How sad.. “John Calipari, meanwhile, is now 1-4 in his last five March Madness games. Questions about his future in Lexington are starting to surface. Calipari's strategy of recruiting five-star players and forming inexperienced starting lineups clearly doesn't work anymore. Top teams are built with experienced, tough players who can strap down defensively once the tournament arrives. The Kentucky head coach admitted after the game he may have to adjust the strategy of how he builds his teams.” "I'll look at other ways that we can do stuff, but, you know, there's -- this thing here, it's a different animal," Calipari said, via ESPN. "We've been able to help so many kids and win so many games and Final Fours, national titles and all this stuff, win league championships with young guys.“
Lots of other fans are piling on the SEC (and rightly so imo) since it was just a few days ago Sankey started saying publicly he thinks less mid majors deserve to be in the tournament. Then his teams lost as big faves to Yale and Oakland. I actually hope this stops Sankey from pushing for changes to the tournament that tilt things even more heavily away from mid majors.
Alabama and Tennessee are the remaining flag bearers for the SEC. Bama has their work cut out for them. UNC is going to be a tough hill to climb. Tennessee also has Creighton to deal with, another even matchup. Possible that the SEC won't have a single team in the Elite 8.
Houston was not getting any benefit against A&M. They had four players foul out before overtime. A&M is hard to officiate, though and I believe Houston is a very physical defensive team.
Not sure about bias, but I heard there were a lot of obvious fouls not balled in Bama's last game. The guy on X (formerly Twitter) called OfficiatingObserver17 that was referenced in another thread made a comment on X congratulating Bama on winning their "rugby match."
I'd be interested in seeing how each conference performed, relative each team's seed, in the past 3-5 tournaments. I'm not sure any one year can prove anything given how crazy the tournament can be. I still think the SEC is one of the top conferences.
The refs called that game pretty loose. Too loose IMO. But had they called it close, and neither team adjusted, then both teams would have been playing short in the second half.
Buzz is just plain weird. Did you see his interview at the half of our game with them at the SEC tourney where he was asking the interviewer Marty if he had any eligibility left because his guys were in foul trouble? He used this strange low voice like he was talking to a child. Really odd.