March Madness is once again upon us; excitement abounds. We’re not wise enough to offer any bracket advice— and why bother consuming such punditry, when odds are your picks will be a mess by this weekend anyway?
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We can, however, share our enthusiasm over these six storylines, which serve as a justifiable excuse to drain your productivity this week.
An Underhanded Maneuver
By early February, the free-throw woes of Wofford College big man Kyler Filewich were becoming too much to bear: he had at one point missed 14 straight foul shots in conference play. So the Terriers coaching staff approached him with a radical idea: why not try shooting them underhanded?
Such a “granny-style” approach to foul shooting has never really taken off, despite NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry hitting nearly 90% of his attempts as a professional underhanded. Filewich, however, was ready to try anything. After an extended tutoring session with Barry himself, Filewich hit his first underhanded attempt on Feb. 5, on national TV against University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, and has attracted attention ever since due to his unorthodox style. Filewich hasn’t exactly put up Barry-esque numbers at the charity stripe: he was, for example, 5 for 17 in the recent Southern Conference tournament. But that’s better than 0 for 14, and the Winnipeg native won SoCon Tournament MVP honors in leading Wofford to the dance, where the 15-seeded Terriers will play Tennessee, in Lexington, Ky., on Thursday.
California Dreaming
The Southern California sports powers haven’t won a women’s basketball title since Police Academy—the very first one—was killing at the box office. UCLA, which owns a record 11 men’s titles, has never won a national championship on the women’s side. USC last won the women’s championship 41 years ago, when the legendary Cheryl Miller was playing for the Trojans. That could change this year, as UCLA, playing its first year in the Big Ten conference, finished with a 30-2 record, which included a 77-62 victory over the defending champion South Carolina in December. The Bruins, who play in the first round on Friday, earned the tournament’s top overall seed; South Carolina finished second. USC, however, handed UCLA its only two losses, and also earned one of the four top seeds. The Trojans are led by sophomore sensation JuJu Watkins, who averaged 24.6 points per game this season, good for second-best in the nation.
Red Storm Rising
St. John’s coach Rick Pitino has more than proven his worth as a turnaround artist: in each of his six stops as a college head coach (Boston University, Providence College, Kentucky, Louisville, Iona, and St. John’s), he’s led teams with a losing or mediocre record at the time of his hiring to 20-plus victories by the end of his second year in charge. For the first time since 1986, St. John’s won both the Big East regular and conference tournament championships; the Red Storm packed Madison Square Garden all season and brought pizazz back to a New York City college basketball scene that felt languid for decades. St. John’s begins its quest to make its first Final Four in 40 years on Thursday night in Providence, against Omaha. If they advance to the second round to face Arkansas, who plays Kansas in the first round, Pitino will square off against Razorbacks coach John Calipari. Pitino reportedly helped Calipari get his head-coaching start, at Pitino’s alma mater, UMass, back in the late 1980s. Since then, the two alpha Hall of Famers have become, in the words of Sports Illustrated, “The Very Best of Enemies.”
The tournament selection committee clearly screwed up by putting underqualified North Carolina in March Madness. That UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham chaired the committee provided terrible optics for the NCAA. But a potential Pitino-Calipari duel in Round 2? That’s some quality work.
Ivy, for Three
The women’s selection committee also got it right when it broke convention to award a mid-major conference like the Ivy League not only one at-large bid to the tournament—a victory in itself—but a second as well, giving the Ivies three women’s NCAA tournament teams for the first time in history. All three teams made their case. Harvard was the automatic qualifier by beating Columbia in the Ivy League title game last Saturday: senior guard Harmoni Turner went out and dropped 44 points on Princeton in the semis of the Ivy tournament, before adding another 24-point outing against the Lions in the championship, to clinch Harvard’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 2007. The Crimson, seeded 10th, face No. 7 Michigan State in Raleigh, N.C., on Saturday.
Columbia finished the regular season atop the Ivy League at 13-1; the Lions earned a second straight at-large bid to the NCAAs. Leading scorer Riley Weiss, a sophomore guard from Long Island, struggled from the field in the Ivy Tournament, shooting just 6-22 over two games; she’ll need to find her groove for the Lions to win their First Four game against Washington in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Thursday; the winner plays West Virginia in the first round on Saturday. Princeton finished second in the league at 12-2, and squares off against Iowa State’s dominant center Audi Crooks in a First Four game on Wednesday in South Bend, Ind. Princeton beat North Carolina State in the first round two years ago and knocked off Kentucky in 2022. Tiger coach Carla Berube, a member of Geno Auriemma’s first UConn national championship team in 1995, owns an impressive 121-24 record in her six years as Princeton’s coach. Auriemma can’t coach forever. Check out his potential successor this week.
McNeese Management
Student managers of basketball teams get the spotlight: they’re too busy doing the behind-the-scenes grunt work, everything from dishing out towels to players to helping arrange travel to rebounding at shootarounds. McNeese State senior Amir Khan, however, has gone viral for leading the team’s tunnel walkouts, with a boom box, before games. Nicknamed “Aura” by his teammates, the hype man has become so popular, he’s signed Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals with Buffalo Wild Wings, TickPick, and Insomnia Cookies; according to On3.com, Khan is the first manager to ever sign a NIL agreement. “If they kept manager stats for rebounding and wiping up wet spots on the court,” Khan says in his official McNeese State bio, “I’d put up Wilt Chamberlain numbers.” Khan’s hype game will be in full force on Thursday, when the No. 12 Cowboys face Clemson in Providence.
One More Paige for the Record Books
Two years ago, UConn’s student-run newspaper, The Daily Campus, came up with a list of the top 10 women’s basketball players in the school’s history. No easy task, given all the greats that have come through Storrs during the Auriemma era, but the student journalists did a fine job: Breanna Stewart, Maya Moore, and Diana Taurasi topped the rankings.
Paige Bueckers would surely be on such a list of it were done today. But unlike those 10 greats recognized a couple of years back, she’s never won a championship. By any measure, the senior standout is an all-time UConn great: in 2021, she became the first freshman in history to win National Player of the Year honors, and this season “Paige Buckets” reached the 2,000-point milestone faster than any other player in UConn’s storied history. But the lack of a title, at a school that produces them with regularity, is a frustrating hole in her otherwise stellar resume. Bueckers plans to forgo her extra year of college eligibility to enter the WNBA, where she’ll most likely be the top overall pick in April’s draft. Her last championship campaign starts Saturday, in the first round against Arkansas State.