The Saddest Stats From Round 2, Day 1 Of The 2024 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament
Tim Nwachukwu. Getty Images.Welcome back to March Sadness. Part three of a blog series where we look back at the Saturday slate of the NCAA Tournament games for a deep dive on a few sad stats you probably haven't heard. If you want some sad action from Thursday, I got you here. If you need a little from Friday, I got you here too.
But today we look back at Saturday. Not Sunday. Saturday. I know you have Sunday's blowouts fresh in mind, but there's many reasons this blog delays things by a day. For one, it's good to let sad stats breathe like a fine wine. Swirl it around a little bit and watch the sad stat legs drip down your sad stat glass. For two, I use play-by-play data from an API source that isn't curated until the following morning after games. So I take notes while watching games for potential lookups and try desperately to find time to do so once the data is in the next morning. For three, I say desperately because I'm a part-time blogger with a real job and a struggling father of two (both under three years old) who has to blog late at night and watched most of the Oregon game on my phone because Beauty and the Beast was on my TV.
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Speaking of which, I realized in watching as an adult that Belle is one of those book smart people who is also a total moron. She spent the whole opening act abhored by Gastan, yet somehow managed to get suckered by the only son of a bitch who was a bigger prick. So much bigger that after being turned into a beast for not helping a fairy disguised as a beggar, his best plan for finding love to break the curse was to quid pro quo a girl to be his prisoner in exchange for letting her father go who was about to die otherwise.
Sorry about that. I bet you didn't expect clicking this blog to read about a Disney movie from 30 years ago anymore than I expected myself to watch the end of Oakland/NC State in the bathroom pretending to poop. But let's get to this. I have just a few stats on a couple teams that caught my eye from Saturday.
Sad Stat #1 - Michigan State scored three points in the final 8 minutes (8:11 to be exact) of the first half
Little staircase graph that shows how many points teams scored from 8:00 left in the first half until halftime with most teams (in gray) doing some sort of progression in scoring across time. Then there's Michigan State in green. I'm no EMS professional but this appears to be the green heartbeat of someone who dropped dead and was administered an AED a couple of times somewhere around the 2:00 mark before whoever was doing so said "ah, hell with it".
UNC ended the half on a 26-5 run and that my friends, was that.
Sad Stat #2 - Oregon shot their first free throw of the game vs Creighton with :27 left in the second half
No. I didn't say made. I said attempted. This is truly absurd. They said on the telecast that the only tournament game in which a team didn't attempt a free throw was Illinois back in 1986.
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But it wasn't to be. That Illinois game will stand alone though as Creighton finally denounced their pacifistic ideals with less than half a minute left in the game. While the TV crew was on the NCAA tourney stats, I dove into the play-by-play of every D1 game this season to see if any team took longer to make it to the free throw line - if at all. Here's a histigram of game seconds left for a team's first free throw for all some 12,000 teams across some 6,000 games just in the 2023-24 season.
Squint really hard and you probably won't see that there were actually two teams who took longer than Oregon to the left of their perforated green line. Princeton knocked down all three with :21 left vs Yale on Groundhog Day (Princeton still lost) and the Idaho Vandals missed their only free with :18 on November 29th (also lost).
Forgive me for not having watched those two prime time showings as I can't speak for them, but the weird thing about Oregon/Creighton is this wasn't even about the refs not giving them calls. Creighton just didn't ever find themselves out of position to need to foul. Why is that? Well, that brings us to ...
Sad Stat #3 - Oregon players not named N'Faly Dante or Jermaine Couisnard made one basket the entire second half, including overtime #1 and overtime #2
Shoutout Kwame Evans Jr. for going 0-3 for zero points in 38 minutes as a starter and Brennan Rigsby for 43 minutes off the bench to go 0-3 with zero points. P.J. Tucker would be proud.
Man, everytime we feel bad for ourselves for being short shifted at work I want you to think of this game. What happened here? It's like after the fifth miss in a row by a non Couisnard/Dante player early in the second half the coach gave everyone else the hook.
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Think about it like this. From 16:11 left in the 2nd half until :38 left in what my computer program thinks is the 3rd half, the only two non Couisnard/Dante shot attempts were as follows:
- Missed dunk
- Missed layup
That's about 21 minutes of game time. Equivalent to the start until around 19:00 left in second half of a non-overtime game.
By double overtime, Couisnard was throwing up air balls. He was toast. Oregon was toast. Everyone knew what they were doing and that brings us back to the fact that they never shot free throws until it was too late. When only two guys shoot the ball, there's never really a chance to catch Creighton off guard and out of position.
Would have loved to have heard their timeout playcalls in the huddle. Gee, coach. What play we running this time? Decent chance the coach mistook a sharpie for a whiteboard marker to start the second half and was too embarrassed to admit it that he just played it cool and called the same play for the rest of the game.
That's a wrap for Saturday. Probably won't get a chance to crush stats from Sunday but I'll just say as fact that Northwestern has to have to lowest scoring first halves for the first two games of a tournament (19 and 18 points respectively) in tourney history.