Man, I guess the number one seed was going to win all along.
It’s finally over — the 2024 NCAA Basketball Tournaments (men’s and women’s) ended with a bang this weekend. The winners? For the men, the University of Connecticut Huskies put away their sixth national title, all won in the last quarter century — more than any other team in that time frame. By repeating as national champs, UConn overtakes Duke in the all-time national championship leaderboard, tied with North Carolina and behind Kentucky. It’s one of the most impressive runs in recent memory, and for the University of Connecticut, it’s broadly representative of the masterclass that Dan Hurley has been able to put together. While UConn will be fishing for a threepeat this upcoming year, it’ll depend more on the way their new players perform, especially since it appears they’ll be losing a chunk of this team to the NBA draft this year. While it’s been a hell of a ride, this upcoming year will be a test of Hurley’s rebuilding skills as the university will retool for the future.
On the other hand, Purdue is probably ecstatic at this result. Painter has been struggling to lose the image of a coach who can’t make it past the first weekend, and putting together an incredibly deep run this year has almost certainly bought him a few more years, and a bit more goodwill in West Lafayette. Losing is disappointing, and while Purdue will be losing Naismith Player of the Year and all-around tall white boy Zach Edey to the draft, they’re still a scary team. With shake ups across the sport, there’s a good chance they’ll be able to keep making deep tournament runs under Painter. Unless they run into another crazy lookin’ 16 seed, which will probably send the entire state of Indiana into palpitations.
Meanwhile, in the women’s tournament, an undefeated South Carolina handily put away Caitlin Clark and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, winning their second chip in three years. It’s a crazily impressive result for veteran coach Dawn Staley, and a legacy-defining result for a team that has been up-and-coming for the past half decade. She puts together incredible teams year on year, and unfortunately for Iowa, they ran into a buzzsaw this year.
The result is a bit disappointing for Caitlin, leaving her without a single national championship in her four years at Iowa. With back to back losses in title games, Clark goes on to the WNBA having put more eyeballs on women’s basketball than ever before — to the point where the women’s title game had more viewers than the men’s title game this year.
Meanwhile, that’s it for Coach Calipari at Kentucky, as a decade-long coaching tenure ended unceremoniously when Cal skedaddled in the middle of the night for a job at prestigious basketball loser Arkansas. Jumping ship within the SEC may lead to a few riots in Lexington, but the seat at Kentucky was getting less and less comfortable. Since the pandemic, Cal hasn’t made it past the second weekend, and losing in the round of 32 just doesn’t cut it when Kentucky is paying you about three million and change every semester to make one of the best college teams in the country. Unfortunately for Cal, in an era of NIL and pay-to-play, his teams of one-and-done NBA stars are simply unable to really play against sixth-year seniors and other experienced veteran players. Hopefully, Arkansas will be a solid place to work on the Xs and Os.
Who’s his replacement? Well, good Lord, the Mormons are comin’, with Mark Pope ditching his job at BYU for all the coffee and premarital contact with women imaginable. Jumping from the Brigham Boys to an actual program, especially a blue-blood like Kentucky is a huge leap, but it’s one we’ve seen work out on many different levels in the NCAA. If Pope can make a bunch of guys who can’t drink hot tea good at ball, who knows what he’ll be able to do with scrawny 19-year-olds who have their eye on the team incompetent enough to land a lottery pick.
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