St. Louis senior forward, Brian Conklin, broke down following the team’s 65-61 loss to Michigan State in the round of 32. Conklin scored 11 points in his final game under head coach Rick Majerus.
Conklin wasn’t the first NCAA Tournament participant to get tearful following a loss. Kansas State’s head coach, Frank Martin, broke down over his best player, Jamar Samuels, being held out of his final game of his college career for taking $200 from his former AAU coach.
Obviously, this is a passionate time for these coaches and players. The stakes are high and the emotions even higher. There still are more games to be played, and therefore, more teams will fall out of the tournament and certainly more tears will be shed.
As if the Colorado’s student section (C-Unit) needed another reason to celebrate the team’s Pac-12 Conference Tournament title after beating Arizona on Saturday night, the student section stormed the local In-N-Out Burger on athletic director Mike Bohn’s tab.
According to this article by Yahoo! Sports, not only did Bohn fly 50 C-Unit students out to the Staples Center for the Pac-12 Tournament games, he spent $600 for the kids to chow down on burger and fries.
Colorado was seeded sixth in the Pac-12 tournament, finishing the regular season 11-7 in the conference and 23-11 overall. The Buffaloes earned an 11 seed and will face UNLV in the NCAA Tournament.
My exact reaction at the beginning of the NCAA Tournament:
Make sure to fill out your bracket with some upsets; it’s more memorable when you can say you picked VCU in the Final Four or Syracuse being upset by Vermont. It’s more fun to have upsets rather than all four #1 seeds making it. (Sorry, this isn’t happening; NC is falling to Michigan (or at least that’s my dream)). I’m also picking the 15 seed, Detroit, over 2 Kansas. There will be a 12 seed beating a 5 seed somewhere, though I’m not sure if this year’s Vanderbilt team is different from the previous teams that were ousted in the first round.
Every year there’s a team that has a reaction that warms you up. This year it’s NC State, who I might add barely snuck into the Tourney and no thanks to Kendall Marshall’s push off in the ACC tournament.
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