The Latest on the first round of the NCAA Tournament (all times Eastern):
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1:45 p.m.
LSU’s Tremont Waters is giving Yale fits in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.
The Tigers’ 5-foor-11 point guard is hitting shots, blowing by defenders and making everything happen for the third-seeded Tigers in the East Region.
LSU leads the 14th-seeded Bulldogs 45-29 at halftime thanks partly to Waters’ 13 points and six assists. Waters was a staggering plus-19 in a little more than 18 minutes on the court.
Yale, the best 3-point shooting team in the Ivy League this season, missed 14 of 17 from beyond the arc.
-Mark Long reporting from Jacksonville, Florida.
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1:30 p.m.
Minnesota has taken a 50-38 lead over Louisville early in the second half of the first game of the day, no doubt buoyed a bit by a friendly crowd with the arena in Des Moines, Iowa, just 250 miles south of campus.
Louisville has the most famous fan in the building on its side, with movie star Bill Murray sitting in the seats in support of his son, Luke Murray, who’s an assistant coach for the Cardinals. Luke Murray followed head coach Chris Mack from Xavier, where Bill Murray used to show his allegiance.
Just like in the movie ”Caddyshack,” Murray is having trouble with Gophers. Amir Coffey had 13 points in the first half.
– Luke Meredith reporting from Des Moines, Iowa
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1:25 p.m.
Florida State forward Phil Cofer was not in uniform for warmups before the No. 4 seed Seminoles’ game against No. 13 seed Vermont. He was wearing a protective boot on his right foot.
The 6-foot-8 Cofer has averaged 7.4 points and 3.5 rebounds. He missed the Seminoles’ first nine games of the season with a right foot injury suffered during a preseason practice. Cofer has started 19 games this season, including the last 15.
– Pat Eaton-Robb reporting from Hartford, Connecticut
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1:05 p.m.
The journey to the NCAA Tournament has been such a whirlwind that Iowa forward Nicholas Baer got confused about where he was.
Hawkeyes players were among the first to meet the press on Thursday morning, and Baer was asked if he thought the team had gotten the attention it deserved this season. Baer started out OK, delivering a standard reply.
”We never get too concerned about attention or anything like that,” he said. ”Obviously we have an opportunity to play in the NCAA Tournament. That’s something that we’re grateful for and really looking forward to this opportunity to play in Cincinnati, and hope we’ll be here for a while.”
But he wasn’t in Cincinnati.
A reporter tried to help him out.
”It’s Columbus, you knew that?”
Baer recovered: ”I did know that.”
The Hawkeyes do play Cincinnati in the first round, though, on Friday afternoon at Nationwide Arena in Ohio’s capital city.
– Mitch Stacy reporting from Columbus, Ohio
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12:45 p.m.
Washington has rewarded coach Mike Hopkins for returning the Huskies to the NCAA Tournament with a contract extension through the 2025 season.
The contract extension was announced on Thursday. The ninth-seeded Huskies open the NCAAs on Friday against No. 8 seed Utah State. It’s Washington’s first appearance in the tournament since 2011.
Hopkins is 47-21 in his two seasons at Washington, turning around a program that won nine games the season before he arrived. He’s twice been named the Pac-12 coach of the year and the Huskies ran away with the Pac-12 regular season title this year.
Terms of the contract were not announced.
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12:40 p.m.
As excited as Oklahoma’s Kristian Doolittle is for the NCAA Tournament, he’ll pass on watching the opening-round games deep into Thursday night.
”I’m going to go to sleep tonight,” he said. ”We play at 12:30 (Friday). Can’t be up too late.”
The ninth-seeded Sooners (19-13) face No. 8 seed Ole Miss in the NCAA’s South Regional, the first of four games Friday in Columbia, South Carolina.
Doolittle is a 6-foot-7 junior third on the team with 11.2 points a game. He’s part of his second straight NCAA team, following Oklahoma’s first-round loss to Rhode Island in overtime a year ago.
”We put a lot of work into this game, game planned really well for Ole Miss,” he said. ”And we get a new mindset of this could be our last game.
– Pete Iacobelli reporting from Columbia, South Carolina
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12:15 p.m.
The first round has begun in Des Moines, Iowa, with coach Richard Pitino’s Minnesota team facing Louisville, the team that fired his father, Rick Pitino, in 2017.
Pitino downplayed the matchup this week, saying that ”all that other stuff didn’t even really cross my mind.”
The Gophers are the No. 10 seed in the East Region, looking for their first NCAA Tournament win since 2013. Pitino is seeking his first such victory in six seasons at Minnesota. The Gophers should benefit from a friendly crowd, since they’re playing less than 250 miles from campus.
Louisville is the No. 7 seed, a five-point favorite to advance and likely face Michigan State – who the Cardinals beat in November- for a trip to the Sweet 16.
– Luke Meredith reporting from Des Moines, Iowa
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12:10 p.m.
The buzz of an unprecedented Duke-North Carolina national championship game has been building all month. That’s the consensus from the crowd of bracket-pickers across the country, too.
As the deadline approached for finalizing those predictions in office pools and just-for-fun family contests, 36.6 percent of entrants on ESPN’s online platform picked Duke to win it all. Next was rival North Carolina at 15.8 percent, followed by the other No. 1 seeds Gonzaga (8.9 percent) and Virginia (8.3 percent).
Over at Yahoo, Duke was named as the champ on a whopping 46.6 percent of entries, with North Carolina coming in next at 16.1 percent. Gonzaga (9.0 percent) and Virginia (6.5 percent) followed.
Duke tips off against North Dakota State on Friday night in the East Region.
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11:30 a.m.
Millions of brackets are filled with millions of guesses, and it’s time to find out how they fare.
The crush of March Madness hits Thursday with 16 games in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Reigning champion Villanova is playing, and so is Michigan, the runner-up from last season.
Kansas and Michigan State are also in action, two of the more popular picks each year.
Murray State’s Ja Morant is going up against Marquette’s Markus Howard, a matchup of two of the biggest stars in the field.
The action begins just after noon Eastern with seventh-seeded Louisville playing No. 10 seed Minnesota.
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More AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/MarchMadness and https://twitter.com/AP-Top25
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