When someone sent out the memo that this was supposed to be a tournament with no upsets, they forgot to inform the 11 seeds.<\/p>\n
First, Xavier continues to deny the odds.\u00a0\u00a0 In a late January game against St. John’s, the Musketeers lost their star guard Edmond Sumner to an ACL injury.\u00a0 They went through February in a free fall, only being able to beat DePaul.\u00a0\u00a0 But Xavier managed to upset Butler in the Big East tournament to show they could still beat at-large talented teams to get into the tourney.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then, yesterday, they were only one of two teams to pull an upset based on seeds – beating Maryland 76-65.<\/p>\n
Today, USC came back from double digits for the second time this week to upset 6 seed SMU 66-65.\u00a0\u00a0 I am still surprised by how often this happens.\u00a0 Every year, there are a couple teams that people say didn’t deserve to make the tournament (although this year has been a little bit more quiet than usual).\u00a0 And every year, I find myself writing that you should pick that team to win – they seem to be so thankful the Selection Committee chose them, they play out of this world.\u00a0\u00a0 Welcome to the Second Round, USC Trojans – you have proven that you deserve to be at the dance.<\/p>\n
Finally, Rhode Island went from potentially not even being in the tournament about a week beforehand, to winning the Atlantic Tournament, to beating Creighton 84-72.\u00a0 What an amazing couple of weeks of momentum for the Rams.<\/p>\n
The only 11 seed who hasn’t played is Kansas State – who won their First Four play-in game against Providence.\u00a0\u00a0 Considering Kansas State was the other team in the list of teams mentioned as lucky to be in the tournament considering they had a losing record in the Big 12, and that the other three 11 seeds won, I would not be happy if I was 6 seed Cincinnati.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When someone sent out the memo that this was supposed to be a tournament with no upsets, they forgot to inform the 11 seeds. First, Xavier continues to deny the odds.\u00a0\u00a0 In a late January game against St. John’s, the Musketeers lost their star guard Edmond Sumner to an ACL injury.\u00a0 They went through February […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1040,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions\/1040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}