EDS: UPDATES with early night games; WILL be UPDATED.
By JIM O’CONNELL
AP Basketball Writer
Belmont came close to joining the “Fab Four.”
True NCAA tournament buffs can reel off the four No. 15 seeds to beat a No. 2 – Richmond, Santa Clara, Coppin State and Hampton.
Duke came close to becoming part of the other half of that list – Syracuse, Arizona, South Carolina and Iowa State.
The Blue Devils’ 71-70 victory over Belmont – that wasn’t assured until the Bruins’ Justin Hare missed a long 3-pointer at the buzzer – wasn’t the only scare a high seed has gotten lately.
Over the last five tournaments, three No. 2 seeds beat a No. 15 by six points or less.
In that same span, five No. 3 seeds have beaten a No. 14 by six points or less.
Two of those high seed scares happened in the same year, and for Duke fans here’s the good news: Both reached the Final Four.
Second-seeded Kansas beat Utah State 64-61 in the first round in 2003, holding on as the Aggies missed two 3-point attempts in the final seconds. The Jayhawks eventually lost to Syracuse in the title game.
Third-seeded Marquette beat Holy Cross 72-68 in that same round and the Golden Eagles won three more games to advance to the Final Four where they lost to Kansas.
The coaches didn’t know what was to come but they both stressed the positive aspects of a close win.
“I’ve seen a lot of teams, including Kansas last year, go pretty far when they struggled to win the first game,” then-Jayhawks coach Roy Williams said after the close win over Utah State.
“I think any time you advance, you’re fortunate,” Marquette coach Tom Crean said five years ago. “That first win is always the hardest because you have to learn how to win.”
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TIRED CHAMPS: Three teams won their conference tournaments last week by winning four games and two of them were quickly gone from the NCAA tournament.
Coppin State, which won the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, lost to Mount St. Mary’s in the opening-round game on Tuesday night.
Georgia, which stunned college basketball with its run through the tornado-delayed Southeastern Conference tournament, lost 73-61 to Xavier on Thursday.
Bulldogs coach Dennis Felton wouldn’t use his team’s long week as an excuse.
“We’re a well-conditioned team,” he said. “I think our team has grown some awfully good toughness in terms of battling through fatigue issues. We’re just coming off an experience where we had a real tangible experience of learning how we don’t have to succumb to fatigue. So I thought we remained aggressive and played really hard all the way to the end. I wouldn’t count fatigue as an issue.”
The lone four-game champion to win its first game was Pittsburgh, the Big East winner, which beat Oral Roberts 82-63.
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SOUR SIXTEEN: One phrase heard most the week leading up to the NCAA tournament is that a 16 seed has never beaten a No. 1. Kansas was the first of the top seeds to play in this tournament and the Jayhawks made it 93 in a row for the No. 1s with an 85-61 victory over Portland State, but it still isn’t the walkover many fans feel it is.
“I love being a 1 seed,” Kansas coach Bill Self said, “but I will tell you this: It is going to happen some time. And when it does, it’s going to be the forever highlight that you’re always reminded of. So I could see, even though you don’t talk in negative terms, you can say, `Hey, we really need to come out and play well early.’
“I was glad we did that because it certainly eliminated any jitters or tension early to allow them to think that they had a good chance. So not that they didn’t have a chance, but when we got up 13-3, I think our guys felt pretty good about themselves.”
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POINT MADE: Joe Crawford matched his career high with 35 points for Kentucky in its 74-66 loss to Marquette, the senior guard’s final college game.
“I mean, I came here to win. That’s what I wanted to do. So I’m just kind of sad right now because I feel like we had a good chance and I’m just kind of down right now,” he said. “But, overall, I’m proud of what we did as a team through the season.”
When Crawford fouled out in the final seconds, Marquette’s Dominic James walked over to him for a few words.
“It was just short,” Crawford said of the exchange. “He just told me, good game, keep my head up.”
Last year, the top individual performance in the tournament was 33 points by Tyler Hansbrough of North Carolina in the second round against Michigan State and matched by Tajuan Porter of Oregon against UNLV in the regional semifinals.
The NCAA tournament record is 61 points by Austin Carr of Notre Dame in a 112-82 victory over Ohio University in the first round in 1970.
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ON THE NUMBER: Billy Crystal could have written a movie about the first three games of the 2008 NCAA tournament.
The three losing teams all finished with the same number of points: 61.
Kansas beat Portland State by 24 points, Michigan State beat Temple by 11 and Xavier beat Georgia by 12.
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BAH HUMBUG: Michigan State ruined any chance of Christmas having a big March.
The Spartans held Dionte Christmas, Temple’s leading scorer with a 20.2 average, to three points on 1-for-12 shooting in their 72-61 first-round victory.
Christmas, a 6-foot-5 junior swingman, came into the game shooting 44.8 percent from the field, including 38.3 percent from 3-point range.
“They took away the 3, took away the drive,” said Christmas, who missed all eight of his shots from behind the arc. “Like Coach said, we couldn’t get into no sets. We had to depend on Mark (Tyndale) coming down, making a lot plays for us. Tom Izzo, the job he does with that program is great. That’s a great defensive team. That’s probably the toughest defensive team I played all year, all my career.”
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BAD HALF: There are bad halves and then there’s Kent State’s opening 20 minutes against UNLV and Winthrop’s second 20 against Washington State.
Kent State scored 10 points in the first half in falling behind by 21 points on the way to a 71-58 loss.
Winthrop scored 11 points after being tied at halftime of its 71-40 loss.
Kent State was 5-of-24 from the field, including 0-for-7 on 3-pointers, and committed 17 turnovers in the first half. The Golden Flashes entered the game shooting 46.7 percent from the field, 36.9 from 3-point range and averaging 14 turnovers.
It was the fewest points scored in a half in the shot clock era.
Then came the Eagles.
They were 4-for-24 from the field, including 2-for-11 on 3-pointers, in the second half. Winthrop had been 12-for-28 and hit half of its eight 3-point attempts in tying the fourth-seeded Cougars after 20 minutes.
Kent State senior forward Haminn Quaintance was asked what coach Jim Christian said to the team at halftime.
“Coach is not going to lie to us,” Quaintance said. “He let us know that we wasn’t playing with any heart, which we really wasn’t. And we wasn’t playing the way that we played the whole season to get here; that we had to step it up. And if we were going to come back we had to battle, which was the truth.”
The lowest-scoring game in tournament history was North Carolina’s 20 points in a six-point loss to Pittsburgh in a regional final in 1941.
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