I. What Do I Know?
Just prior to college basketball’s conference tournament week (which I relish more than the giant carnival it relentlessly feeds, as rivers do the sea), I glanced briefly at an NBA game — just to check on the night’s outcomes — and caught a furtive glimpse at Lebron James going up for a jump shot. I noticed, with surprise, that James had drifted — egregiously — to his left.
“Uh oh,” I muttered to myself, watching the shot miss badly, reminiscent of the fate of many of The King’s early career jumpers, before he somehow corrected his awful habit of not going straight up, at long last making himself into a good shooter, not just a great scorer and everything else.
I took comfort in feeling that my ability to size up and divine what is happening, and what was about to happen — my cherished (if apocryphal) wisdom — remained intact; because, like many who count themselves fans of our beautiful game, I knew next to nothing about men’s college ball this year, outside the Big East: well, St. John’s and some of their conference rivals.
There were no marquee players (like Zion Williamson, Oscar Tshiebwe, or O.B. Toppin, in recent years) to command my attention, whereas Caitlyn Clark was drawing fans of all stripes to Iowa women’s games, in person and on the tube (1). Many veteran fans remark — with a kind of ironic glee — that they do not know a single player in all of college basketball, other than Clark. One easily becomes nostalgic about seeing Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Akeem Olajuwon, and Patrick Ewing performing on the big collegiate stage: future NBA superstars providing sneak previews in March.
Today, the NBA now draws equally upon elite international prospects (Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, and Victor Wembanyama), superstars without a prior campus affiliation. Another group is composed of “one-and-done” stars such as Joel Embiid, Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Devin Booker, Jamal Murray, Bam Adebayo, and De’Aaron Fox, who didn’t have a string of tournaments from which to become household names. Even aside from the international set, many players never even enter college, but instead apprentice themselves to alternative pathways such as Overtime Elite or the G League. Potential dynasties crumble before getting a chance to jell (2). Others, like John Caliapri, find themselves less well adapted to the trend toward older players (3), who are becoming the norm, with graduate transfers increasingly frequent, since the disruption of COVID wound up gifting DI players outside the Ivy League a fifth year of eligibility (4). Recruiting these days largely hinges on assessing and raiding the “transfer portal,” which is essentially a holding tank for players looking to relocate.
Nonetheless, somehow, attendance figures, both live and on-screen, were up. Record-setting crowds were the norm.
I didn’t get it. Perhaps I was stuck in my own transfer portal of a bardo. “He brags of his ignorance,” or was it “misery?” Dylan might quip, were he to settle in with me for a look at the Big East tournament. But was I really living dangerously? There was a geometry of innocence to it all, I further speculated.
II. Learning As I Go
About that ignorance of mine: I did know about Clark, whose televised games I tried never to miss. I also knew about St. John’s Coach Rick Pitino, who was hired to return the Johnnies to relevance after four nondescript years (68-56, with no NCAA bids) under Mike Anderson, a true player’s coach and gentleman; characteristics no longer prized in our beautiful game.
I had seen St. John’s several times, each game very different than the preceding one, as their aged boy wonder coach struggled to impart wisdom and cohesion to a group of strangers toiling through a fifth year of college ball, to integrate them with the few younger players he had signed from the transfer portal (5) in the little time he had to work with, as his previous team (Iona) had competed in last year’s NCAA.
And I knew about my alma mater’s women’s team: Columbia (6) would be making its initial NCAA appearance, receiving an unexpected at-large bid after finishing tied at 13-1with Princeton in the regular season, before losing the Ivy tournament final.
And I knew that today’s conferences embody geographical anomalies, and that my old jokes about “sixth year seniors”, and UCLA joining the Big East are no longer laughing matters. And I knew that I was no longer fluent in the grammar of it all: gap years, NIL’s, and transfer portals.
III. The Big East
I had my usual inflated hopes for St. John’s, which had won their last five conference games before the Big East tournament, turning matters around after an horrendous 2-8 stretch during conference play, which ended with their blowing a double-digit lead to Seton Hall, and Pitino shamelessly blasting his players. “This is the most unenjoyable experience of my lifetime,” he intoned at a press conference. To everyone’s amazement, his team responded with renewed effort and success.
Having seemingly righted the ship, Pitino’s charges again faced Seton Hall (coached by Shaheen Holloway, who had had guided St. Peter’s to the Elite Eight in 2022, before decamping for an enormous raise from his alma mater) in the tournament’s quarter-finals, with both teams seemingly in good position to receive NCAA at-large bids. Seton Hall appeared to be a lock: it had 23 wins, and had finished a strong fourth (13-7) in conference play; whereas the resurgent Johnnies needed one more win to achieve twenty for the season, in which they had finished fifth (11-9) in conference play.
Last year, five Big East teams had been selected, but to be safe, it seemed that the Johnnies needed at least one tourney win, and this could be it. With UConn looming large in the semi-finals, they likely would be excused — by the Kafkaesque Selection Committee — if they didn’t get a second conference tournament win.
St. John’s had lost both its regular season meetings to The Hall, the second of which (68-62) was the game that had so frustrated Pitino, who had deserted Iona a year earlier (just days after proclaiming that coaching there had given him a new lease on life), taking with him his star point guard Daniss Jenkins, to go with his All-Ivy guys. 6’11” traditional post player Joel Soriano was the only Johnnie most fans knew. Otherwise, only R.J. Luis seemed worth knowing.
St. John’s took a 45-40 halftime lead that reached fifteen points for the second time at 71-56 and continued to swell for a 91-72 win, their sixth straight win, and their twentieth overall. This, it seemed, should have been enough to clinch an NCAA bid, no matter whatever happened versus UConn, which beat them 95-90. Overall, it was a very respectable game for the Johnnies, who, by virtue of defeating Seton Hall, vaulted into fourth best team in Big East, a conference which had five bids last year. Could this fail to be enough?
Guess so. Inexplicably, the selection committee revealed, St. John’s was not even among the first four teams not selected, despite their six straight wins and their pushing defending national champion UConn to the limit in the conference tournament semis, and despite its NET (an NCAA Evaluation Tool) rating of 32.
Ironically, it was Pitino’s son Richard’s New Mexico team that was complicit in the Johnnies being left out: by winning their Mountain West tournament to earn an automatic bid, giving his conference another team in the tourney, and taking away one more slot that might have gone — deservingly — to the Big East.
“If I could just give the players a hug and make the pain go away, I would wave my magic wand and do that,” Pitino said via Zoom after the team watched the selection show in-private because of his sense that disappointment loomed. “But I unfortunately couldn’t do it.” For Coach Rick, this constitutes humility!
So the Johnnies stayed home, declining an NIT bid. UConn, considered unbeatable by many, had lost three regular season games, one by nineteen points, to Big East rival Creighton, another by fifteen to Seton Hall. Entering the tourney, only two other teams had lost as few as four. By contrast, in 2021, Gonzaga had made a serious run at the sport’s first undefeated season since 1976, losing only to Baylor in the tourney Final.
IV. First Weekend
Watching, however randomly, the Michigan State-Mississippi State Thursday national TV opener (I still ignore the play-in games), once an unknown-to-me Spartan hit four threes in the first seven minutes, all the excitement of March Madness come into focus: the same kind of three point mania that makes the NBA so unrewarding creates tremendous excitement in the college game. It’s just as explosive, but not as predictable. These guys haven’t seen each other five times earlier on. The tournament is a big tent. Spread it, and thrills will come.
What came instead was a call from my college friend Pete, who had coached the University of Vermont for nine years, before the Catamounts’ advent as a tourney regular, from the days of twenty-five team tournament that kicked off with a triple header in the old Madison Square Garden. Hearing his voice made me recall the days when I resented having to specify “men’s”, when I wrote about the tournament. Who did we wind up discussing? Caitlyn Clark, of course. Full parity, as well as legitimacy, has arrived! This holds true for the broadcast booth as well, where former greats- players and coaches- present the women’s game with the sizzle and respect it has come to deserve.
No matter how uninspired one might feel after the draw, Day one always provides stunning moments; more than one, and one — in particular — better than shining: Oakland University’s upset of Kentucky had it all: blocky and muscular 23-year-old reserve guard and DII transfer Jack Gohlke coming off Oakland’s bench to make ten of twenty-three point attempts! These were the only shots he took all game. Turns out he had scored on only four two point attempts all year!
Fans of the old NIT were treated to the brief resurgence of previous Eastern power Duquesne, coached by whimsical (though intense) 65-year-old Kevin Dambrot, whose last name sent me on a google search that revealed Coach Kevin to be the nephew of the late Irwin Dambrot, of the 1950 CCNY team that — uniquely in the game’s history — captured both the NCAA and NIT tournaments in the same season. Irwin was the MVP of the NCAA tournament and the No. 1 draft pick of the New York Knicks that year. Kevin’s father — Sid Dambrot — was part of the Duquesne teams that ranked in the Associated Press Top 10 from 1952-1954. The 1954 team went 26-3, made it to No. 1 in the AP poll for two weeks in February of 1954 (7).
After the smoke from the whirlwind four days had cleared and Gohlke and his gang were gone, along with thirty-one other men’s teams, and thirty-two womens’ squads, what was really of significance? Just what DID I really know?
I knew that the three Big East teams had all advanced to the Sweet Sixteen (going 6-0), as if to rub in the exclusion of St. John’s and Seton Hall. I knew that Yale had done the Ivies proud with a win over highly regarded Auburn, a number four seed in its region, before succumbing to San Diego State.
I knew that Purdue had a big white kid who had won Player of the Year last season, but had failed to prevent his top-seeded Boilermakers from losing in the first-round last year to lowly Farleigh Dickinson; so I was finally learning Zach Edey’s name.
And I knew that North Carolina State, winners of seven games in 12 days (as they had to win five (!) games in the ACC tournament to qualify), were led by a 6’9” left-handed player whose weight probably exceeded 300 pounds: crowd-pleasing DJ Burns had begun his college career at Tennessee, then relocated to Winthrop, where he won Big South Player of the Year, before moving on to N.C. State. His cherubic smile, protruding belly, super-soft hands, and odd haircut made him an ideal candidate for perhaps the next Spike Lee joint.
I also knew that form was holding for the women, meaning that the awaited match-ups between the big stars would materialize. The men had no such analogue, but — against all these odds, television rating were higher than ever for both the women and the tail-wind riding men.
V. Moving On: Second Weekend
I still had my hopes for a Big East Final, but both Marquette and Creighton (which — astonishingly — had beaten UConn 85-66 on February 20) went down in the Sweet Sixteen, Marquette to NC State, and Creighton to Tennessee. In the same round, Alabama eliminated top-seeded North Carolina, on a 22/12 effort from 6’11” senior Grant Nelson (8) and Tennessee, which had dispatched Creighton, had 6’6” SEC Player of the Year Dalton Knecht, poised to be a first round NBA draft pick, to dominate the court at critical moments.
By this stage of the tourney, irresistible players like Nelson, Knecht, and Burns inevitably emerge. Story lines fairly beg to be developed. It just takes putting in the time. “You can learn a lot just by observing,” Yogi Berra is credited with saying. How hard a heart would be needed not to embrace these Tennessee guys fighting the continuous tsunami that engulfs anyone trying to guard the 7’4” Edey?
In Tennessee’s Elite Eight match-up with Purdue, Knecht had 37 points to Edey’s 40 (along with 16 rebounds and a critical block of Knecht’s shot with the score 69-64 and half a minute remaining), but took 31 shots to get there, as compared to Edey’s 21. Each of these stars scored more than 50% his team’s total.
Burns was more fortunate than either Nelson or Knecht: Trailing Duke 27-21 at the half, with Burns seemingly their only effective weapon and flirting with foul trouble, North Carolina State summoned enough inspiration to nearly triple their first half output and win going away: 76-64. DJ posted 21 second half points, to finish with 29. NC State was now 26-14, despite having gone 9-11 in regular season ACC conference play. With the exception of sophomore star Mohamed Diarra- a junior from France (also a transfer) who was scrupulously observing Ramadam, NC State’s starters were graduate students.
VI. Distaff Star Wars: Elite Eight
Even with their great talent, it was so much easier to break down plays while watching the women, to project one’s (aging) self into players’ shoes, as if to coach them from within, even if unnoticed. The half-time promotors had great force, passion, and swagger: sexy, smart, and high octane aggressive! (Hush, hush, damned spot). And the ads! Dr. Naismith, talk to me. I know a good heath where we can meet. Former South Carolina star Aliyah Boston joined the cast in the booth. Is she what women’s ball considers its Draymond Green? Or perhaps they know better. May they not make all our mistakes.
The leading teams all had big stars to carry them: Clark (whose passing mentality and ability to read the floor was likened to a football quarterback’s), UConn’s Paige Bueckers, LSU’s Angel Reese, and USC freshwoman Juju Watkins (9), but there was reason to suppose that South Carolina (a perfect 36-0, despite returning none of last year’s starters!) might have too many of them. Underdog North Carolina State was represented in both Final Fours, the first time any school had both teams get this far.
How were these women being presented? Boldly, of course. L.S.U.’s Angel Reese sported a bright blue single leg sweat garment (sweat-leg?). Her flamboyant and controversial coach, Kim Mulkey, wore a bright green suit that emphasized her ample cleavage, as if to underline her defiant character, in the wake of a Washington Post article that had Mulkey talking retaliatory lawsuits.
Clark’s Iowa team had lost only three times, and never when she had taken under 25 shots. Facing L.S.U., who had beaten them in last year’s title game, had ten points in the game’s first three minutes, putting Iowa ahead 20-14, only to see L.S.U. (led by its two athletic stars Angel Reese and Flau’ jae Johnson) assert apparent dominance and take a 31-27 after the first quarter, at which point it was hard for Clark’s legion of fans not to expect disaster.
But Clark’s repertoire was full of what seemed like miracles, and she did not disappoint. There is an inspired sudden-ness to Clark’s on-court decisions: she dribbles, looks, waits, then fires a pass. To put oneself vicariously in her body is reminiscent of being in a penny arcade shooting gallery: plastic animals appearing suddenly, only to be gunned down. She has an unusual splaying motion with non-shooting hand, which seems to be trying to mimic her shooting arm.
Her forty-one point masterpiece (including nine of twenty three-pointers; almost identical to Gohlke’s masterpiece against Kentucky) led Iowa to a 94-87 victory, and set up a showdown with UConn and Bueckers, who has long been Clark’s major competition. Both were branded for stardom at an early age.
UConn dispatched Watkins and her USC team-mates 80-73, in a game that was tied at 59-59, with 7:30 minutes remaining, after UConn had been ahead as much as 52-40, and was decided in the second half by UConn’s supporting players Aaliyah Edwards and Niki Muhl, who like Bueckers, went all 40 minutes, with Edwards’ twenty-four complementing Bueckers’ twenty-eight. Watkins exited with a game high twenty-nine.
South Carolina , showing superior depth and athleticism, had already moved on, decisively: 78-59, with 6’7” Kamilla Cardoso dominating inside.
VII. Final Four (x 2)
An unfortunate but technically accurate charging call deprived UConn of its final chance to tie their semi-final game with Iowa, but gave fans what they really wanted: another look at Clark two days later.
This year’s compressed schedule (with the women’s Final moved from Tuesday night to Sunday afternoon; and, as such, to precede the men’s Final), in combination with the great attractiveness of the current crop of women stars, made it emotionally hard to come back for the men’s semis, especially since it seemed quite possible that neither game would be close. Indeed, neither was: UConn and Purdue proved themselves clearly the two best teams.
Purdue-NC State was one of those games you wouldn’t think to bother with on an ordinary given Saturday, with a generous mid-season television menu from which to choose. Edey’s overwhelming size proved too much even for Burns, as the other Wolfpack DJ (guard DJ Horne) tried valiantly to carry the load, as their miraculous run finally ended: 63-50.
So both Finals were as they should have been! The two best teams would face off with each other. The Iowa women were the only questionable squad, but, look, we can’t do this without Caitlyn! UConn had outscored its first four opponents by 111 points, having led by thirty at some point in each game. Against Illinois in the Elite Eight, after finishing the first half tied at 23-23, they ran off thirty straight points! Purdue wasn’t having much trouble either: plus 97 for the same four games.
Both UConn and Purdue won their semi-final games handily; 86-72 for UConn versus Alabama, in what would be their closest game! Alabama’s newly minted stars, Grant Nelson and lefty guard Mark Sears (made in the image of Dick Barnett; or Jalen Brunson 2.0), had never been this way here before, whereas UConn was a battle-tested regular. And huge! Not only 7’2” Donovan Clingan, but everyone was at least 6’4,” with several extremely athletic players at lesser heights: 6’8” Alex Karaban, 6’5” returning NCAA MVP Tristen Newton, 6’6” freshman and probable NBA first round pick Stephon Castle, and versatile transfer 6’4” Cam Spencer.
With a ticket reportedly going for a minimum of $481, Clark’s team-mates scored the game’s first seven points, and Caitlyn followed by unloadng 13 more. Iowa (34-4) led 10-2, then 15-4. Clark’s spree consisted of one “logo three,” two “ordinary threes, and two sets of three free throws each, after having been fouled outside the three-point circle! Iowa led 22-13, then 27-20 at the quarter. Clark had eighteen!
Could this be sustainable against the superior speed, size, and athleticism of South Carolina? The game see-sawed for a while, with Iowa’s supporting cast outperforming themselves, but the relentless pressure from Cardoso’s size and the speed of Raven Johnson and freshman MiLaysia Fulwiley, along with the all-around play of 6’3’ Ashlyn Watkins, were too much: 87-75 for South Carolina. One imagines the same result each time if the teams played a series. South Carolina Coach Dawn Staley shed revivalist tears and expressed gratitude to God. Clark would be drafted first just one week later by the WNBA, which will start play in mid-May, less than six weeks later.
With their 75-60 win, UConn became 6-0 in NCAA Final games, a record that was achieved under three different head coaches; this was their only repeat championship. They have been the dominant team since their first title in 1999. During UConn’s era of pre-eminence, Duke and North Carolina, with three apiece and Villanova, Kansas and Florida, with two apiece, are the only other programs with multiple titles, and none of the other six teams with four or more titles is undefeated in Final games. Taking all this into account, along with the UConn women’s team’s incredible run of eleven titles under Coach Geno Auriemma, the lovably antic Hurley (10) could credibly boast that the Huskies had been running college ball for the last thirty years!
Notably, of the seven players who played at least seven minutes for UConn in the semifinal, five did not previously play for another college, whereas six of Purdue’s top-seven contributors are homegrown. In the era of NIL payments and the transfer portal, is this the last NCAA Tournament final that is going to look this way? Or is this an early indication that teams which manage to keep a nucleus together are going to have an advantage, moving forward?
Purdue Coach Matt Painter provided perspective: “If you change three or four times, you don’t get your degree, don’t become a pro, don’t have any [alumni] contacts, you didn’t take that opportunity and get any better, then what are we doing for young people? That doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t like anybody that devalues education. We’ve tried to stay the same where we are with it, but we’re kind of an outlier. If you have that opportunity to move, then you just want to move again, then you want to move again, the only thing you got good at was moving.”
So it was UConn in a series of routs and a superior South Carolina crew. Not so complicated. Ignorant though I may be, I knew it all along.
Now if we could have a rematch with St. John’s, at least UConn would have some competition.
NOTES
1. Several Iowa games were televised nationally during prime time. This was not normal! Neither was the reportedly record-setting viewership of 18.9 million people for this year’s women’s Final, the largest ever for any college basketball, men or women, an 89% increase over last year’s Final! Clark will enter the WNBA with the same kind of expectations of transformation that Lebron James had twenty years ago when he was an NBA rookie.
2. The two most recent national champions (Kansas and UConn) had a combined fourteen losses in their title seasons.
3. John Calipari continued to buck the tide at Kentucky, but found it increasingly difficult to win with the finest eighteen year olds, against foes long past the legal drinking stage. After fifteen years, one title, and two other Final Four appearances, Cal was ready to retreat, as graciously he did, leaving a stunning overall record that was getting obscured by recent disappointments, as the opponents of his annual crop of phenoms kept getting older. Wisely, he decided to move to Arkansas, where he can hope to revive a once-powerful program (champions in 1994 and runners-up the following year), and in time be remembered at Kentucky for his one championship and three Final Four appearances, rather than for recent post-season underperformance of his Goliaths against such spirited unknowns Davids as like Oakland University.
4. Oddly, in this new scheme of things, the Ivy League, which does not allow players a fifth year of eligibility, comes to serve as a kind of next-level prep school, holding the promise for higher level glory for players hoping to get good enough to play a fifth year, and for a more powerful contender. The same is true for the women: whereas at St. John’s, Pitino started two of the previous season’s all-Ivy players, this year’s USC women started three, to complement freshwoman superstar Juju Watkins.
5. The transfer portal’s doors re-open right after champions are crowned. It’s moral arc is painfully short, and swings in both directions, it seems, as Seton Hall sported a St. John’s transfer, the hyper-muscular Dylan Addae-Wusu.
6. Although their women’s team lost in the first round of the NCAA, two Columbia players (one of whom played her fifth year at USC) were selected in the WNBA draft
7. Following in the footsteps of early NBA pioneer Chuck Cooper, a great group of Black Duquesne stars graced the Garden during NIT”s of the 50’s: Jim Tucker, Dick Ricketts, and, Sihugo Green, all college stars who often had to play subordinate roles on pro teams beholden to Jim Crow principles. In an era in which St. Louis did not dare draft Bill Russell, how could Sihugo Green get his chance to shine?
8. From Devil’s Lake, North Dakota no less; a transfer, as you might expect, from North Dakota State, where he toiled for three years, before migrating South.
9. Watkins, a big overpowering guard, brings a Magic Johnson like presence to the women’s game. Her game also bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Carmelo Anthony, whose 2005 run through the NCAA as a Syracuse freshman she was trying to emulate, while playing with three Ivy League graduates three to four years her senior. Watkins hails from Watts, where her great-grandfather established the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (an anti-poverty nonprofit where Juju volunteered as a kid) after the 1965 riots.
10. The always intense Dan Hurley, who loves to feign derangement, is a fit replacement for Calipari as the public face of college basketball and its budding Recruitment Science Division. It would be fitting to three-peat next year and have Coach Geno Auriemma’s UConn women’s team — led by Paige Bueckers of course — win Geno a record twelfth title, and have him stand beside Hurley, making it only the second time in history that both women’s and men’s teams from the same school had won titles. The other was UConn in 2004. What’s that Hurley said about dominating the game?