gasaway takes that idea and applies it to seeding the tournament. We have the data. John asks, why not just put teams into an algorithm and spit out a fully seeded bracket? It would increase transparency. John must not like cooking, although he makes a lot of great points.

In a way, every mock bracket is a prediction of the future. The fine folks at CBS Sports take a look at the most important month of the college basketball season and make more specific predictions. Gary Parrish thinks a familiar name will return to the Sweet 16. Matt Norlander is wiping the chalk off the board of the Final Four. Kyle Boone thinks one frequent visitor to the Final Four will finally cut down the nets. Meanwhile, David Cobb believes one conference having an historically down year will have a surprising run in March.

This appears last since some readers may be burnt out on Coach K coverage. He is not exactly getting the Zion treatment this season, but he is very prominent in the waning moments of his Hall of Fame career. If you are reading this far and have been hankering for one good long read on the man that has become synonymous with one letter, with one sport, this is the one. Wright Thompson takes us deep into the man from a working-class Polish neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago to West Point to the face of one of the most famous names in sports. From the highs of cutting down the nets to the lows of berating players and student-reporters, Thompson takes us inside like few others have.