By Peter Murphy ’25
These past couple weeks have been jam packed with college basketball. Like many others, I have been on the edge of my seat while watching some of the best college basketball teams in the country compete against each other for the NCAA championship. Every team has done tremendously well, but as we all know, only one out of the 68 teams can come out victorious.
The National Championship has come and gone, and our NCAA Championship team this year is the Kansas JayHawks! But we can’t finish covering a great March Madness tournament without going back to what led to The Jayhawks winning. The Final Four teams this year included Kansas and Villanova playing and undoubtedly one of the biggest matches of the year was Duke and UNC. The reason for this being a big match up is because this was the final game of Duke’s head coach, Coach Krzyzewski. The last time Duke and UNC played this season, UNC came out with the win at the expense of Duke being the home team. UNC eventually came out with the win against Duke again, 81-77, but it wasn’t without controversy as the entire Duke basketball team besides Coach K and player Wendell Moore, went out into the locker room without shaking UNC’s hand after the game. The Kansas Jayhawks faced off against Villanova in the final four and won the game 81-65. They then played against UNC and claimed the National Championship, 72-69.
The biggest standout of this tournament this year was the biggest Cinderella teams ever seen in the past couple years. This team would be the Saint Peter’s Peacocks. A team that many of us have never heard of before, single handedly beat Kentucky, Murray State, and Purdue. Not only did these teams that Saint Peter’s played have some of the top players in the country in high school on their team, the financial gap for athletics with these teams are astounding. Kentucky, for example, had built an arena for their basketball team that cost a stunning 241 million dollars, while Saint Peter’s arena was only six million dollars to make.
Overall, this college basketball season has been more than exciting. It has been full of upsets, blowouts, and thrills. So many teams have been through many ups and downs, and all deserve their spot to participate in this year’s tournament.
