The first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is for celebrating Cinderellas and their magical runs that each year make March Madness great, but the second weekend is meant to separate the good teams from the great ones. After a few days of work back on campus, the 16 remaining teams in the 2024 NCAA Tournament have arrived at their regional locations in Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas and Detroit. The goal of every coach and every player is to be on college basketball’s biggest stage, the Final Four, at the end of the season. And by the end of these regional competitions, four teams will emerge from these four sites.
It’s hard to identify any one region as more top-heavy than another since every No. 1 and No. 2 seed advanced to the Sweet 16 for just the fifth time since 1979. Every game on Thursday night includes a team that’s expected — according to their seed — to reach to the Elite Eight at a minimum. But history tells us that won’t be the case, and the close competition we’re expecting in the matchups makes another round of chalk extremely unlikely.
Thursday night’s action focuses on the regional semifinals in the East and West regions, set in Boston and Los Angeles. Let’s get into some of the big storylines for the evening, starting with the reigning champions facing a familiar foe.
A title game rematch for the reigning champs
UConn entered the 2024 NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 overall seed and there’s been very little across two games — won by an average of 28.0 points — to suggest the Huskies are out of sync or off pace from contending for a second-straight national championship. But the path to accomplishing the first repeat since Florida in 2007 runs through the same team UConn defeated in last year’s national championship game, as the Huskies rematch against San Diego State (7:39 p.m. ET, TBS).
While UConn’s continuation of last year’s success has made the last two years…
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