Winners and losers from Sweet 16 weekend

This is one of the wildest tournaments in years and you can look no further than your bracket to see that. On the left side, you had chaos. Kansas State, Florida State and Loyola-Chicago in the Elite 8? What is that? No Virginia, no North Carolina, no Arizona, no Xavier or Cincinnati. Now we get the much anticipated Michigan-Loyola matchup in the Final Four. On the right, Villanova, Kansas, Duke and Texas Tech made it to the Elite 8. Now the Final Four features an 11-seed battling a 3-seed while the right has two No. 1s.

When Kansas State beat Kentucky in the Sweet 16, there was a post-game controversy that the Kentucky players didn't shake their opponent's hand. John Calipari and his team shook the K-State coaches' hands but the KSU players were celebrating on the floor and the UK players went to the locker room instead of waiting. The K-State players mentioned that the UK players didn't shake their hand and UK players said they weren't going to wait around for the celebration to end. Both need to concede some sportsmanship. Kentucky's players could have waiting a bit to congratulate the Kansas State players, and the Kansas State players could take a break from celebrating a Sweet 16 win for a moment to form the handshake line. Hey, college is about learning life situations, correct?

Again, a great story and an unexpected one as well. While no one should be shocked that Loyola-Chicago won a game or two in this tournament, their run to the Final Four is special. Not only are they the fourth No. 11 seed to reach the Final Four, but their relationship with their fanbase, all dressed in maroon and gold, and Sister Jean. After each of their wins, the players don't just pile up on each other to celebrate, they run over to their cheering section and celebrate with their fans and alumni. Then Sister Jean gets on the floor to enjoy the festivities and give yet another dynamite interview. Now they are off to San Antonio.

Four teams who won their conference tournaments will be there next weekend. Loyola-Chicago may have had to win the MVC tournament to get in the dance. Kansas, Michigan and Villanova each won their conference tournaments as well. Needless to say, all four teams are on a roll heading into Alamo City. We will have everything you'd want in a Final Four.

No disrespect to anyone, but the South Region's semifinals and finals in Atlanta didn't turn out the way local organizers could have hoped. In what many felt was the toughest bracket when the seedings were announced, Atlanta thought they'd have the No. 1 overall team there (Virginia), a sleeper favorite (Arizona), a hungry Cincinnati team and fanbase, a sizable contingent from nearby Tennessee and/or the Big Blue Nation. Well, Kentucky got there but was surrounded by smaller contingencies from Kansas State, Nevada and Loyola. No matter, Kentucky was a strong favorite to get to the Final Four and their fans would run the town all weekend. Except Kentucky was ousted suddenly Thursday night and their fans left the Peach City as quickly as they populated it.  

Zones have made a strong comeback in this tournament. They are an effective tool to slow high-powered offenses down and to limit foul problems for your own team. On Friday, we got to see Duke and Syracuse zone each other to make for a contest of three point chucking and alley-oops. Loyola-Chicago switches from man-to-man to a sort of pack line defense to zone. Even Clemson reverted to a zone when they had issues containing Kansas' offense ... and it helped facilitate a comeback attempt. With the varying successes of the zone defense this season, you may start seeing more teams employ it in the future. 

While it is a good strategy to stay in games and tamp down opposing offenses, zones can make for ugly games to watch. Syracuse spent the entire tournament running its patented zone and allowed 230 points in four games (57.5 ppg) and even held Duke's high powered offense to just 69 points. Fans watching games with zone defenses rarely get to see offensive flow, exciting offense and stunning plays ... things the NCAA wants badly and why they've had rule changes to open up the scoring. As top teams have been whisked away early in this tournament, their fans have been forced to watch slower paced games with lower scoring outputs. 

In Villanova's Sweet 16 game with West Virginia, we saw two of the most tremendous blocks you will see in a college game ... and both were so different. Nova's Mikal Bridges skied for an emphatic dunk when West Virginia's Konate went straight up with both hands and stuffed Bridges' dunk attempt. Stuffed, volleyball style. A few minutes later, the Mountaineers' James Bolden dared to drive to the basket where the Wildcats' Spellman sent his shot straight into the floor, beginning a fast break that Spellman trailed for an emphatic putback dunk. Two great plays that showed the heart and passion of that particular game. 

There's nothing worse in the NCAA Tournament that when a significant injury happens and all the season's work gets compromised. Look at Purdue. This was a team that was hanging near the top of the rankings for most of the season and then sees star big man Isaac Haas break his elbow in their first round win over Cal State Fullerton. The Boilermakers would get by Butler in the second round but Haas' absence was too much to overcome in their Sweet 16 loss to Texas Tech. That makes this Boilermakers senior class (Haas, Vincent Edwards, P.J. Thompson and Dakota Mathias) tough losers as well. They didn't get to put their best team out there.

If you hate Duke then you had to love how the end of the Duke-Kansas game unfolded. Duke had a three point lead and the ball with under a minute remaining. They airballed a five footer, allowed a tying three then watched Grayson Allen's buzzer beater spin off the rim twice. That close to winning. In overtime, Kansas pulled away in the closing moments due to more missed Blue Devils shots and turnovers.  

Look, these one and dones are certainly not losers since they will be cashing major checks in a few months but their teams didn't fair too well this tournament. Deandre Ayton, Marvin Bagley III., Wendell Carter Jr., Michael Porter Jr, Mo Bamba, Trae Young, Collin Sexton, Kevin Knox, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Lonnie Walker, Gary Trent, Jontay Porter and Brandon McCoy won a combined 14 tournament games ... and 9 of those came from the trio of Duke names on this list. 

There's nothing harder to watch in college basketball than a kid standing at the line struggling to hit free throws. That's what happened to Kentucky's P.J. Washington against Kansas State. K-State kept fouling him and he kept missing free throws. He ended up 8-for-20 from the line and missing key free throws down the stretch of the 61-58 loss. After the game, he blamed the loss solely on himself. Of course, if it wasn't for his 18 points and 15 rebounds, Kentucky may not been in any position to win the game at the end. Still, he felt the ire of Big Blue Nation as well as Kentucky haters around the country.

Self is one of the most punished coaches in the nation. His Jayhawks have won an amazing 14 straight Big 12 regular season titles and have gotten to the Elite 8 three years in a row. But all anyone has talked about is how Kansas doesn't cash it in enough during the tournament. Self has taken the Jayhawks to eight Elite 8s in his 15 seasons in Lawrence and this is his third Final Four. He won the whole thing in 2008 and lost to Kentucky in the title game in 2012. When discussing the great coaches of our era it tends to take a few minutes to check Self's name off the list for whatever reason. He did a great coaching job on Sunday against Duke even if you failed to notice.

There were several pressing and chaotic defenses this week trying to get to the Final Four. While they valiantly kept games close, they just couldn't get over the hump. West Virginia's "Press Virginia" brought the best out of Villanova but wasn't enough. Clemson couldn't topple Kansas with it either. Florida State did beat Gonzaga with it but just couldn't stuff Michigan in the Elite 8. 

All season long, Weber has been on a bit of a hot seat in Manhattan, Kansas. But the Wildcats little run to the Elite 8 has him a very happy man. Weber will earn a $430,000 bonus for getting K-State to the Elite 8 (it would have been $688,000 if they made it to the Final Four). This bonus is worth 20% of his salary which certainly isn't chump change and maybe his seat cooled off just a little bit.

I mentioned this last week but the time spent on these replays are ridiculous. I'm all for getting it right and am a proponent of using replay but if it takes five minutes of real time to go through the replay, just go with the call on the floor. I get that the out of bounds call with 56.5 seconds left in the game was a huge call, but if it is so close that you need to kill the flow and energy out of the building then just go with the call on the floor. This is basketball. There are tons of calls during the first 18 minutes of the half that are close and may be wrong as well but we live with them. Heck, the close block/charge call on Wendell Carter Jr. meant more to the end of the game than that possession did (Kansas ended up with a shot clock violation anyway). Use replay for obvious plays or something that can be determined within a minute. 

The conference, one of the oldest collegiate leagues, has taken some big hits over the last few years. This was one of the better mid-major conferences for a while, routinely placing multiple teams in the NCAA Tournament and watching Wichita State reach the Final Four in 2013. Since then, they've watched Creighton leave for the new Big East and Wichita State leave for the AAC last summer. Loyola-Chicago actually replaced Creighton in the conference and is now in the Final Four, capturing the nation. 

The two major southern-based conferences had a tough tournament. The ACC got nine team in the tournament and none of them reached the Final Four. They had a No. 1 seed (Virginia) who lost to a 16th seed for the first time. No. 2 seed North Carolina didn't get out of the first weekend and No. 2 Duke couldn't get to the last one. The SEC got eight teams in and none of them even got to the Elite 8. Three "Big" conferences got a team in but the ACC and SEC were shut out. In fact this will be the first Final Four without a team from North Carolina or Kentucky since 2007.

Newman was one of the top high school prospects when he was a senior in 2015 when he went to Mississippi State. Not only did the likely one-and-done stun everyone by spurning the NBA to stay in school, he transferred to Kansas and redshirted the 2016-2017 season. So if must of felt great to have scored all of Kansas' 13 points in overtime to beat Duke. Newman scored 32 points against the Blue Devils and did a nice job defensively on Grayson Allen, as someone said on his Wikipedia page.

I get that it has got to be tough to have a reporter question your coaching judgement moments after losing an NCAA Tournament game where your season ends. But reporters have a job to do and most of their questions are valid ... especially one asking you why you didn't foul down four points with 10 seconds left. Florida State head coach Leonard Hamilton looked a bit angered by CBS' Dana Jacobson asking that very question and never answered it. To his credit, he apologized the next day for his attitude towards the interview. Jacobson said she appreciated Hamilton, though peeved, talking through the interview and not walking away.