NCAA Basketball

Connecticut became the first Division I men’s college basketball team to win back-to-back championships since Florida 17 years ago, as the Huskies downed Purdue 75-60 in the NCAA title game Monday.

“You can’t even wrap your mind around it because you just know how hard this tournament is,” UConn head coach Dan Hurley said after the game in Glendale, Arizona. “What a special group of people, a special coaching staff and incredible group of players. The best group of players you could possibly do it with and UConn. UConn’s a special place this time of year and they give us all the resources we need to do it like this in March and April.”

The Huskies (37-3) have now won six national championships, joint-third in the all-time men’s NCAA Division I basketball list. All six have come since 1999, more than any other men’s team in that span and second only during that time to the school’s women’s team (10).

That this started, or restarted, with a then-75-year-old Jim Calhoun nearly kicking Dan Hurley’s ass is so perfectly Connecticut that the scene should replace the state flag. It was early spring of 2018. Hurley was the recently named UConn head coach and Calhoun was the retired patriarch of the program, one whose endorsement helped secure Hurley’s hiring.

Hurley’s first practice with his inherited team was an abomination. He’d left a job he loved at Rhode Island because UConn is a premier brand in college basketball, a place that, at the time, had won four national titles in the prior two decades. But what Hurley saw didn’t look like anything he was expecting. It was so bad Hurley called his agent to ask about backing out of the deal and seeing if Rhode Island might take him back. The agent explained to Hurley that the buyout in his contract made such a move impossible, so Hurley had to accept that he might’ve made a mistake.

The situation was so dire that Hurley eventually walked into Calhoun’s on-campus office, where he worked while assisting the school as a quasi-statesman. As Hurley remembers it, the conversation began with him telling Calhoun something like: “This is bullsh–. Nothing is in place. This is UConn. Where’s the infrastructure? What’s been going on here?”

Calhoun looked at the cocky 45-year-old. Then, never one to suffer timidity, he introduced Hurley to the real UConn Basketball.

Though they were physically separated from Oats and his full-time assistant coaches, the graduate assistants, dressed in matching black polo team shirts, kept up a loud chatter — read: they never shut up — throughout Alabama’s 89-87 victory. With curious media members seated courtside peeking back to see what all the fuss was about, Alabama’s graduate assistants hyped up their team, worked the referees, reinforced Oats’s points of emphasis and repeatedly stole North Carolina’s play-calls throughout the nail-biter.

Oats sang the group’s praises Friday, noting they helped his full-time assistants prepare scouting reports and video breakdowns of upcoming opponents.

Soon, Samford trailed Kansas 90-89 with 14 seconds left.

Then came the play.

Kansas, wearying, inbounded against Samford’s habitual press. Point guard Dajuan Harris Jr. took the ball, spotted teammate Nicolas Timberlake behind the defense and went all Mahomes, all makeshift left-handed. The 6-foot-4 Timberlake fielded the long pass, dribbled once, stepped twice and leaped up to score.

From behind, the 6-foot-5 Staton-McCray flew in. He crossed behind Timberlake and lunged upward. Timberlake crashed to the floor, which in real time screamed foul. Staton-McCray immediately protested the call, and the crowd joined in with him.

Sitting at the dais in his hometown's arena, Kentucky men's basketball coach John Calipari was something close to shell-shocked after his No. 3-seeded Wildcats' improbable 80-76 loss to No. 14-seed Oakland.

Now 1-4 in his past five NCAA tournament games, matching the program's worst five-game span in the tournament, Calipari considered what Thursday night's loss could mean for his approach to constructing the team's roster.

"I've done this with young teams my whole career, and it's going to be hard for me to change that, because we've helped so many young people and their families that I don't see myself just saying, 'OK, we're not going to recruit freshmen,'" Calipari said.

It's time to get those No. 2 pencils out, and brackets printed.

March Madness has arrived.

The official brackets for the men's and women's NCAA Division I college basketball tournaments were revealed Sunday evening, with the final list of the 68 selected teams showing a lot of excitement – and a few surprises.

Whether you're one of the roughly 68 million Americans expected to place a bet on the tournament, or you're just looking for an easy entryway into the March Madness conversation with some insider lingo (Cinderella, anyone?) – here are some highlights to pay attention to heading into Tuesday's kickoff:

Dreams die hard, particularly in March.

The Big East found that out Sunday as three 20-win teams -- Providence, Seton Hall and St. John's -- were all snubbed by the NCAA selection committee.

St. John's arguably had the biggest gripe of the three. It finished 20-13 overall, winning six games in a row -- four of them by at least 14 points -- before a loss to overall No. 1 seed UConn in the Big East semifinals on Friday.

I'm psyched for this tournament after this crazy championship week. It's gonna be good

College Basketball is back!

In a long-anticipated ruling, the Independent Resolution Panel (IRP), a judicial board part of the Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP), ruled on Wednesday that Kansas men's basketball would have to vacate its wins from the 2017-18 season. That includes removing from official record any formal acknowledgement of its 2018 Final Four appearance, which means the banner inside Allen Fieldhouse commemorating that Final Four appearance will be coming down.

The vacation of wins stems from illegal payments made to former Kansas player Silvio De Sousa.