Sunday’s 2025 NCAA Tournament Notes And More
This tournament is being played on very, very high level.
The 2025 Final Four is half set with Florida and Duke and by the end of the day we’ll know who else is inbound.
We thought that as long as Khaman Maluach stayed out of trouble that Duke could shut down Alabama inside and the perimeter defense has been good all year. And that pretty much came to pass.
We did have concerns about some carelessness with the ball. In a closer game, Duke’s 13 turnovers could have been a real problem. And worse, Cooper Flagg had four and Maluach had four - and two of Flagg’s came very near the end. It worked out, but in a different game, that could have been fatal.
Even so: Duke goes to the Final Four with freshmen Flagg, Maluach and Kon Knueppel playing 36, 31 and 35 minutes. For Maluach, it’s the most minutes he’s played since he pulled 32 against Notre Dame on January 11th.
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No one is going to feel worse after Saturday than Texas Tech because the Red Raiders had that game. All during the broadcast, the announcers kept quoting Grant McCasland saying “the toughest team wins.” Unfortunately, that ended up being Florida.
And also unfortunately, Florida’s comeback very much resembled Texas Tech’s comeback against Arkansas. Down nine with less than three minutes to play, Walter Clayton nailed a couple of threes and the Red Raiders made some unhelpful mistakes to allow Florida to pull off a comeback from 75-66.
It’s going to be a rough few days for McCasland and his team. They were the better team for almost the entire game and they let it slip away. It’s going to be a long summer.
After the game, McCasland chose to focus on Chance McMillian, who missed the last four games with a strained oblique. Here’s what he said about his gutty senior:
“I wanted to sit in that locker room forever, honestly. I don’t know. You get in these moments and a lot has happened in a short amount of time because the game has a scoreboard. But in my heart what Chance McMillian did today just doesn’t have anything to do with the score; it just has everything to do with what I want to live my life like.
“He’s obviously in a situation where he probably could have not come back. And I told these guys in the locker room, there’s something about laying down your life for your brothers in a position where you could take, I don’t know, just the path that is easier, and Chance didn’t. I’m so inspired by him. And because of him I do believe our program is different forever.”
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For his part, here are some of Nate Oats’ comments about Alabama’s loss to Duke:
“Duke is as good a team as we’ve seen all year. We’ve got some really good teams in the SEC, and they’re at that level, and it wasn’t meant to be for us tonight....
“[T]hey’ve got length all over the place. You look at their starting lineup, they’ve got Khaman Maluach that has a 9’8 reach, he protects the rim at a high level...But when they’ve got a rim protector, it’s hard to get rim shoots. At the rim we shot 48 percent, we only made 12 shots at the rim tonight. We were 12 of 25. You know, he made that tough.
“We made the point to our guys we’re not going to go in and score on him, and we had a few guys still try to challenge him. It’s kind of a habit, you can tell them going in. And then he ended up having two blocks. We ended up having more blocks than them, but the way he challenges, it’s a problem. He challenges at the rim.
“Then they’ve got Cooper at, whatever he is, 6’9”, then everybody else is 6’6” or taller. So they’ve got length...
“...We dug ourselves a hole early, gave ourselves some adversity we had to face. I thought we did a decent job fighting back, but they’re too good a team to dig yourselves a big hole. And I think the closest we ever got it from that was six, and then they went on a big run there in the last — kind of that under-eight media. We had a shot there. I think it was nine-point game with the under-eight media, then they went out on a 13-0 run and the game was over then.”
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The Kevin Willard/Maryland saga continues. According to InsideMdSports, Maryland has scheduled a team meeting for Sunday morning and that Willard will be moving on to Villanova, as has been widely reported.
It’s been a bizarre story but fortunately for everyone, it’s nearly over. Is he the right fit for Villanova?
Well, maybe. Jay Wright set a high standard, not least of all for how he managed fellow human beings. We’re not sure Willard can meet that or, really, come close to it. One of his players said this weekend that he told them he’d be back, which is obviously not true. Everyone is a free agent of course, but honesty still counts and from a distance, Willard doesn’t seem very good at that.
Buzz Williams has apparently made it clear he’d like to be considered and now Oklahoma’s Porter Moser has been rumored to be in play as well.
The situation is much more complicated by Maryland not having an AD and financial constraints (one of Willard’s complaints was that he asked for his team to stay an extra day on a road trip and was denied).
That probably means that the Terps brain trust, such as it is, would prefer not to pay top dollar.
So who would take the job when he doesn’t know who his boss will be, he probably won't get top dollar and the athletic department is having financial issues again, which is why they jumped to the Big Ten in the first place.
Well, your best bet is going to be someone who is loyal to Maryland, who loves the school enough to work through these various very serious but mostly short-term issues. And better yet, someone who knows the DMV inside out.
And as far as that goes, the only answer is Duane Simpkins. Currently at American, he’d almost certainly jump at the chance to coach his alma mater. He might even work with Maryland on his contract a bit. And best of all, he’s done well at American.
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On Sunday, the last two Final Four teams will be set. In the first game, Tennessee and Houston will tangle in a defensive war and in the later game, Michigan State and Auburn will rumble.
If those were the Final Four opponents, we’d be thrilled to be on the other side from Tennessee and Houston in the Midwest because that’s likely to be a war. Rick Barnes and Kelvin Sampson go way, way back. Both are native North Carolinians too. That game is impossible to call but we’ll go with Houston because, to borrow from McCasland, we think that’s the tougher team.
Not by much though.
In the later game, consider what Auburn did against Michigan on Friday: yes, they blew them out - late. However, as someone said, it’s like they flipped a switch.
Michigan State doesn’t need to flip a switch. That team is on all the time. So we’ll take the Spartans. Auburn has had a great year, but the Tigers haven’t been great in the postseason, and you can’t turn it on and off like that.