Get ready for a truly Elite Eight

Upsets in the NCAA tournament are treasured, but this one promises to give us the best vs the best.

Houston’s Milos Uzan

As anyone with a modem and a screen has noticed, fans are difficult to please.

The regional finals of this men’s NCAA basketball tournament are set. All four No. 1 seeds are alive and so are three of the four No. 2 seeds. That leaves Texas Tech, a No. 3 seed and the only team to win at Houston this season.

Two years ago, the Final Four consisted of a No. 4 seed, two No. 5s and No. 9. This was the product of an upset epidemic, during the first two weeks, that was pure cotton candy to the casual NCAA fan. The sugar high wore off quickly two weekends later, and what followed was one of the more soporific Final Fours in recent history, with Connecticut stomping San Diego State in the final.

Now we have the revenge of the elites. Half of the final eight is from the SEC.. All eight are among the top nine in the KenPom.com ratings (Gonzaga, No. 8, was the only interloper), and their combined record is 189-36. Yet you keep hearing this low-grade discontent. What happened to Cinderella? Where’s the romance?

Those questions will dissolve if Saturday’s Duke-Alabama game turns out to be half as good as it looks, or if Saturday’s Houston-Tennessee rockfight takes on Old Testament ferocity. The best teams have turned out to be the best teams. The reason is found on the calendar.

Of the 62 most prominent players on the regional final rosters, only 10 are freshmen, and five of those belong to Duke. Thirty-two transferred in from somewhere, or from several somewheres; Auburn is the fourth institution of higher learning for Chad Baker-Mazara. There are 28 players in that group who are seniors or graduate students, including six of Auburn’s top seven.

Several of those players might have been fueling lower-seeded teams to upsets, in the days before the portal and NIL and play-for-pay took over. Mark Sears of Alabama, who hit 10 three-pointers against Brigham Young Thursday, played in NCAA games at Ohio U. Johni Broome of Auburn, who will be the national Player of the Year if Duke’s Cooper Flagg isn’t, succeeded at Morehead State and, in fact, played well enough against Auburn in the 2022 season opener to impress Bruce Pearl, coaching at the other bench. Later that year Broome scored 20 against Xavier, and his team lost a first-round NCAA game to West Virginia.

Alabama’s Grant Nelson starred at North Dakota State, Tennessee’s Chaz Lanier was a sharpshooter at North Florida and Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr. was the best player at Iona. Remember when Lehigh’s C.J. McCollum engineered an upset of Duke? Today McCollum might have checked out greener hardwood by his sophomore year. This is all a great advertisement — check out tomorrow’s NCAA heroes today — for the so-called mid-major conferences and even Division II, where the basketball was always better than any of the TV-conference broadcasters suspected. But we had to wait until the NCAA tournament to see it.

There was a kid from Davidson in 2008 who dropped 42 on Gonzaga, 30 on Georgetown (after trailing by 17 in the second half) and 33 on Wisconsin to get to the Final Eight. His uniform hung on him like scarecrow garb, and he wasn’t equipped to make razor-blade commercials, but he took over the tournament for a while. Then he decided to conquer a higher league. Today’s Steph Currys have already left the Davidsons behind.

Older teams can handle upset scares, can stop them before they become permanent scars. Michigan State looked woefully heavy-footed for most of the game against Mississippi Friday, but handled the dread well enough to come back and win, 73-70. Auburn trailed Michigan and its band of transfers by nine with 12:26 left and scored 20 of the next 22 points, winning by 78-65.

Houston had to beat Purdue several times in its Round of 16 game, and overtime loomed with 2.3 seconds left, with a black-and-gold Indianapolis crowd poised to make a difference. But Milos Uzan, who transferred from Oklahoma, in-bounded the ball underneath the Purdue basket and then stepped over the line to accept a return pass from JoJo Tugler. The layup won a 62-60 grinder for the Cougars.

Uzan, who had hit six 3-pointers with six assists, wasn’t hindered by any Purdue defender. He clearly saw the play develop, with teammates setting a pick for L.J. Cryer, usually the team’s best shooter. Purdue’s Braden Smith followed Cryer to the right wing, which allowed Tugler to take advantage of another screen and cut toward Uzan, to take his pass. The Boilermakers were outnumbered at the rim, and Tugler connected with Uzan for probably the easiest two points of the night for Houston.

“We had three reads on the play,” coach Kelvin Sampson said, “and the third one worked. The execution was great.”

Six of the 10 best players in the country, according to KenPom’s metrics, are still in the tournament: Flagg, Broome, Clayton, Sears, Toppin and Tennessee’s Zakai (ZZ Rocky Top) Zeigler. Flagg is averaging 19 points, 7.5 rebounds and 4.3 assists this season, and one of the fascinations is whether Alabama’s all-court game and depth will bring untold wonders out of Flagg’s game. Comparisons are cheap, but at 6-foot-9 (or 10) Flagg seems to be the next iteration of tall skill, a modification of the genre that Magic Johnson started. Flagg has the same knack for exquisite and instant decision-making, without the flamboyance. The ball rarely stops with him, and he’s totally plugged into the good-to-great philosophy of shot selection.

But Flagg’s teammates would be just fine anywhere and with anybody, as they proved when he was out with a bad ankle. The Blue Devils are shooting 57 percent in three NCAA games, and 47.4 percent on deep shots. If anything, this Duke team proves that Mike Krzyzewski’s final decision, to hand over the whistle to Jon Scheyer, was one of his wisest..

And now Duke will have to beat the best to earn its sixth national championship, which is as it should be. The Cinderella fable, with all the George Masons and Fairleigh Dickinsons and UMBCs, is one of the drivers of NCAA tournament lore. But when you get to this point, it’s more fun to dance with the stars.

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