The 20 most influential faculty basketball video games of the 2000s: Virginia vs. UMBC, Villanova vs. UNC, extra

With the 2022-23 faculty basketball season quick approaching, it’s a good time in your resident Hoop Thinker to do what he does greatest: Copy different individuals’s good concepts!

Once I learn via my The Athletic colleague Andy Staples’ entertaining story in August ranking the 20 most influential college football games of the 2000s, I got here down with an acute case of listing envy. So with a not-so-gentle push from our faculty basketball senior managing editor Hugh Kellenberger (“When you don’t do that, we’re going to make you our Thursday Night time Soccer beat author”), I got down to do the identical for the boys’s recreation.

As Andy famous, it’s not straightforward to outline what makes a recreation “influential.” At the beginning, the sport must be consequential to the general narrative of the game. It ought to have a traditionally vital consequence, or not less than an iconic second or two. And it ought to have determined one thing essential.

Not surprisingly, most of those video games happened within the NCAA Match. However not all. March Insanity is the capstone for school basketball, however there are many different golden nuggets from the previous 22 years which can be nicely value revisiting. So with a tip of the hat to Andy, listed here are my Influential 20, adopted by the ten video games that just about made the reduce.

20. UConn 76, Pittsburgh 74

March 10, 2011

Since UConn went 9-9 and completed ninth within the Massive East, it didn’t get a bye into Wednesday’s second spherical for the convention event in Madison Sq. Backyard, a lot much less the double bye that went to the highest 4 seeds.