San Diego State lost to a better Connecticut team, allowing the Huskies to celebrate their fifth national title and affording the Aztecs all sorts of heartache.
Ed Graney
Ed Graney is a sports columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, covering a variety of topics and the Las Vegas sports scene.
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Former Oklahoma forward Brady Manek has made a major impact in his only season at North Carolina, helping the Tar Heels to the NCAA title game against Kansas.
Here are some of the shining moments that stood out to this columnist over two-plus decades of covering the Final Four.
Gonzaga owned the lion’s share when it came to this whole leaving the West Coast Conference for the Mountain West scenario, but that doesn’t mean the league in which UNLV exists shouldn’t have made the effort.
The Tar Heels have a sixth national championship and are deserving in the sense they proved to be the better of two teams hardly at their best and yet never permitted to be Monday night.
The Rebels need someone to perform selective memory erasure on them — just delete everything from the moment a ball was dribbled at this season’s first practice.
The lure of a big city isn’t enough anymore, because players have figured out they can have a fancy spread in Malibu or Manhattan in the offseason while competing rather than watching once the playoffs commence. The lights just don’t seem as bright.
Barry Rohrssen, a former administrative assistant and director of operations at UNLV under Bill Bayno, is in his first season on John Calipari’s staff at Kentucky. “Slice” has made it to the big time. He never won with the Washington Generals. He hasn’t lost with the Wildcats.
That was then: A group of college basketball players that helped embed into the game a hip-hop culture with how they dressed and what they said and the music blaring from their headphones. They influenced a nation of fans, a team viewed as rebellious by some and yet merchandising giants for corporate America.
Bill Self talks about the ceiling and how every college basketball coach understands where that surface exists for his team each season, that it’s his job to lift players as close to it as possible.
This is what they don’t write about in those lavish recruiting profiles. These are the things you don’t hear about when a prep basketball star signs with your favorite college.
Cinderella stayed home. Forget that Kentucky is an 8 seed and Connecticut a 7. Of those teams that have advanced to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament, all are major programs and three have won multiple national championships.
