Winners and Losers of the Second Round of March Madness

Who shined the most in the second round of March Madness? Who fell short? Let’s dive into a special edition of Winners and Losers.

Winner: 14 Seconds of Madness

Sometimes we’ll say that a March Madness ending is wild, and it’s, like, a play where a guy hits a 3-pointer. College basketball fans are still freaking out about the time that Gordon Hayward almost made a buzzer-beater 12 years ago. We can overhype things.

So I need you to watch the ending of regulation in Sunday’s matchup between top-seeded Arizona and ninth-seeded TCU, which was perhaps the maddest in the history of March. First, Wildcats star Bennedict Mathurin drilled a 3-pointer from the logo to tie the game at 75 with 14 seconds to go. (Yes, it’s an extremely large logo, eating up roughly 25 percent of the court—we’re still counting it as “from the logo.”)

After that, competence completely left the building. Everybody screwed up to varying degrees in regulation’s final 14 seconds. Let me attempt to sum up everything that happens in this sequence:

• TCU has the ball in a tie game with under 14 seconds to go. The ball is in the hands of point guard Mike Miles Jr., who is in a lot of trouble, as he’s stuck in a double-team roughly 40 feet from the hoop. He tries to get around 7-foot-1 Arizona center Christian Koloko, but the nimble big hounds him all the way to the sideline. When Miles turns around, the 6-foot-7 Dalen Terry is there waiting for him. Miles is now trapped by two large, long-armed men. Luckily, TCU has a timeout.
• Miles doesn’t call the timeout. Instead, he spins toward the sideline and half court. There are now 4.5 seconds left on the game clock, and he is moving farther from the hoop. If he steps in one direction, he’ll go out of bounds; if he steps in the other, he’ll commit a backcourt violation. I want to scream this: TCU still has a timeout.
• Somehow, Miles gets an angle on Terry, who essentially tackles the TCU guard to the ground. Miles loses possession, sending the ball skittering free into the backcourt.
• The referees do not call a foul on Terry for tackling Miles, even though tackling is not allowed in basketball.
• In the process of being tackled, Miles also crosses the midcourt line with the basketball. If there was no foul, then Miles surely committed a backcourt violation. But remember: Competence has left the building. The officials also do not call a backcourt violation.
• For some reason, the clock stops briefly at 2.2 seconds. Obviously, the clock on the TV broadcast is unofficial—but we can also see the official game clock on top of the basket stop. It’s unclear why this happened; the clock stops via an automated system controlled by officials’ whistles, and there was no whistle on this play. However, it stops at almost exactly the same moment as the uncalled foul or backcourt violation. It sure feels like someone stopped it in anticipation of a call being made.
• Terry scoops up the ball. The game is tied, and there is nobody standing between him and the basket. He sprints toward the hoop and throws down a dunk.
• The dunk is too late. The buzzer buzzed while Terry was dunking. A layup could have won the game; the extra time required to dunk sent this contest into overtime. Terry sprints down the court to celebrate his basket while his Arizona teammates cringe in horror as they realize the win has slipped through their hands.

This was a Matryoshka doll of basketball confusion. Miles made a series of increasingly poor decisions with the basketball, but he probably got fouled, or committed a backcourt violation, both of which the officials ignored. Terry should have realized he needed to lay the ball in to beat the clock, but even if he had, the temporary clock stoppage meant that the time listed was likely inaccurate. The refs should have blown the whistle on the play, but instead watched in horror like the rest of us. Somehow, all these failures canceled each other out, resulting in overtime and an 85-80 Arizona win.

These 14 seconds were a perfect encapsulation of the chaos of this tournament. This is not March Competence. It’s the other thing, which is infinitely more fun.

Winner: The Strutting Peacocks

In March Madness, the games are supposed to get harder the further that teams advance. As the rounds go on, the good teams survive and the bad ones go home, leaving just the best of the best. It’s like any tournament from a sports movie: The protagonist takes out rando after rando until facing the villain in the finals.

There is only one way to avoid this: be a Peacock. No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s permanently entered the college basketball lexicon on Thursday by knocking off second-seeded Kentucky, a team many expected to make the Final Four. Saint Peter’s had to scratch and claw for that 85-79 win, rallying from a six-point deficit with four minutes to go, forcing overtime, and hitting a series of improbable 3-pointers to pull out the victory.

And although…