2024 NCAA Tournament Watchlist: Round of 32 (Saturday)
It's Jack Gohlke time
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(2) Arizona (-9.5) vs. (7) Dayton, 12:45 PM ET, CBS
KenPom: Arizona by 6, 72% to win
Torvik: Arizona by 8, 77% to win
Last 10 games (Torvik): Arizona by 10.5, 84% to win
EvanMiya: Arizona by 8.5, 80% to win
Dayton’s miracle comeback on Thursday gets them into an interesting game with an Arizona team that has the weight of bad history on their shoulders. In a vacuum going 1/2/2 seed in your first three years is undeniably amazing work, however having a total of three NCAA Tournament wins to show for it thus far is causing serious pain for Tommy Lloyd. Worth noting that his mentor had some March trust issues at first, too, before breaking through eventually as a high seed.
The game specifically is going to be a serious styles clash between Dayton’s modified ground-and-pound (centered around All-American DaRon Holmes) and Arizona’s run-and-gun style that would love to have every possession last 12 seconds or less. Dayton wants this game to be very, very slow, as you should when you’re an underdog with a talent gap. Arizona’s better the faster the game is, while Dayton ranks in the 340s in tempo at EvanMiya.
This is a story of two different approaches to ball screen coverage. Dayton’s going to largely switch and/or drop with Holmes at center; hard hedges haven’t been their thing often. That’s then on Arizona’s guards to exploit potential plus matchups, a thing they’re generally good at but run hot and cold on. On the other end, Arizona would prefer to play drop if possible, but as Jordan Majewski notes, Dayton wants to force Oumar Ballo into as much coverage as possible simply because he’s not fast enough in rim recovery. Fascinating battle here, but I lean Arizona for the simple reason they’ve got better guards. And probably the better coach. Feels like Dayton has to shoot 43% or something from 3 to win.
Pick: Arizona 68, Dayton 59. I can’t shake two things: how bad the Salt Lake City nets are, which harms transition play, and how similar this is in theory to last year’s Princeton game.
(4) Kansas vs. (5) Gonzaga (-4.5), 3:15 PM ET, CBS
KenPom: Gonzaga by 2, 60% to win
Torvik: Gonzaga by 1.5, 56% to win
Last 10 games (Torvik): Gonzaga by 8, 77% to win
EvanMiya: Gonzaga by 8, 79% to win
Welcome to all who realize Kansas is extremely lucky to be here! May I introduce you to such famous pasts as 2010 New Mexico State-Michigan State, 2012 UNC Asheville-Syracuse, 2015 SMU-UCLA, 2018 Charleston-Auburn, and a billion more. Our beloved plucky underdogs like Samford get screwed every year by officiating crews, whether consciously or unconsciously biased towards the big boys. Samford, sadly, is the latest in a long line of poor officiating errors that have just happened to benefit the Big Six team on the other end. Nothing to see here.
The bigger story is trying to find a way Kansas can pull this off. KU played by my count the longest start-to-finish regulation game of the Round of 64, clocking in at an astounding 2:37. Excluding Elmarko Jackson, sort of a Kevin McCullar replacement, Kansas’s bench played five (5) minutes. Gonzaga, meanwhile, coasted to victory over a 12-seed and gave their bench nearly 33% of the available minutes. They’re going to be way more well-rested here.
Can Kansas crack a Gonzaga defense that’s gotten much better as the year’s gone on? If they can, it likely has to be in the post, where they should theoretically have a minor advantage with Dickinson. The problem is that on the other end Gonzaga’s got wider paths to scoring, and the same “can he stop him” questions I have with Graham Ike on defense apply perhaps more so to Dickinson on the other end.
Pick: Gonzaga 87, Kansas 75. I think this goes like the score suggests: Kansas can hang punch-for-punch with Gonzaga for about 25 minutes but depth shows after that.