Final Four Men's Preview: a Weekend of Classics, and the Promise of More

Michigan State’s Cassius Winston, right, with Aaron Henry after Sunday’s win over top-seeded Duke sent the Spartans to the Final Four.CreditCreditPatrick Semansky/Associated Press

by Marc Tracy

April 1, 2019

WASHINGTON — The first games of last year’s N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament made plenty of memories: Virginia’s historic first-round upset; the beginning of Loyola-Chicago’s fun Final Four run; Nevada’s exciting upset of second-seeded Cincinnati.

But you may hardly remember that tournament’s regional semifinals and finals, the games over the second long weekend. Some were close, others not. Only Kansas’s 80-76 overtime win over Duke registered as a classic. Even the Final Four felt like little more than the predetermined coronation of a dominant Villanova.

The contrast represented a trade-off. The theory went like this: If you want the wonderful anarchy of a crazy and unpredictable first weekend, you might have to settle for latter rounds with more than their share of lopsided matchups and consequent blowouts. In turn, a by-the-numbers opening weekend by all rights ought to lead to the best basketball of the season, as 16 superior teams scrap against each other for one national championship.

With this year’s Final Four field set after second-seeded Michigan State’s 1-point victory over the top overall seed, Duke, on Sunday, the second part of that bargain has been consummated. After one of the two chalkiest first and second rounds ever, the regionals produced the best N.C.A.A. tournament second weekend in 20 years, and potentially set up two or three more great games.

This year’s regional semifinals included No. 2 Kentucky’s squeaker over No. 3 Houston and No. 5 Auburn’s surprise upset of No. 1 North Carolina. Top-seeded Virginia barely survived the only double-digit seed left, No. 12 Oregon, and No. 3 Purdue required overtime to knock out No. 2 Tennessee.

And the regional finals on Saturday and Sunday outdid those games. Texas Tech, a scrappy bunch led by a sophomore, Jarrett Culver, who is actually from Lubbock, Tex., upset top-seeded Gonzaga on Saturday. The Virginia-Purdue game went to overtime after Virginia’s freshman point guard, Kihei Clark, made a heads-up, half-court pass to Mamadi Diakite, who hit a buzzer-beater to tie the score. Virginia advanced in overtime.

Sunday’s first game also went to overtime, with Auburn eventually upsetting Kentucky. That left only No. 2 Michigan State vs. No. 1 Duke, an instant all-timer that included the stunning defeat of college basketball’s ultimate front-runner and its massive star, Zion Williamson.

Tre Jones, Duke’s wise freshman point guard, had put it best on Saturday, referring to the combined 3 points by which Duke had eked out wins in its previous two games. “We are really living the March Madness thing out to the fullest,” he said.

That is how we got where we are. On Saturday in Minneapolis, at the Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium, No. 1 Virginia (33-3) will play No. 5 Auburn (30-9), and then No. 2 Michigan State (32-6) will play No. 3 Texas Tech (30-6).

Auburn lives by the 3-pointer. But it also plays stifling defense, and that prevented its dying by the 3 when it shot poorly in its win over Kentucky. That extra gear will come in handy when they face Virginia’s pack-line defense, which is specifically good at stopping deep shots. The Spartans-Red Raiders game, meanwhile, should be a slugfest between two extremely physical teams.

Of the Final Four, only Michigan State counts among the half-dozen biggest names in the college game, but do not let that fool you. If all these programs do not have the same pedigree, all these individual teams belong.

On Sunday, Auburn coach Bruce Pearl anointed the Tigers “the Cinderellas of this tournament.” It helped that they had just successively bumped off three of the sport’s most redoubtable blue bloods, Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky. It also helped that Pearl is an enthusiastic salesman (at best; we will be hearing more about the “at worst” of his career over the next week).

If Auburn is the Cinderella, though, that makes this a very loaded field. Auburn won the Southeastern Conference tournament only two weeks ago, and it is the 11th-best team in the country according to the KenPom rankings (Loyola-Chicago was 31st at the same time last year). Michigan State won the Big Ten tournament. Virginia was the Atlantic Coast Conference regular season co-champion. Texas Tech was co-champion of the Big 12, by several metrics the strongest league in the country this year.

It is the first Final Four for both Auburn and Texas Tech — similar to the favorites-heavy tournament of two years ago, which also featured two first-timers, South Carolina and Gonzaga, who were emphatically not long-shots of the Loyola-Chicago (or Butler, or George Mason, or Virginia Commonwealth) variety. That, too, was a tournament that began with unusually few upsets.

Dane Fife, the Michigan State associate head coach, offered some theories that could explain these recent influxes of first-time Final Four participants drawn not from the pool of out-of-nowhere mid-major teams but from the leagues that dominate contemporary college basketball and, with the right coaches, can have access to its best players.

“We’re losing a lot of kids early — us as a college basketball business — and the transfers have really spread the wealth,” Fife said, referring to the increased prevalence of one-and-dones (and even two-and-dones) at the top programs where the best players tend to congregate anyway.

“That’s added to the parity in college hoops,” he said.

Texas Tech, for instance, has three seniors who were nonetheless effectively recruited by third-year coach Chris Beard, transferring from other programs. (Fife noted that Michigan State also had looked at Matt Mooney, a guard who had played at Air Force and South Dakota before electing to transfer to a high-major team.)

Virginia and Michigan State, the two favorites, are constructed with a pinch of young talent (the Virginia sophomore De’Andre Hunter, likely to be a first-round draft pick; the Michigan State freshman Aaron Henry, a big part of Friday’s win over Louisiana State); a dash of transfers or otherwise randomly obtained players (Virginia’s Braxton Key, who came from Alabama; Michigan State’s Kenny Goins, a one-time walk-on); and plenty of heavily developed upperclassmen.

It was difficult not to notice that John Calipari’s Kentucky and Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke, college basketball’s two premier homes to one-and-dones and the only two programs to win national titles recently on the backs primarily of freshmen, were the ones that lost within hours of each other Sunday.

“I thought they played older than we did,” Krzyzewski said of Michigan State. “But that’s happened to us — we are young.”