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Elite Eight of NCAA Tournament to be finalized Friday

It will be a SEC showdown, as the South Carolina Gamecocks will face off with the Florida Gators. By pushing the tempo, North Carolina imposed its game plan effectively throughout and earned a win over a good Kentucky squad.

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“You can play in the national championship game nine years in a row”. “You have to put the ball in the basket”.

SC went 12-6 in the conference. And she mothers my children, she puts up with my nonsense about work, when we came to a new community where she knew nobody at, she’s been dealing with our kids while I’ve been running around the country trying to build a program. They’re fresh on the preparation, on the things to expect, what’s coming.

EXTRA TIME: Wisconsin has won eight straight overtime games and only one of them has been at home.

They are an 11 seed – one notch lower than Syracuse was previous year when it made the Final Four – but the notion of the Musketeers as the scruffy, lovable team from nowhere is best left in the 1980s and ’90s, when they really were just that. OR is as much a first-timer as those two.

And then there’s the Oregon Ducks.

After coming up a victory short of the Final Four, though, it was hard for White to look toward the future when the present was so painful.

OR (33-5), the No. 3 seed in the Midwest, secured the program’s first trip to the national semifinals since the 1939 “Tall Firs” won the first NCAA Tournament. But the impressive mix of transfers, recruits and a 7-footer from Poland, made the ‘Zags the championship favorite at 7-to-5, slightly ahead of North Carolina (8-5) following the games on Sunday night.

But, UCLA is up 11-8 after back-to-back dunks, the last a three-point play by Thomas Welsh.

Gonzaga’s Mark Few dismissed questions of whether his Bulldogs would be a failure as long as they failed to get to a Final Four after so many great regular seasons.

Florida is in the Elite Eight for the first time since 2014, and for the first time with second-year Coach Mike White – the man who replaced Billy Donovan in Gainesville. “We played really good teams on the road”, Martin said. “Our guys are aware of that”. “We have to rehearse some stuff today, we’ll continue to rehearse some things later on tonight at the hotel”, he said.

“I’m happy for them”, Young said.

Now the players and the coach enjoy the reward they’ve given each other with the trip to Glendale. People will play (experience) up if they choose to. Will coaching come into play? In 17 years not to get one call at midnight that your guys did something insane or not to have to break up a fight in the locker room or deal with man, I’m going to transfer if I don’t play more. “As a coach you want to coach against the best”, Staley said.

“We practice that way every day”, a soaked Williams said.

“The general distraction meter is going to go out the roof”, he said. “They have guys flying all over the court any time you try to get a shot off, you have two or three guys on you”. The Gamecocks have been maybe the biggest surprise of the tournament, beating No. 2 seed Duke and blowing out third-seeded Baylor.

The Tar Heels are shooting 72.7 percent (13 of 18). “If that’s going to happen to Joel, I would rather have that happen Tuesday night as opposed to Wednesday night”. We weren’t off by a lot, it wasn’t our attitude, we just slipped a little bit.

On Friday night, eighth-seeded Wisconsin plays fourth-seeded Florida, while third-seeded Baylor meets seventh-seeded SC. We don’t know how they will finish yet. He transferred from a Nebraska junior college to Eastern New Mexico in 1978.

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Malik Monk set a record for a Kentucky freshman with 47 points, including a go-ahead 3-pointer taken against his coach’s wishes, to lift the Wildcats to a 103-100 win over North Carolina. The school couldn’t find statistics from his second season.

Sindarius Thornwell finished with 26 points as South Carolina beat Florida to reach the Final Four for the first time