SI:AM | UConn and Vanderbilt Join Growing List of Week’s College Hoops Upsets

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I hope you got the chance to watch some ski mountaineering this morning after I hyped it up yesterday. If not, NBC put the women’s gold medal race on YouTube.

In today’s SI:AM:
🇺🇸 U.S. men’s hockey survives
🟠 Inside Myles Garrett’s record-breaking season
🏀 How Belmont built a college hoops winner

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Upsets galore

It’s been a bad week to be one of the top teams in men’s college basketball. Nearly half of the ranked teams that faced unranked opponents this week lost those games. There were six such upsets on Tuesday and another two on Wednesday.

Tuesday’s victims were as follows:

No. 9 Nebraska lost to Iowa, 57–52
No. 13 Texas Tech lost to Arizona State, 72–67
No. 16 North Carolina lost to NC State, 82–58
No. 18 Saint Louis lost to Rhode Island, 81–76
No. 21 Louisville lost to SMU, 95–85
No. 24 Wisconsin lost to Ohio State, 86–69

As if that wasn’t enough, Wednesday night had two more upsets. Missouri knocked off No. 19 Vanderbilt, 81–80, and No. 5 UConn lost to Creighton, 91–84.

Of all this week’s numerous upsets, UConn’s was the most shocking, for a variety of reasons. The Huskies were the highest ranked of the eight upset victims and the only one to lose at home. (They fell in Storrs to a thoroughly mediocre Creighton team, which has a 14–13 record and is 8–8 in Big East play).

“The defense has been a joke,” UConn coach Dan Hurley told reporters after the loss. “It was a game of just really bad individual defense. Our defense has been so bad. We’ve been playing with fire. Obviously, overall defense was just dreadful.”

UConn has been struggling of late. It saw its 18-game winning streak snapped on Feb. 6 with a loss to St. John’s at Madison Square Garden, then survived a scare on Saturday against an unimpressive Georgetown team on Saturday. The Huskies are still 24–3 on the season, but they haven’t looked like the same team that racked up impressive non-conference wins over BYU, Illinois, Kansas and Florida earlier in the season.

One reason for UConn’s recent struggles is that star forward Alex Karaban has been hampered by an unspecified leg injury. Karaban, a four-year starter for the Huskies, scored just two points in the loss to Creighton, the first time since his freshman season that he failed to score more than two points in a game.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have played Alex today,” Hurley said. “He said he was fine, but he’s dealing with something physically. He was not moving around well there on the court. He was a shell of himself.”

With just four games left in the regular season, the loss to Creighton may have cost the Huskies a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. There are several excellent teams in college basketball this season that can make a compelling case for a top seed. Michigan should be the No. 1 overall seed, and Houston, Duke and Arizona could fill out the rest of the top line. Iowa State is also a possibility after its win over Houston on Monday.

But UConn’s tournament seeding isn’t its primary impediment to winning a third national title in four years. The Huskies need to start playing as they did early in the season, otherwise they’ll be in danger of making an early March Madness exit.

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Quinn Hughes shoots the puck — Quinn Hughes kept the United States in medal contention with an overtime goal against Sweden. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

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Despite giving up a late goal that forced overtime, the U.S. men’s hockey team never seemed to waver against Sweden. Michael Rosenberg details how its poise was rewarded with a trip to the semifinals.
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The top five…

… things I saw yesterday:
5. Mississippi State junior Josh Hubbard’s 35 first-half points. He hit nine three-pointers in the half and finished with 46 points in a 91–85 win over Auburn.
4. Vanderbilt’s half-court buzzer beater attempt against Missouri that went in and out.
3. Artturi Lehkonen’s overtime game-winner for Finland against Switzerland.
2. Mitch Marner’s overtime game-winner for Canada against Czechia.
1. Quinn Hughes’s overtime game-winner for the U.S. against Sweden.