Kansas State jumped out to a 13-1 lead to start the game against the team now favored to win the South regional.\u00a0 But Kentucky came back quickly and created a game that stayed close throughout.<\/p>\n
Kentucky kept dumping the ball into PJ Washington down low, and he kept drawing fouls.\u00a0 He managed to foul out three of Kansas State’s players, including their leading scorer for the night, Xavier Sneed.\u00a0 But while he was fouling out the Kansas State team, he was missing his free throws, going only 8 for 20.\u00a0 So, with 1 minute and 14 seconds left, Kansas State gets the ball tied at 58 and decides to go with a 5 guard lineup.<\/p>\n
The largest player on the court is 6’4″.\u00a0 Barry Brown drives to the basket late in the shot clock and gets the ball blocked out of bounds by Washington.\u00a0 He gets another chance and throws up a desparation shot in the lane to just beat the shot clock, and misses again.\u00a0 But KSU’s Cartier Diarra somehow amongst the bigger Kentucky players gets the rebound and called timeout.\u00a0 This time, Brown would get a third chance, and it was the charm as he drove hard to the basket and hit the layup just barely over Washington’s attempt to block it.<\/p>\n
Quade Green quickly tried to take the ball up the court and missed a wild three point attempt, and KSU’s Amaad Wainwright grabbed the board and was quickly fouled.\u00a0 Wainwright only made one free throw giving Kentucky one last chance – but Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s three pointer at the buzzer missed.\u00a0 Kansas State had pulled the upset.<\/p>\n
Kentucky’s John Calapari had complained about being sent to Boise and having to play in a region of conference champions (there were 10 conference tournament champs and 2 regular season champs).\u00a0 So, there has to be a lot of irony that Kentucky did great in Boise, and then when they were in Atlanta, Georgia – where their fans were in abundance, they lost to one of the 4 non-champions, Kansas State.\u00a0 Make it even more ironic – it was the first time Kansas State had beaten Kentucky in school history.<\/p>\n
After that exciting game, I flipped over to notice that #9 seed Florida State was up big against Gonzaga.\u00a0 They managed to make sure that Gonzaga never made a late run and took out #4 Gonzaga 75-60.<\/p>\n
Since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, only two 9 seeds had ever made the Elite 8 (Boston College in 1993 and Wichita State in 2013).\u00a0 Tonight, two more 9 seeds have made their way to the Elite 8.\u00a0 \u00a0Congratulations to Florida State and Kansas State on their major upsets.\u00a0 \u00a0 So, we have #9 Kansas State vs #11 Loyola – Chicago and #3 Michigan vs #9 Florida State for one half of our Elite 8 – I imagine most of us didn’t pick that.\u00a0 Have to love March – anyone has a chance to win the National Championship, and these 4 teams are seizing that opportunity, even if no one else thought they could do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kansas State jumped out to a 13-1 lead to start the game against the team now favored to win the South regional.\u00a0 But Kentucky came back quickly and created a game that stayed close throughout. Kentucky kept dumping the ball into PJ Washington down low, and he kept drawing fouls.\u00a0 He managed to foul out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324","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=1324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1325,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions\/1325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}