Quinnipiac’s Cinderella run ends in Sweet Sixteen

The game finished up in the wee hours of the morning.

Next up: The victor of (2) Oregon State/(3) Florida State, Monday at 9pm ET. This is the Bears’ fourth Sweet 16 under coach Scott Drew, but they haven’t been to a Final Four since 1950. Martin has kicked himself about it ever since.

USC will play Florida at 2:20 p.m. Sunday on CBS. “I can speak on behalf of the whole team when I tell you that we appreciate it from the bottom of our hearts”. We’re excited, I know they are, and then we just got to go out and figure it out. That’s not the way we practice. When I was an assistant at Florida, Billy (Donovan) and I were at a coaching clinic where Frank spoke.

“You know, they put up with me, which is not easy to do”, Martin said.

“There’s no doubt in our mind that we can pull off another upset”, forward Jen Fay said.

The NCAA East Regional returns to Madison Square Garden tonight.

Sindarius Thornwell scored 24 points and seventh-seeded SC cruised past third-seeded Baylor 70-50 on Friday night in the East Regional semifinals, the Bears’ worst NCAA Tournament loss.

“They imposed their will defensively upon the basketball game, plain and simple”, Seth Greenberg said. Which team will win? They know what type of player he is. Just the Garden itself gives you that edge that you need to play. They add toughness. They add all the intangibles that go with great technique.

Baylor shot 25% in the first half.

“I learned how to make peace instead of being the problem, I sat down with Frank a lot”, Felder said. But at SC, that chance was about as likely as the Cubs winning the World Series. Baylor was averaging 45 points in the paint. South Carolina’s dream run ends tonight. Instead, Baylor settled for heavily contested midrange shots. USC raced out to a 16-0 lead in the first quarter.

A demoralizing 70-50 loss Friday to SC played a significant part, no doubt. “They’re physical, they get after it”, Robinson said. It was really impressive.

The second half had more of the same. In postseason play, the SEC and NCAA Tournaments, Davis is averaging 17.2 points per game, up from 11.8 in the regular season. Martin said familiarity with Baylor’s match-up zone helps some but more so the Gamecocks benefit from having played zone teams Syracuse and MI.

“We’re both two tough defensive teams and we take pride in the defensive end”, White said after beating the Badgers with an overtime buzzer-beater.

He’s the only major conference player to have 10 games with at least 10 free throw attempts, according to Sports-Reference, and the most glaring game is when he made 25 out of 33 from the line against Alabama.

Martin’s been cooking with the right ingredients for the last couple of seasons in Columbia, but no one could’ve predicted the type of season that the SEC Player of the Year Sindarius Thornwell had. “They shut Baylor down all night long”.

For if your only reference point for the Gamecocks coach heading into tonight’s Sweet 16 game against Baylor is that of the drill sergeant persona he projects during games, it would be easy to mistake him for a more ornery version of former IN coach Robert Montgomery Knight, were such a thing possible.

“I’m very confident. Whether I miss shots, I still just got to keep shooting it because if I don’t, I kind of feel like I’m hurting my team by not shooting it”, Allen said.

This is to take nothing away from the charismatic SEC Player of the Year, who has rightly broken out into tourney-hero status thanks to his first-weekend performances and long-underrated, all-around excellence.

It began in a graceless chaos of bumped bodies and wayward shots, reminiscent of the ugliness enacted by the defenses of the last good National Basketball Association teams to call this storied arena home. This is a team that’s rediscovered its identity-superb defense, established post scoring, and Koenig’s three ball-and is riding one hell of a wave right now, making the prospect of watching the East much more entertaining than a Duke-Villanova clash would have.