5 reasons the NCAA tournament’s second weekend is going to be awesome

After being flooded with basketball at all hours for two straight weeks, the Monday-Wednesday after the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament always feels like the longest three-day stretch on the sports calendar.

Thankfully, we successfully survived the trip through the three-day dessert and are about to be rewarded with what figures to be an incredibly entertaining four days of Sweet 16 and and Elite Eight action. Here are the five biggest reasons why you should be excited about the upcoming return of the NCAA tournament.

Kentucky vs. UCLA is without doubt the sexiest game of the tournament’s third round, and the showcase matchup within the showcase game is where many fans tuning in Friday night will have their eyes.

We’ve already seen this showdown once. On Dec. 3, UCLA went into Rupp Arena and proved its worth to the world by upsetting the top-ranked Wildcats, 97-92.

After an extremely shaky first half in which he turned the ball over five times, Ball let the game come to him in the final 20 minutes, finishing with 14 points, seven assists, and six rebounds. With Ball realizing that the Kentucky defense was keying on him, he switched his game up and let guys like Aaron Holiday and Bryce Alford do the bulk of the scoring damage. That shift in mentality was most apparent during the game’s critical stretch. After Ball had looked rattled to start the game, UCLA as a team committed just one turnover from the 10:50 mark of the first half (when they were down 21-14) to the 15:21 mark of the second half (when they led 60-51).

The help that Ball got wasn’t as prevalent for Fox, whose team lost despite him scoring 20 points and dishing out nine assists. The issue for Kentucky was that while Fox and backcourt mate Malik Monk scored a combined 44 points, it took them 39 shots to get there. Their supporting cast outside of big man Bam Adebayo will have to be better on Friday if they want to advance.

In spite of that last fact, there will be those who frame this game in terms of it being Ball vs. Fox in a battle of point guards who could easily both be top-five picks in the upcoming NBA draft. Certainly this game isn’t as simple as that one matchup, but when the two star freshmen are going head to head, it will be appointment television.

The NCAA tournament hasn’t seen a coach make his Final Four debut since 2014, when Kevin Ollie led Connecticut to the national title in the first season that the Huskies were postseason eligible under his watch. That two-year run of the national semifinals being occupied by veterans only is guaranteed to be broken next weekend.

The reason for that is the East Region, where overwhelming favorites Villanova and Duke both got bounced in the second round. That leaves four teams — Wisconsin, Baylor, South Carolina, and Florida — who all have head coaches trying to crash the season’s final weekend for the first time. Mike White and Greg Gard are both trying to prove that they’re fully capable of taking their respective programs to the level where their predecessors had them. Meanwhile, both Scott Drew and Frank Martin are attempting to accomplish something that many deemed impossible when they first accepted their gigs.

It’s been years since Arizona stunned Kentucky and a West Coast team was the last one standing at the end of the NCAA tournament. That could all be changed in a week and a half thanks to a power quartet that has carried the banner for the region this entire season.

Gonzaga is a top seed in the West, where Pac-12 champion Arizona is also lurking as the No. 2 seed. Even without the injured Chris Boucher, Oregon has impressively advanced to the Sweet 16 where it will face seventh-seeded Michigan before potentially getting a shot at top-seeded Kansas in the regional final. UCLA has a date with a Kentucky team it’s already beaten before likely going toe-to-toe with North Carolina for a trip to the Final Four.

With all this being the case, it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility that multiple teams from the left side of the country could be making the trip to Phoenix after this weekend.

One of the most popular ongoing conversations in golf surrounds the notion of who is the best player on tour who’s never won one of the four majors. College basketball does the same thing, except it does it for both programs and coaches who have never made it to the Final Four. The current flag-bearers for both categories are still alive, and are one win away from meeting each other in the West Regional final.

For both Sean Miller and Gonzaga, the crux of the public’s fixation on them “breaking through” and making a Final Four rests with how successful they’ve been over a prolonged period of time, and how close they’ve both come to achieving this goal before.

Gonzaga has been to 19 consecutive NCAA tournaments, winning at least one game in each of the last nine. They’ve been a No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3 seed on six different occasions, and have advanced out of the tournament’s opening weekend eight times. To have a resume with those accomplishments but no Final Four appearances is somewhat mind-boggling. Until the breakthrough finally happens, there are those within the American public who will continue to view it as an impossibility.

During his time at Xavier and Arizona, Miller has taken 10 of his 13 teams to the NCAA tournament. He’s won multiple games in the Big Dance on seven occasions and has four times been just a single victory away from the Final Four. Three of those Elite Eight losses have come with Arizona, and they have each been brutal. There was two-point loss to eventual national champion Connecticut in 2011, a one-point overtime defeat against Wisconsin in 2014, and then another brutal loss to the Badgers in the same round a year later.

Nobody ever wants to be known as “the best to have never (insert anything),” and both Miller and Gonzaga are now just two small victories away from shedding their respective stigmas forever. Unfortunately, the shedding of one may very well have to come at the expense of prolonging the other.

There hasn’t been a team story in March as good as Michigan’s in quite some time. Playing with, as their coach John Beilein put it, “a newfound respect for life” following a plane accident, the Wolverines have ripped off seven straight victories and are widely viewed as the hottest team in the country. The streak has allowed them to become the highest-seeded team to ever win the Big Ten tournament, and to crash their first Sweet 16 since 2014.

Momentum is a game-changer in March, and seeing just how far Michigan takes it will be one of the most exciting things about the four days ahead.