Sometimes I really like doing a theme for the art on top of these newsletters. These are the three genres of NCAA Tournament Head-Touching — horror, confusion, and joy.

– Rodger Sherman

Coaches are often treated like the stars of college basketball. The players hang around for two or three years while the coaches remain for decades, so we mythologize the brilliant men in suits on the sidelines. On Sunday, we got one of the biggest matchups of Headline Coaches of the NCAA Tournament: The second-ever meeting between Rick Pitino and Bill Self, both two-time national champions in the Top 50 of the all-time wins leaderboard.

The game ended with coaching hubris: Kansas lost when Self rolled out a galaxy-brained endgame strategy that backfired spectacularly.

The Jayhawks rallied furiously to tie the game with 14 seconds remaining, but St. John’s had the ball and plenty of time to hit a game-winning shot. Kansas had one unusual advantage in the situation: The Jayhawks had only committed two fouls in the second half, meaning they could commit four fouls without sending St. John’s to the line for game-winning free throws.

Self decided to use all four fouls.

His idea was to bleed the clock so that the Johnnies had less time to put up a potential game-winning shot. The Jayhawks stretched 14 game-time seconds out to several real-time minutes thanks to all the fouling, leaving St. John’s with about four seconds on the clock. But that was enough time for junior guard Dylan Darling, who drove all the way to the hoop for a relatively easy game-winning layup.

Here’s the sequence in full:

In hoops, good process doesn’t always lead to good results. Sometimes you play great defense and the guy drills a contested 45-footer. Sometimes you leave somebody wide-open and they brick it.

But I still think Self’s late-game tactics were poorly thought and poorly executed, making St. John’s game-winner significantly easier.

And so, the winning genius was Rick Pitino, who after the game laughed about a mistake he made in the late-game. He agreed to Darling’s request to run the final play for himself, then later remembered that Darling hadn’t scored all game, calling it “the funniest thing I’ve ever been involved with.” Sometimes, it’s better to roll with a bad-but-simple strategy instead of fishing for a perfect solution that becomes an overcomplicated mess.

Our friends at Homefield Apparel dropped a ton of new hoops attire for Mach Madness:

—First up, they’ve added a bunch of new schools to their collection of sick retro shooting shirts modeled after the real on-court items worn by iconic college hoops teams of the past.

I’m partial to the 1987 Providence Final Four shirt featuring the Hoopin’ Friar and the 1987 Final Four logo, which is a basketball riding a riverboat playing the trumpet.

—And they’ve added the Campus Court collection — heavyweight hoodies with retro mesh shorts. You could actually play basketball in these … or you know, you can just look cool while watching basketball.

The champs are out! For the first time since 2023, a 1-seed has lost before the Sweet 16. (Apparently beating Prairie View A&M by one million points is not an indicator of future success.)

Iowa beat Florida on this game-winning three by 6-foot-10 Spaniard Alvaro Folgueiras:

Wanna talk about late-game strategies not going as planned? Iowa wanted to call timeout once it got the ball across halfcourt. The ballhandler, Bennett Stirtz, changed the plan on the fly when he saw Folgueiras open. (BTW, incredible inbounds pass by Cooper Koch to hit Stirtz moving in stride despite exceptional defense.)

And Florida’s plan, believe it or not, was to foul. Some analytics folks believe that fouling up two is a good strategy in situations like this — and Florida has those exact analytics folks on staff!

It makes sense: The average free throw shooter in college basketball shoots 72 percent from the line, which means there’s roughly a 50-50 chance they miss at least one of two shots. And even if Iowa had been fouled and hit both, Florida would have had the ball in a tied game with a chance to win. Instead, Florida couldn’t foul and gave up a game-winning three … which is another one of the reasons why analytics folks recommend fouling in that scenario!

Iowa hadn’t made the Sweet 16 since 1999, but did it in Year 1 under Ben McCollum. Two years ago, McCollum was the head coach at Division II Northwest Missouri State, where he won four national championships. Last season he coached Drake, bringing along four starters from Northwest Missouri. That short stint was a big success: Drake went 31-4, made the NCAA Tournament, and upset Missouri in the first round.

McCollum is using the same blueprint at Iowa: Four of the Hawkeyes’ starters came with McCollum from Drake. (Only one, Stirtz, has followed McCollum all the way up from Northwest Missouri. Stirtz led Iowa in scoring and is a likely first-round pick in this year’s NBA Draft, though he had a bizarre off-night against Florida.)

Iowa’s upset win feels like a sign of a new paradigm in college basketball. A record eight first-year coaches won NCAA Tournament games this year. Often, those teams are being led by the best player on the new coach’s old roster, much like how Curt Cignetti won the football national championship with a bunch of rebranded James Madison Dukes.

Perhaps you’ve spent this NCAA Tournament wondering, “Where is Cinderella?” Well she’s here, on this Iowa team, wearing fancy new princess clothing.

There are some positives and some negatives to the fact that the women’s NCAA Tournament has the first round hosted at home sites rather than neutral venues.

The cons: It makes it hard for visiting team.s to pull upsets — as I type this, every 1/2/3/4 seed is through to the Sweet 16

The pros? This noise:

That’s Minnesota’s Amaya Battle sending the Golden Gophers to their first Sweet 16 since 2005. There was almost a conflict that would’ve sent Minnesota on the road, as the high school basketball tournament is usually hosted in Minnesota’s quirky old home venue, affectionately known as The Barn. But the school’s athletic director realized before the season that the team might be good enough to host, and got the high schools to delay their games by a week. Good call.

The Huskies forced OT, but then Olivia Miles made the two plays of the game: This sick wrap-around pass for a wide-open three, and this tough finish:

One of the biggest questions of the early tournament for me has been how Iowa State would look without its best player, Joshua Jefferson, who hurt his ankle early in its first-round game against Tennessee State. OK, it turns out!

Nothing specific about this game, which the Boilers won thanks largely to 24 points on seven shots by Fletcher Loyer. (Edit: originally called him FOSTER Loyer, his older brother who used to play for Michigan State. Whoops!) But I forgot to mention the other day that senior point guard Braden Smith set the all-time NCAA record for assists in the Boilermakers’ first NCAA Tournament game, surpassing a record set by Bobby Hurley in 1993. Smith didn’t play a COVID year or anything, just four normal seasons of college basketball, all at the same school. (Rough couple of weeks for Hurley, who just got fired by Arizona State.)

Illinois State’s football team won back-to-back-to-back-to-back road games to reach the FCS Championship. Now Illinois State’s basketball team is trying to win a series of road games to win the NIT. (They just LOVE prolonged road trips for not-quite-top-tier championships.) Here’s a buzzer-beater by Johnny Kinziger to beat Wake Forest:

I’ll bring you buzzer-beaters wherever I can find em. So far I’ve gotten the men’s and women’s NIT. Still looking for the WBIT and College Basketball Crown.