SI:AM | Recapping a Wild First Weekend of March Madness

Plus, an outrageous finish to a college hockey game.

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I hope this all makes sense, because I’m awfully groggy from staying up late to watch TCU-Arizona.

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This year’s Cinderellas are starting to emerge

Every year, the expectations for March Madness are high and the tournaments alway deliver. This year has been no exception. On Sunday alone, two double-digit men’s seeds and two double-digit women’s seeds scored upsets to advance to the Sweet 16. Let’s break everything down.

We’ll start with the men’s tournament, because the first two rounds have been completed. The story of the opening rounds is obviously Saint Peter’s, the No. 15 seed that stunned Kentucky on Thursday and then defeated Murray State on Saturday to become the first MAAC team to reach the Sweet 16.

But the Peacocks are the lone Cinderella left in the field. Even more surprising, they’re the only team left that isn’t in a power conference. (I’m excluding Houston, because the AAC is a much better basketball conference than it is a football conference, and Gonzaga, which is, you know, Gonzaga.) The other big upsets of the weekend were scored by North Carolina, Michigan, Iowa State and Miami—not exactly mid-major darlings.

The lack of lovable underdogs doesn’t mean this hasn’t been a good tournament, though. The UNC-Baylor and Memphis-Gonzaga games Saturday were fantastic, as was Duke’s win over Michigan State yesterday. But the best game of the weekend was TCU-Arizona. If you didn’t stay up late like me to watch it, here’s what you missed.

The Wildcats won 85–80 in overtime behind 30 points from Bennedict Mathurin. The game almost ended in regulation after a frantic sequence that could have given both teams the win. With the game tied at 75, Arizona doubled TCU guard Mike Miles near the half-court line, where he was bumped by the Wildcats’ Dalen Terry and lost the ball. No foul was called, nor was Miles called for going over and back. Terry picked up the ball, raced toward the basket and dunked the ball home. But time expired just before he put the ball through the hoop, so the game went to OT. (You can watch the full overtime here.) The nail in TCU’s coffin was a putback dunk by Arizona’s Christian Koloko in the final seconds.

On the women’s side, Sunday’s first day of second-round action featured two No. 10 seeds knocking off No. 2 seeds.

First, Creighton defeated Iowa, 64–62, to advance to the Sweet 16 in the Greensboro Region. It’s the program’s first Sweet 16 appearance. The dagger for the Bluejays was a deep three from Lauren Jensen, who transferred from Iowa, that gave Creighton the lead with 12.6 seconds left. (Iowa star Caitlin Clark had 15 points, 11 assists and eight rebounds, but shot just 4-of-19 from the field.) Here’s what Jensen had to say after the game:

“It’s crazy,” Jensen said, grinning at the podium afterwards as she tried to find the words to describe her performance. “It’s honestly so surreal. I feel like it hasn’t really sunk in yet that we’re going to the Sweet 16, and the fact that it was here—I’m still kind of processing that one a little bit.”

Later in the day, South Dakota shocked Baylor with a wire-to-wire 61–47 win. The Coyotes jumped out to a 16–4 lead by the end of the first quarter and never looked back.

The rest of the women’s second round will be played today (beginning with Kansas State–North Carolina State at 4 p.m. ET on ESPN), with three more double-digit seeds still alive and hoping to punch their tickets to the Sweet 16. Keep an eye on No. 11 seed Princeton—fresh off an upset victory over SEC tournament champion Kentucky—in a matchup with No. 3 Indiana in Bloomington.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Today’s Daily Cover is a fun one. Harvard mammalogist Hopi Hoekstra explains everything that’s wrong with college mascot suits:

First, Goldy Gopher has a big, floofy tail. But a real gopher has a little nub tail, which is characteristic of subterranean rodents. I thought for a moment that this mascot might actually be a beaver, because its tail is almost flat and paddle-like. But a beaver’s tail isn’t furry; it’s scaly.

Emma Baccellieri thinks Carlos Correa and the Twins could be perfect for each other. … To Kevin Sweeney, Saturday’s Murray State–Saint Peter’s game was the perfect example of “what makes college basketball special.” … The stakes weren’t as high as they usually are in El Clásico, but Barcelona still made a statement with its 4–0 win, Avi Creditor writes.

Around the Sports World

Illinois’s R.J. Melendez was called for a really weak technical foul for hanging on the rim against Houston. … Kelvin Sampson celebrated the Cougars’ win by taking his shirt off in the locker room. … A private investigation by Boston’s former police commissioner determined that David Ortiz was targeted by an accused drug kingpin when he was shot in 2019. … The lawyer representing 22 massage therapists says no NFL team reached out to him during Deshaun Watson’s recruitment last week. 

The top five...

… … non–March Madness moments of the weekend:

5. This amazing save by Augsburg midfielder Niklas Dorsch after his goalie was caught out of position.

4. Ohio State won its first women’s hockey national championship.

3. A men’s college hockey tournament championship game had to be restarted after a 40-minute delay because the supposed game-winning goal actually went under the goal frame.

2. The wild finish to last night’s Warriors-Spurs game.

1. LeBron James passes Karl Malone for second on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.

SIQ

Serendipitously, this question has a tie-in to Friday’s SIQ. On this day in 1946, Kenny Washington (Jackie Robinson’s college teammate) and Woody Strode broke the NFL’s color barrier by signing with which team?

• Bears
• Rams
• Browns
• Giants

Check tomorrow’s newsletter for the answer.

Friday’s SIQ: Which MLB team did Jackie Robinson try out for in 1942?

Answer: The White Sox. Robinson and another Black player, pitcher Nate Moreland, showed up unannounced at the team’s spring training site in the shadow of the Rose Bowl in Robinson’s hometown of Pasadena and asked to be given an opportunity to try out for the club.

White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes was familiar with Robinson before he showed up to the park that day. In 1938, Dykes’s team played an exhibition game against a youth team called the Pasadena Sox. After a 19-year-old Robinson impressed Dykes with his play in the game, Dykes reportedly said, “Geez, if that kid was white, I’d sign him right now.”

Baseball was not any more welcoming to Black players four years later when Robinson and Moreland tried out in Pasadena, so they had no realistic shot of actually making the team. But the tryout was about making a point, and, paradoxically, that could be precisely why so little is known about that day.

According to a 1997 article in the Chicago Tribune, Robinson never mentioned the tryout in any later accounts of his life. It wasn’t covered contemporaneously in any of Chicago’s newspapers, either, including the city’s Black paper, the Chicago Defender. The only paper that did cover Robinson and Moreland’s trip to Sox camp was the Daily Worker, a publication of the American Communist Party.

The author of that Tribune piece, William Hageman, wrote that the Communist Party may have even set up the tryout and that perhaps Robinson was hesitant to recall that day due to anti-communist sentiment:

“One theory that would explain the lack of news coverage and Robinson's reluctance to mention the tryout is that the Communist Party—a longtime advocate of breaking baseball's color barrier—set it up and persuaded the two to go. That could explain how a Daily Worker reporter was on hand, and why Robinson—in the America of the 1940s and ’50s—would not publicize a connection with the American Communist Party, however innocent.”

Robinson was drafted into the U.S. Army later that year and wouldn’t play pro baseball until 1945 with the Negro American League’s Kansas City Monarchs.

Moreland lived in Robinson’s neighborhood after moving to Pasadena as a teenager and the two went to high school and junior college together. He went on to pitch 14 seasons in the Negro National League and Mexico.

From the Vault: March 18, 1968

Greg Nelson

My favorite Sports Illustrated cover to receive in the mail growing up was the classic March Madness preview issue with the Where’s Waldo?–esque collage of mascots. “Where’s your team?” was always a fun game to play.

But I have to admit that I like the approach the magazine took in 2016 as well. There were four regional covers to the March Madness preview issue that year, featuring Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield, Iowa’s Jarrod Uthoff, North Carolina’s Brice Johnson and UConn’s Breanna Stewart.

I’m not quite sure how No. 7 seed Iowa ended up getting one of the cover spots, but the other two men’s teams featured ended up faring very well. SI picked North Carolina, Oklahoma, Kansas and Michigan State to go to the Final Four. Hield’s Sooners and Johnson’s Tar Heels did advance out of their regions, joined by No. 2 seed Villanova and No. 10 Syracuse. (The Wildcats would win the title on Kris Jenkins’s unforgettable buzzer beater. And Stewart was voted Most Outstanding Player after the Huskies won their fourth consecutive championship.) Give the editors of SI credit for getting half of the last four men’s teams right.

Check out more of SI’s archives and historic images at vault.si.com.