Thursday Recap:

There certainly were some interesting results from Thursday's slate of Sweet 16 games. Let's start with the best game of the day, Pittsburgh coming from behind and beating Xavier. Levance Fields did not have a very good game but hit a clutch 3 in the final 2 minutes and then had a critical steal and layup shortly thereafter. DeJuan Blair had a terrific second half, gobbling up every rebound in sight even if his shooting touch was off. And speaking of shooting touches being off, both teams had really poor performances from the field pretty much the whole game.

The other "early" game saw UConn hold off Purdue. This was the first game of the Tournament where you could see UConn have a little chink in their armor. Purdue could not make shots, but were still able to stay within arm's length of UConn the whole game.

The late night games certainly were surprising. My disappointment of the day had to be Duke's second half performance against Villanova. This was a bragging rights game between the Big East and ACC and Duke wilted under the pressure. I thought they were lucky to be down only 3 points at the half, and came out in the second half completely flat. None of Duke's stars could get the ball in the basket. It was definitely an embarrassing performance for a #2 seed in a Sweet 16 game.

Another surprise was Missouri just taking it to Memphis, using a halftime buzzer-beater to build up a 20+ point lead before Memphis made it semi-interesting at the end. I thought coming in Memphis was the more athletic and talented team, but they could not stop Missouri from playing the style they wanted to play. Tyreke Evans was terrific for Memphis but the rest of the team did very little. And Missouri just made too many shots. It will be interesting to see how they match up with Thabeet and the Huskies.