In an NCAA Tournament without many surprising teams, Coach John Calipari has taken on the rare role of being the closest to a surprise story.
After consistently leading strong teams at Kentucky to the Sweet 16 and beyond, Calipari has done the same in his first season at Arkansas. The 10th-seeded Razorbacks are set to face No. 3 seed Texas Tech in the West Region semifinals on Thursday night. They are the only double-digit seed left in the tournament.
“My guess is other than a fan of Arkansas, no one is picking us to win the game,” Calipari said Wednesday. “But the great news in this tournament, you’ve got to play the games.”
Top-seeded Florida will play No. 4 seed Maryland in another Sweet 16 game in San Francisco.
Calipari is getting ready for his 16th trip to the Sweet 16, having made it there before with UMass, Memphis, and Kentucky. Lon Kruger and Eddie Sutton are the only other coaches to reach this point with four different schools.
Calipari reached Final Fours at all three of his previous schools, winning his only championship in 2012 with Kentucky.
After not making it to the second weekend of the tournament in his last four seasons at Kentucky, Calipari left after a first-round loss to Oakland last season to become the coach at Arkansas.
While he has been successful everywhere he’s coached, it seemed like things might take longer to get going at Arkansas when the Razorbacks started SEC play with a 1-6 record. However, a win in Calipari’s return to Kentucky helped turn the season around. Now, he’s back in the Sweet 16 with an underdog team, after having a top-two seed in his region in 11 of his first 15 trips to this round.
“We approach the postseason the same. I’ve been the 10 seed. I’ve been the 8 seed. I’ve been other seeds,” he said. “There’s so many ways of doing this, including on the court. There are a lot of ways to do this and have success. So, for me, what I’ve done, I want this to be like regular season like nothing has changed.”
Derik Queen warms up in the practiceHomecoming
Since no teams from the West are playing in the regional in San Francisco, Texas Tech might have the strongest claim to being the local favorites. Guard Chance McMillian is from San Francisco and went to high school in nearby Vallejo, while forward Darrion Williams is from Sacramento.
“I have a lot of people from San Francisco expecting to come to the game,” McMillian said. “Feels good to be back home because this is my first game in Northern California, too, so I have a lot of people excited to watch this.”
McMillian has missed the last three games due to an oblique injury he got in the Big 12 Tournament. He will be a game-time decision on Thursday.
“I’m getting better day by day,” he said. “Been in the training room, doing a lot of pool workouts and breathing workouts because I strained my oblique pretty bad. But my goal is to play tomorrow.”
Thiero’s Status
Arkansas received a big boost last weekend when guard Boogie Fland returned from injury, and now they have a chance to get another important player back this weekend.
Star big man Adou Thiero participated in a full contact practice on Tuesday for the first time since injuring his knee on February 22. He didn’t practice during the open session on Wednesday because his leg was still bothering him, but Calipari remained hopeful that Thiero could give them around 10 minutes of play against Texas Tech.
John Calipari instructs his team in the practiceGoing Deep
The game between the Gators and Terps features two teams with different playing styles. Maryland depends a lot on its “Crab Five” starting lineup, while Florida regularly plays eight or nine players. Maryland has gotten almost 85% of its scoring from its starting five, which is the fifth highest in all of Division I.
However, coach Kevin Willard knows that he will need help from the bench to ease the workload on big men Derik Queen and Julian Reese so they don’t get too tired against the fast-moving Gators.
“We’re going to have to play all four bigs,” Willard said. “There’s just no way Derik and Ju are going to be allotted 36 minutes against this team. They run consistently. They’re fresh. They’re as good a basketball team as I’ve seen on film all year.”
Willard’s Whereabouts
Willard’s future has been a big topic during the tournament as he has openly discussed his frustrations with the school and the changes he wants to make to the program. Athletic director Damon Evans left last week to take the same job at SMU, and Willard is reportedly a candidate to become the coach at Villanova.
When he was asked about it on Wednesday, he responded by talking about the matchup against the Gators and their All-American guard Walter Clayton Jr.
“The biggest thing is we’ve got to stop Clayton,” he said. “He’s really good. He shoots the basketball going left 48%. He shoots it right going at, like, 38%. So really the last couple of days trying to come up with a game plan to stop Clayton because I think he’s one of the best guards in the country that we’ve seen.”
