Winners and Losers of the NCAA Tournament’s First Round

The first two days of March Madness included legendary performances from Oakland’s Jack Gohlke and Iowa State’s Audi Crooks, a host of upset wins by mid-majors, and another flop from John Calipari and Kentucky. Here are the winners and losers of the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

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

Loser: The John Calipari Way

John Calipari enjoys a spotlight, but probably not the one he’s getting all too familiar with after another embarrassing loss in the first weekend of the men’s tournament. This latest early exit came in an 80-76 loss to no. 14 seed Oakland (Kenpom’s 130th-ranked team) out of the Horizon League (20th-ranked conference) Thursday night. And this one comes two years after Calipari’s team lost as a 2-seed to Saint Peter’s in the opening round.

The loss led to a postgame roast session of Calipari, who makes $8.5 million a year and has produced the kind of results he’s previously deemed unacceptable.

Calipari’s teams aren’t just losing, they’re losing to teams you have never heard of before. I think Rodger Sherman was the only person outside of Jersey City who seemed to think the Peacocks would prevail before they knocked off Kentucky in 2022. Don’t act like you knew Oakland was in Michigan before Thursday night. Nobody was touting the Golden Grizzlies as a potential Cinderella—don’t call them that, though—coming into the tournament.

Calipari’s team of future first-round picks got torched by a Division II grad transfer named Jack Gohlke (more on him later). Kentucky’s Reed Sheppard, who went third in the latest Ringer NBA mock draft, scored three points in 26 minutes. Rob Dillingham, another projected lottery pick, went 2-for-9 from the field. If you want to know how poorly the Kentucky freshmen played, just ask Calipari himself:

Calipari isn’t wrong, but he’s the guy making a bunch of money to get those guys ready to play in March. Not too long ago, he was awfully confident that he had done that:

But Kentucky didn’t win a single postseason game after Calipari needlessly raised expectations for a group that struggled on defense the entire season. This Kentucky team experienced plenty of highs, including a couple of 100-point performances in conference play and an impressive road win against Tennessee in the SEC regular-season finale, but this Wildcat team had more red flags than a Love Is Blind contestant. Kentucky’s talent made it an intriguing team, and in theory, it should have been built for March. But it had a coach who isn’t—and never really has been. It’s just become more apparent in recent years.

If you’ve consumed any coverage of Kentucky’s loss, you’ve likely heard that Calipari has a $33 million buyout if the athletic director Mitch Barnhart decides to put an end to this decadent era of Wildcats basketball. And it would be understandable if that’s the conclusion. Afterall, it’s been 12 years since Calipari coached Kentucky to a national championship, and nine years since Cal’s last Final Four appearance.

Here’s a general rule of the coaching business: If you’re reading about a buyout in the press, it’s probably too late for the coach to save his job. The hard questions will be asked in coming days, and Barnhart might arrive at the conclusion that Calipari is the best it can do for now. The 65-year-old coach may have lost his fastball, but he’s still bringing in loaded recruiting classes with regularity. But it’s worth asking if his recruiting chops are as valuable as they once were. Even when Kentucky was raising conference championship and Final Four banners with regularity, the strategy of building around first-year players was questionable. Now, it feels like malpractice.

In this era of college sports, top programs are bringing in experienced talent via the transfer portal, and that trumps the talent advantage Cal’s teams have historically enjoyed—as we saw in last year’s tournament loss to a Kansas State team loaded with transfers. It’s fitting that the one star who showed up for Kentucky on Thursday was fifth-year senior Antonio Reeves, an Illinois State transfer who scored 27 in the loss. If things are going to work out for Calipari he may need to change the way he builds his roster and look for more players like Reeves. It doesn’t sound like that will happen any time soon.

It’s stunning that Calipari doesn’t seem to be aware of the problem. “It’s changed on us,” he added. “All of a sudden, it’s gotten really old. So we’re playing teams—our average age is 19. Their average age is 24 and 25. So do I change because of that? Maybe add a couple older guys to supplement.”

Kentucky’s incoming recruiting class is loaded. Calipari has signed three top-50 players, per 247sports, including five-star recruit Jayden Quaintance, so expectations will be sky-high once again next season. There will be no excuses if this happens again and another talented Kentucky team gets sent home early; don’t think that will stop Calipari from making them anyway.

Winner: Oakland … and Skeptics of Dribbling and Defense

Basketball purists insist that dribbling and defense are fundamental skills, but Jack Gohlke showed just how overrated these concepts can be in his star-making performance amid Oakland’s upset of Kentucky. Gohlke scored 32 points on 10 made shots, and he took a total of just four dribbles on those plays. The former star at Division II Hillsdale College was ruthlessly efficient with his time on the ball.

Apparently putting the ball on the floor is unnecessary when you can zip around screens, rise up, and hit a contested jump shot. That’s the thing about Gohlke’s performance: The degree of difficulty was stupidly high. This wasn’t a guy making wide-open corner 3s. He was making off-balanced jumpers with defenders draped all over him. Per Synergy Sports, only two of his 20 shots were “unguarded.” Every other shot was contested. Kentucky’s defenders were never quite able to run Gohlke off the 3-point line, but they were able to stay attached while chasing him around screens all over the court. Gohlke’s breakout wasn’t the product of bad defense, his buckets were earned. Gen-Z Chandler Bing was hooping.

Gohlke did not take a single shot inside the 3-point arc, which is par for the course for him. He’s attempted just eight two-pointers all season. He’s made only three layups and attempted only six shots in the paint on the year, per Synergy. Gohlke has one bit and he’s committed to it. His season-long shot chart is as absurd as you think it’d be:

His performance against Kentucky was another master class in 2-point shot avoidance for the 24-year-old guard. This is what Charles Barkley sees in his nightmares about analytics:

Gohlke fell one 3-pointer short of the men’s tournament single-game record, set by Loyola Marymount’s Jeff Fryer in 1990, but has already done enough to solidify a permanent place in tournament lore. He checks all the boxes for March legend certification: a quirky game, a big performance in an upset win, a zero-star recruit origin story, and the look of someone who will go pro in something other than sports. Harold Arceneaux, Omar Samhan, and Ali Farokhmanesh need to make room at the table.

While Gohlke was the standout, I promise that the Horizon League champion Golden Grizzlies did have other players on the court. Trey Townsend, Oakland’s leading scorer on the season, chipped in with 17 points, 12 boards, and four assists. DQ Cole scored 12 and grabbed eight rebounds. That trio scored 69 of Oakland’s 80 points in the win, and all three looked like they belonged on the court with Kentucky’s future pros. And Oakland’s longtime head coach, Greg Kampe, looked as if he belonged on the big stage with Calipari. Kampe, a prolific sweater-wearer and the nation’s longest-tenured coach, had the better game plan and kept Kentucky’s stars in check, while the Wildcats had no answers for the Bears’ top players.

Oakland’s win over Kentucky ended a dry spell of 14-over-3 upsets. In the previous eight tournaments, we had only seen one—Abilene Christian over Texas in 2021—after getting five over a four-year stretch from 2013-2016. Next, Kampe’s squad gets 11-seed N.C. State after the Wolfpack extended their own miracle postseason run with a convincing win over Texas Tech on Thursday. Oakland will need more scoring balance to pull off another upset. Unless, of course, Gohlke can just turn into a non-dribbling, defense-immune superhero once again.

Winner: Scoring Exactly 40 Points

As fun as Gohlke’s game was, the most impressive individual performance of the first round of either the men’s or women’s tournament (thus far) belongs to Iowa State freshman Audi Crooks, who dropped 40 points in a win against Maryland on Friday. And she needed only 20 shots to do it. Crooks made 18 of her 20 attempts from the field and became just the second player in college basketball history to score 40 points on at least 90 percent shooting. You may have heard of the first player to do it:

All of Crooks’s points were scored in the paint, but she scored in various ways: 19 points on post-ups, eight points on put-back opportunities, and six points in transition.

Crooks has been unguardable on the block throughout her freshman campaign. The 6-foot-3 center is averaging 18.9 points per game and 7.7 rebounds on the season, and more than 12 of those points come on post-up plays, according to Synergy. Crooks posts up opponents at the country’s sixth-highest rate, and only Kansas State’s Akoya Lee, a senior, averages more points per game on those plays. If Crooks isn’t already the country’s most dominant post threat, it’s only a matter of time before she earns that title.

Crooks will get another chance to score 40 when Iowa State takes on no. 2 seed Stanford in the second round. With Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, USC’s JuJu Watkins, and Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo starting their tournament journeys on Saturday, there’s a good chance she’ll be joined in the 40-point club by the time that game tips off on Sunday.

The only man in that 40-point club so far this year is Oregon’s Jermaine Couisnard, who dropped exactly 40 points on his former team in a win over sixth-seeded South Carolina.

We don’t get to see a revenge game in the NCAA tournament too often, but Couisnard, who played three seasons for the Gamecocks and transferred after a coaching change in 2022, did not squander his chance to show out on his old team. He made 14 of 22 shots from the field, including five of nine from deep. The Gamecocks didn’t have an answer for him anywhere on the court. He did a little bit of everything for a Ducks team that has now won six straight games.

After the game, Cousinard insisted that he had no hard feelings for his former team, but he did admit that hearing an old teammate talk trash got him fired up after his slow start in which he turned the ball over on his first three possessions. He eventually hit back-to-back 3-pointers to break out of his slump midway through the first half, and he never looked back.

Loser: Basketball Stereotypes

Yale’s John Poulakidas may not have scored 40 on Friday, but he earned the hooper’s seal of approval with a dazzling display of shot-making in his team’s upset win over Auburn. This wasn’t your typical Ivy League performance. Poulakidas’s 28-point master class included several stepback jumpers, often with a defender’s hand directly in his face. This bucket over two Tigers defenders gave Yale a lead it would never surrender:

Poulakidas was far from a one-man show, but he required very little assistance on his big day. Per CBBAnalytics, none of his 10 makes from the field were assisted by teammates. This was pure bucket-getting by the junior forward.

uburn coach Bruce Pearl never figured out a way for his team to slow down Poulakidas. He switched up the defensive matchups and Auburn’s ball screen coverages, but none of the adjustments worked. One of the nation’s best defenses had no answer for a guy who averaged 13.5 points in the Ivy League. The nerds aren’t just setting solid screens and making smart backdoor cuts. They’re out here playing iso ball and embarrassing SEC defenders who dare to guard them (just ignore the block):

The Ivy League champ has now advanced out of the first round in back-to-back seasons. The 13-seed Yale will play 5-seed San Diego State on Sunday for a chance to make it consecutive Sweet 16s for the nerd league.

Winner: Double-Digit Seeds That Don’t Play Like Double-Digit Seeds

For the first time since 2019, every 1-seed and 2-seed advanced past the first round of the men’s tournament. In fact, 14 of the 16 teams on the top four seed lines made it to the weekend, with only 3-seed Kentucky and 4-seed Auburn missing the cut. Chalk has mostly prevailed in this tournament, so congratulations, cowards. This is your year in the office bracket pool.

While the upper crust of this year’s field made it through the first round largely intact, the mid-tier teams have had a harder time. The 5- and 6-seeds went a combined 3-5 and finished the first round with a point differential of exactly zero over the tournament’s first two days. That means the upset winners didn’t just scrape by. They took it to their high-seeded opponents.

Duquesne, an 11-seed, set the tone for the rest of the round by bullying 6-seed BYU in a 71-67 win on Thursday afternoon. The Atlantic 10 champs were the more athletic team. They switched matchups on the perimeter to disrupt the Cougars’ five-out offense. They attacked, took BYU defenders off the dribble repeatedly, and completely shut down the paint on the defensive end. Aly Khalifa, the passing center who serves as the focal point of the BYU offense, was held scoreless and looked like he didn’t belong on the court at times. The Cougars, who finished tied for fifth in the Big 12, didn’t have anyone who could hang with Duquesne’s guards. Point guard Dae Dae Grant led the Dukes in scoring with 19, and it was Jimmy Clark III who put the game away late with a crucial steal and the game-sealing bucket in the final seconds.

Before the season, BYU was picked to finish last in the Big 12 because of concerns about the team’s toughness in America’s most physical league. The Cougars did just fine and made it through their first power conference season with a winning record. They beat Kansas in Lawrence, they nearly swept Iowa State, and they gave Houston a scare in Provo. Against the Dukes, though, BYU looked more like the team Big 12 media expected to see in conference play.

Duquesne’s win extended the career of coach Ken Dambrot, who coached LeBron James at St. Vincent–St. Mary High School in Ohio and has already announced that he’ll retire at the end of this season. LeBron surprised Dambrot’s players with a free pair of his signature shoes, and many of the Dukes players wore the free kicks during their upset win.

BYU never stood a chance, did it?

Duquesne was one of the three 11th-seeded teams to win in the round of 64. The other two aren’t exactly underdog stories. Oregon beat South Carolina by 87-72, and North Carolina State beat Texas Tech by a comfortable 13-point margin. There was also an 11-over-6 upset in the women’s tournament, with Middle Tennessee knocking off Louisville after pulling off the third-largest comeback in the history of the competition.

The 12-seeds didn’t miss out on the fun, either. James Madison picked Wisconsin apart and never trailed in a dominating win Friday night. The Dukes—yes, there are two of them in the men’s bracket—extended their nation-leading win streak to 14 games with their second win over a Big Ten opponent this season. The Sun Belt champs opened their season with a road win at Michigan State. JMU, led by the one-two punch of Terrence Edwards Jr. and T.J. Bickerstaff, the grandson of former NBA coach Bernie Bickerstaff, is for real. And if there weren’t already too many Dukes to keep track of, JMU will take on Jon Scheyer’s Duke Blue Devils on Sunday.

Grand Canyon was the other 12-seed to pick up a win on Friday, and it put on the most impressive performance of any team we’ve covered so far. Head coach Bryce Drew, a former March Madness star himself, has filled his roster with long, talented athletes that give the 49-year-old coach plenty of strategic options on the defensive end. GCU’s length disrupted St. Mary’s offensive flow, and the Gaels saw nine of their shots rejected, including four that were blocked by Antelopes reserve Lok Wur. GCU’s star players, Tyon Grant-Foster and Gabe McGlothan, combined to block five shots between them.

On the offensive end, Drew spread things out and let his players take advantage of athletic mismatches. Grant-Foster, who has an NBA future, led the ’Lopes with 22 points on 6-of-13 shooting. He drew eight fouls and went to the line for 14 free throws. Gaels coach Randy Bennett didn’t have a defender who could stay in front of Grant-Foster.

Grant-Foster could go down as the story of this year’s tournament. He started his career at Kansas in 2020, and he got buried on the Jayhawks bench. He transferred to DePaul a year later and hit a buzzer-beating 3-pointer before halftime of his first game with the Blue Demons. He then collapsed in the locker room and had to be resuscitated. He had to be revived an additional three more times on his way to the hospital, where he had a defibrillator placed in his chest, according to the Associated Press. But Grant-Foster collapsed again during a pickup game a few months later and it appeared his basketball career could be over.

While working to become a ref, Grant-Foster continued to work his way back into playing shape, and after 16 months, doctors cleared him to return to the court. The 6-foot-7 forward, who can score from all three levels, landed at Grand Canyon, a small school with one of the nation’s rowdiest student sections. It turned out to be a perfect pairing. Well, unless you’re a St. Mary’s fan.

Loser: College Referees (and Us)

Samford coach Bucky McMillan doesn’t want to blame the referees for costing his Bulldogs a possible upset of fourth-seeded Kansas on Thursday night, but I’m more than happy to do it on his behalf. The refs cost Samford a massive tournament upset win! With 14.7 seconds left in a game Samford was trailing by four, Bulldogs guard A.J. Staton-McCray chased down Kansas’s Nicolas Timberlake and swatted the ball away cleanly. The ref, trailing the play from behind and in perfect position to see the clean block, blew the whistle anyway.

The call not only gave Timberlake two foul shots—both of which he hit—but also denied Samford a transition opportunity with a five-on-four advantage and a chance to take the lead after erasing a 22-point lead. That’s a big swing in win probability that went in the Jayhawks’ favor. The call was universally hated. Lonzo Ball even ended a four-month absence from Twitter just to protest it. We all witnessed a crime against basketball.

The haters will point out that Samford got a chance to tie, and Achor Achor, Samford’s star player with a possible NBA future, bricked the shot, but the Bulldogs should have never been forced into taking a desperate 3 just to tie.

It would have been cool to see Samford advance, which makes the officiating mistake even more frustrating. Bucky Ball, the nickname for Samford’s chaotic style of play, lived up to the hype. The Bulldogs threw a bunch of looks at Kansas on the defensive end. They pressed on over a third of the Jayhawks’ offensive possessions. According to Synergy, they played zone on over a quarter of their defensive trips and held Kansas to 0.88 points per possession. The offensive plan was to shoot 3s early and often. The Bulldogs, who finished fifth in the nation in 3-point field goal percentage per Kenpom, jacked up 37 shots from deep and made 16 of them. It was the kind of game Samford had to play to pull off the upset. It just wasn’t enough to overcome the Jayhawks and a bad call in crunch time.

“That’s my first experience with Bucky Ball,” Kansas head coach Bill Self said after the game. “I’d as soon not play against it again for a while.”

We deserved more Bucky Ball. Look at what they took from us:

But that was hardly the only time the refs influenced results throughout the first round. Auburn’s Chad Baker-Mazara was ejected just three minutes into the Tigers’ loss to Yale on Friday. A flagrant foul was warranted there, but a flagrant 2, which results in an automatic dismissal, seems harsh.

CBS rules expert Gene Steratore agreed with the referee’s decision to eject Baker-Mazara, but it’s not surprising that a former official would also get the call wrong. They live to ruin basketball games.

And a questionable flagrant foul call nearly cost Northwestern a win over Florida Atlantic in the first game of Friday’s slate. First, the officials blew a whistle that broke up a Wildcat fast break in order to check on Owls center Vladislav Goldin, who had taken an inadvertent shot to the face while going for a rebound. It was not called a foul in the moment, and Northwestern had a numbers advantage as they ran up the court. But after play was stopped, and refs went to the monitor to review the contact, the refs decided that the contact was worthy of a flagrant foul. Goldin went to the line for two shots and FAU got possession down only a bucket with a little over three minutes in the game.

In overtime, Northwestern’s Boo Buie and Ryan Langborg closed out the game in the extra session. Buie scored 22 in the game, and Langborg, who helped lead Princeton to the Sweet 16 last March, poured in 27, including 12 in overtime. This time, the refs were no match for Northwestern’s scoring duo.

Loser: SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey

Sankey picked a crappy time to talk shit. A week after the commissioner claimed that automatic qualifiers—mainly mid-major conference champions—were having a negative impact on the competitiveness balance of the men’s tournament, he watched five SEC teams get eliminated in the first round, including three teams that lost to automatic qualifiers.

“We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers [from smaller leagues],” Sankey said in an interview with ESPN. “And I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion.”

In Sankey’s dream tournament, teams like Oakland and Yale wouldn’t have qualified, and their thrilling upsets of Kentucky and Auburn would have never happened. We wouldn’t know Jack Gohlke or John Poulakidas. Instead, he’d have more bids go to mid SEC teams like Mississippi State and South Carolina, which both went out sad in uncompetitive losses to Michigan State and Oregon on Thursday. All of the SEC’s eliminated teams were taken out by lower-seeded teams—the portion of the field that was supposedly holding the tournament back.

Other major conferences fared better. The Big 12 rebounded after an inauspicious start. The ACC lost Virginia in the First Four on Tuesday, but that’s an addition by subtraction. The Big Ten’s lost only Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Big East sent only three teams to the tournament, and they’re all still dancing. The Pac-12 (RIP) hasn’t lost any games yet, either. In a way, the first-round results have kind of proven Sankey right. The teams that snuck in from the bottom of the power conferences have had success in the tournament … it’s just that Sankey’s conference hasn’t really contributed to the cause.

The SEC teams that advanced—Tennessee, Alabama, and Texas A&M—did so in impressive fashion. The Vols, led by Dalton Knecht’s 23 points, beat Saint Peter’s by 34 points. The Tide scored 106 points in a win over a good Charleston team. A&M fell two points short of the century mark in a 98-83 win over Nebraska. Despite its embarrassing start, the SEC is still well represented.

We can point and laugh at Sankey, but in reality, this will have little impact on him. He’ll continue collecting millions in annual salary from the conference through 2028, and his gross vision for the tournament is probably the one we’ll be heading toward in the near future. People like Sankey always seem to win in the end, so we have to savor these little losses when we can.

Winner: Kevin Harlan

Perhaps the best game of the first round came in the South Region’s matchup between 10-seed Colorado and 7-seed Florida. The Buffaloes survived Florida’s late comeback attempt thanks to K.J. Simpson’s baseline jumper right before the clock hit zero. Simpson’s game-winner came just seconds after the Gators’ Walter Clayton Jr.’s deep pull-up jumper tied the game at 100. The game had everything: a ton of scoring, clutch shooting, and, luckily for the viewers at home, Kevin Harlan on the call. The veteran broadcaster, who’s been quietly kicking ass across three decades as a basketball and football announcer, rose to the occasion and gave this instant classic the treatment it deserved.

Let’s start with his call of Clayton’s game-tying shot:

Perfection. That’s what March is supposed to sound like.

Harlan had another gear in him, and he hit it after Simpson’s shot fell off the rim and into the net for the game-winning score:

Jim Nantz has stepped away from his March Madness duties, so you won’t hear him this month. It’s been years since we’ve heard Gus Johnson call a tournament game. Thankfully, we still have Harlan to fill the void. Simpson and Clayton gave him a chance to show that he’s still in his prime.