British playwright William Archer penned that drama is “anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” The 2024 NCAA tournament promises plenty of dramatic alchemy. We stand on its precipice, drunk with anticipation for rising contenders, wilting pretenders and balling Cinderellas. Mingled with this anticipation is the uncertainty of it all: the randomness of shotmaking, the chaos of competition,…
2023 NCAA Tournament Preview: Teams to Trust, Who’s a Bust, and Cinderellas Discussed
Contenders, Pretenders, and Cinderellas for the 2023 NCAA Tournament
2022-2023 College Hoops All-Name Team
There are more than 5,500 active players in D1 men’s college basketball this season, a sample size plenty large enough to yield its fair share of exceptional names. Players like KyKy Tandy (pronounced ‘Key-Key’) at Xavier, Churchill Bounds at Central Arkansas (pictured above), Wooga Poplar at Miami, Chris Cross (!!) at Southern Illinois, Love Bettis…
2022 Field Guide to March Madness
March Madness is a jigsaw puzzle and no one holds all of its pieces. There has never been a perfect bracket (the odds of doing so are around 1 in 9.2 quintillion) and the closest recorded pursuit of perfection was in 2019 when a Columbus, Ohio native went 49 for 49 before his bracket busted…
College Hoops All-Name Team
There are 358 teams in Division 1 basketball, which translates to roughly 5,370 players on active rosters. Some players’ names are redundant (see Ali Ali of the Akron Zips or Akok Akok – ‘a-cook a-cook – of the UConn Huskies). Other names are a wildly unique combination of words (see Wheza Panzo of the Stetson…
The March to Madness
A couple of centuries ago, German theologian/GOAT Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion as an intuition that “reveals the infinite within the finite.” It’s a shame this dude never lived to see the NCAA tournament: an infinitude of possibilities contained within one finite eventuality. March Madness is a sacred glimpse at infinity. Played out 1,000 times you…
Previewing the Most Unique Season in NCAA History
What we learned (or didn’t learn) from last year The 2019-2020 men’s basketball season was fun…while it lasted. Right out of the gate we witnessed historically huge upsets like Stephen F Austin over Duke and Evansville over Kentucky (on Duke and Kentucky’s home courts!) and for the first time ever no D-1 school remained undefeated…
Early Season Storylines
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like March We may be months away from knowing who will win the Bachelor (my money is on Sarah C), but college basketball’s non-conference play has already started to sew the seeds of March. Close games and stunning upsets have been the norm and not the outlier this season,…
The Real Tournament Starts Now
Part of March Madness’ beauty is that each iteration unfolds at its own pace. This year’s narrative has been more of a slow burn than a quick blaze. Whereas in 2018 we saw half of the 1-3 seeds lose before the end of the first weekend, in 2019 we saw 14 of the top 16 kenpom teams…
The Contenders
The Contenders Duke Blue Devils You don’t need to know much about college basketball to see that Duke is the most talented team in the country. They start four future NBA first-rounders (Zion Williamson, RJ Barrett, Cam Reddish, and Tre Jones) and only lost twice when all of these players were healthy. Ranking in…