Sports Then and Now

Danny Ainge made a magical shot to defeat Notre Dame in the 1981 NCAA Tournament.

Welcome to Part 2 of the Ultimate March Madness List. Today, we explore moments 40-21.

40. 2003 Syracuse-Kansas
Syracuse’s Hakim Warrick blocks a potential tying 3-point shot by Kansas’s Michael Lee with 0.7 seconds left to preserve the 81-78 win and securing the first national championship for Syracuse and coach Jim Boeheim.

39. 1998 Washington-Connecticut
On the third shot attempt in the final eight seconds of the game, UConn’s Richard Hamilton hits a short fade away jumper at the buzzer that wins the game for the Huskies 75-74 in their Sweet Sixteen game with Washington and sends UConn to the Elite Eight.

38. 2008 Davidson
Stephen Curry, son of former NBA player Del Curry, becomes the star of the 2008 Tournament as he leads his Davidson Wildcats on a memorable run to the elite eight.

Curry scores 40 points in Davidson’s first round matchup with Gonzaga, followed by a 30-point performance in the second round against Georgetown as he outscored the Hoyas 25-22 in the final 14:24 of the second half to lead the Wildcats back from a 17-point deficit, then scored 33 in a rout of Wisconsin in the Sweet Sixteen, and then 25 in a two-point loss to Kansas in the Midwest Regional Final. Read the rest of this entry →

The NCAA Basketball Tournament gives small schools the chance to wear Cinderella's glass slipper.

So how does your NCAA bracket look? If yours is anything like mine, the toughest choices have not been in picking Final Four teams, but instead in trying to predict which school will come out of nowhere to crash the party.

Almost every year at least one school that is familiar only to people within its home area code suddenly becomes a national darling thanks to an upset, or near upset, of a team with significantly more national recognition. These schools are often referred to as “Cinderella” and just to avoid the kind of confusion that occurred at my house the other night when my five-year old daughter heard a promo for the NCAA Tournament and thought it meant one of her favorite princesses was going to be playing basketball, in this case Cinderella does not have flowing blonde hair, a glass slipper or a Fairy Godmother.

Rather, the typical Cinderella of the NCAA Tournament is a school that has been playing good basketball throughout the year, but has stayed under the radar while schools from the power conferences hog the national television spotlight and spots in the national polls. One of the endearing elements of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament is that the opening rounds of the tournament are the one time each year when those power conference schools must share that spotlight with schools that aren’t so familiar to a national audience. Read the rest of this entry →

Big Red players and fans react as the Cornell name is revealed during the NCAA Tournament selection show. Cornell is seeded 12th in the East Region and will play 5th-seeded Temple in the first round.

For three years running, making history or ending droughts has been as common for the Cornell men’s basketball team as gorges are to the university’s location in Ithaca, NY. The 2007-2008 team finished 22-6 to establish a school single-season record for wins en route to capturing the Big Red’s first Ivy League Championship in 20 years. That team also became the first in school history and only the 13^th in league history to go undefeated in league play at 14-0.

Last season’s club went 21-10 overall and 11-3 in the league while becoming the first Ivy League team other than Penn or Princeton to win back-to-back league titles. Cornell’s 2009-10 team has set an abundance of individual and team records lead by 6-foot-7 senior sharpshooting forward Ryan Wittman who became the Big Red’s all-time leading scorer (1,974 points) and was named the Ivy League Player-of-the-Year. However the biggest news for Cornell (27-4) this past regular season came on Feb. 1 when the Big Red was ranked 25^th in the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll, its’ first national ranking in 59 years.

Cornell remained ranked in the same poll the following week on Feb. 8 when it climbed to No. 22. After suffering their only league loss of the season, a 79-64 setback at Penn on Feb. 12, the Big Red fell out of the poll. However, Cornell has not lost since and has appeared in the others receiving votes category in each poll since then while ending the regular season on a seven-game winning streak. Read the rest of this entry →

Michigan's "Fab Five" made an improbable NCAA Tournament run in 1992.

We have entered the month of March which means one thing for diehard sports fans: March Madness.

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is regarded as perhaps the greatest sporting event in America because of the great individual performances, mid-majors knocking off the giants of college basketball, and the many last-second buzzer beaters.

Here I have compiled the Ultimate March Madness List, a countdown of the 65 greatest moments, performances or stories to come out of the NCAA Tournament.

The reason I chose 65 is pretty obvious with there being 65 teams in the tournament.

Included in this list, all of the some greatest runs in the tournament in which a team complied more than one memorable moment during their journey in March.

Now that I have made myself clear, here is Part I of the Ultimate March Madness List, starting with moments 65-41.

65. 1981 Wichita State-Kansas
Living up to their nickname, the Wichita State Shockers upset their intrastate rival, the Kansas Jayhawks, 66-65 in their Sweet Sixteen matchup as Wichita State guard Mike Jones makes two baskets from more than 20 feet in the final 45 seconds.

64. 1986 Kansas-Michigan State
The Jayhawks, aided by 10 extra seconds of play while the game clock was stopped at 2:21, erase a six-point deficit in the final minute to force overtime where they would outscore the Spartans 16-6 in overtime for a 96-86 win in their Sweet Sixteen matchup.

This incident leads the NCAA to require that referees use television replays to fix timing errors. Read the rest of this entry →

Maya Moore and the UConn women's basketball team has towered over their competition for the last two years.

According to the old saying, the only things certain in life are death and taxes. It might be time to modify that phrase to make it death, taxes and a dominating victory by the Connecticut women’s basketball team.

The Huskies didn’t just defeat West Virginia to win their 72nd straight victory; they annihilated the eighth ranked team in the country 60-32 to claim their 16th Big East title.

The old adage of “on any given night” just doesn’t seem to apply to the Huskies as they have taken the game to a new level. Since the start of the 2008 season, the Huskies have been playing in a different stratosphere than all other teams in women’s college basketball.

The Huskies did not eclipse their own women’s basketball record for consecutive victories by posting a bunch of late game comebacks and last second victories.

To the contrary, they have won each of their 72 straight games by double digits and only 17 times (24%) has the victory margin been under 20 points. They have won eight games by more than 50 points and 41 (57%) by 30 or more points. Read the rest of this entry →

The 1991 NCAA Tournament win by Richmond over Syracuse marked the first time a 15 seed had ever defeated a number two seed.

When the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament begins later this month there will be lots of talk about Cinderella’s and which previously unknown teams from obscure conferences will shatter the Final Four dreams of schools from top-tier leagues.

For more than a quarter century, schools from one mid-level conference have set the standard for crashing the dance during March Madness.

Based in the mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast, the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) has created an impressive resume of NCAA Tournament upsets.

Even before the league officially formed in 1985, some of its original members were harassing the “big boys” during the NCAA Tournament.

Between 1981 and 1983, James Madison University (as a member of the CAA predecessor the ECAC South), made three consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament and each season knocked off a big conference opponent. Their victims were all marquee programs in West Virginia, Ohio State and Georgetown.

JMU also nearly pulled off what would have gone down as one of the biggest upsets in tournament history as they gave eventual National Champion North Carolina all they could handle during the second round of the 1982 NCAA Tournament. UNC needed a controversial charge call on JMU in the final minute to pull out a 52-50 victory.

The University of Richmond (a member of the ECAC South and then a CAA member from 1985-2001) is now known as the only team in NCAA Tournament history to win games as a 12, 13, 14 and 15 seed, however, in 1984 they were a national unknown when head coach Dick Tarrant led the Spiders into the tournament. Read the rest of this entry →