There’s so much to look back on from this season’s Big Ten, and who doesn’t like receiving an award? So we decided to hand out a few more. Forget Class Clown. Our superlatives are a real honor:

Where does this moment stand against the best of the year?

• Best game: Indiana at Michigan — We’ll get to the climax of this contest in a minute, but this was a heavyweight battle. After Indiana dealt then-No. 1 Michigan just its second loss of the season in Bloomington a few weeks earlier, the Hoosiers came to Ann Arbor with a Big Ten title on the line. If the Hoosiers won, they’d claim the conference championship outright. If the Wolverines won, Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State all had the chance to join the Hoosiers on the championship podium. Michigan led by three at halftime before the Hoosiers outscored the Wolverines by four in the second half. And that final play… well, you’ll just have to keep reading.
• Best play: Ben Brust’s half-court three to force overtime and eventually beat Michigan — If Victor Oladipo had been able to finish this dunk in the aforementioned game against Michigan at Assembly Hall, it’d be my choice. But since that shot ends up on the score sheet as just another missed field goal attempt, we’ll go with a shot that actually went in. It looked like Michigan was going to escape Madison after Tim Hardaway, Jr. hit a huge three-pointer with three seconds to go, giving Michigan a 60-57 lead. But Wisconsin took a timeout, and Mike Bruesewitz hit Brust in stride. Brust took one dribble across the half-court line and drew nothing but net. The Badgers went on to win in overtime, with Brust also hitting the game-winner with 43 seconds left in OT.

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The 2012-13 season has just been put to bed, so what do we do now? Look ahead to next year, of course! It’s never too early to look to the future, so I’ve taken a few stabs at some (semi-outlandish) too-early predictions for the next Big Ten season. Take a look:

• The conference will be deeper, but not as top-heavy — What made the Big Ten so great this year was a combination of the heavyweights at the top — Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State all hovered in or around the Top 10 for much of the season — complemented by some excellent and dangerous middle-of-the-pack teams like Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota. You can expect Michigan State and Ohio State to be in that Top 10 mix again (and perhaps Michigan, depending on who stays and leaves) but it will not be as top-heavy as it was this year. Instead, expect Purdue, Iowa, Northwestern, Nebraska, and Penn State to all be improved. If you thought there was no such thing as a gimme in the conference this year, the top-to-bottom slate next season will be even tougher.

Mitch McGary is poised to be an All-Big Ten player next year… if he returns. (Getty Images).

• The Big Ten will not have two Final Four teams — If what was regarded as the best conference in the country this year couldn’t pull it off, I doubt it will be able to send two next year. Michigan State figures to be the best bet with Ohio State trailing close behind. Indiana doesn’t have the pieces and, again, it depends on what Michigan brings back. But given Tom Izzo’s track record (he will need to guide the Spartans to the Final Four to continue his streak of each four-year player at least reaching one Final Four in their careers) and his pieces, the Spartans are the best shot. Again, the conference may be deeper, but without nearly as many national title contenders.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The awesomeness of the national title game almost makes you wish the season had another five months of games to offer us. It doesn’t, of course, which means it’s about time we start glaring into the blank expanse of another long offseason. But before we move ahead, before we start counting down the months, weeks and days until tip-off 2013 (Midnight Madness!), let us go back and review the stories that defined the 2012-13 season. I’m talking about the headlines with the most resounding impact – not always the rosiest or most enjoyable developments. That means good and bad, but hopefully more good. If you kept a pulse on the game this year, the following tropes will strike a familiar note, positive or otherwise; if not, then where exactly have you been since November? In the interest of not dragging out this preamble, let’s turn to the matter at hand and count off 10 of the 2012-13 season’s biggest storylines.

(* in no particular order)

Kentucky. The domination and instant stardom of Kentucky circa 2012 had the poll voters convinced: the Wildcats had perpetually solved the one-and-done riddle, and everything that happened during that Anthony Davis-led title season would become something like a yearly occurrence for John Calipari’s team. Calipari would recruit the best players, mold them into a national champion-caliber outfit, and repeat the whole process again the next year. Clockwork. So Kentucky entered the reason ranked No. 3 in the AP Poll. This seemed like a reasonably fair assessment at the time; another loaded recruiting class, the residual winning momentum of the previous season, a once-recruiter turned excellent head coach who seemed to have this recruit, develop and draft thing figured out was evidence enough that the Wildcats would turn in another deep-Tournament run with the same freshmen-lead constitution that had brought the BBN so many good memories during the first few years of Calipari’s tenure. Kentucky needed to get to the Tournament first, and as the season wore on and the flaws of UK’s roster construction – almost zero experience to speak of, the absence of a true leader, the realization that not all highly-recruited freshmen are Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist – became evidently obvious, reality sunk in: Kentucky wasn’t going to make it.

One year after winning a national title, Kentucky missed out on the NCAA Tournament (Getty Images).

A season-ending ACL injury to star center Nerlens Noel in February doomed the Wildcats’ chances, but the speculation hung right up until Selection Sunday, and when the Wildcats were passed over by the likes of Middle Tennessee, La Salle and Saint Mary’s, the only question remaining (a minor one, to be sure) was how motivated John Calipari’s team would be in a prospective NIT matchup at eight-seed Robert Morris. Yes, Kentucky, college hoops royalty at its purest, was being asked to finish its season on the road in Moon Township, PA., Calipari’s home town. And yes, Kentucky fell to the Colonials, prompting a rare NIT court storm from a packed Charles L. Sewall Center, a fitting end to a season that never lived up to the one preceding it. The backdrop to UK’s sudden plunge was that Calipari, seemingly undeterred by the chaos of the regular season, was assembling a recruiting class for the ages, built on six five-star commitments and still waiting word on the player many consider to be the best high school product since LeBron James, Andrew Wiggins. The BBN will be back in 2013, rest assured, but their dramatic fall from grace this year is not lost.

The Big Ten Was Awesome. We began the season with the highest of expectations about the Big Ten. Five of its teams (Indiana, Michigan, Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin) began the season in the top 25, Indiana was a unanimous pick for preseason No. 1 and the top-to-bottom depth, just as much as the upper-tier quality, were huge selling points for a league many billed to not only outclass every other major conference this season, but also go down as one of the most dominant versions of any league in recent memory. The Big Ten didn’t disappoint us. Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Wisconsin waged intense wars in blaring campus gyms on a weekly basis, shocking upsets were sprung (Penn State over Michigan, Northwestern over Minnesota, Wisconsin at Indiana, etc.) and the league grew to corner the market on the most exciting brand of high-powered, tense, must-watch hoops in the country. It was good from start to finish, all the way up to the NCAA Tournament, where four teams survived the first weekend to land a spot in each of the four regional sites.

In the end, only one made it to the Final Four – ironically, of the four Big Ten teams left standing, Michigan was probably the biggest surprise of them all; they were widely pegged to lost their round-of-32 bout with VCU – and after fending off a nightmarish Syracuse 2-3 zone no one else had managed to decode during Tournament play, the Wolverines lost a close but thrilling national championship game. The lasting memory from the 2012 Big Ten, beyond all the consistent regular season drama and Victor Oladipo’s star turn and Trey Burke’s brilliance and Wisconsin’s remarkable year-to-year consistency, will be Spike Albrecht – for the sheer fact that Albrecht, on the last and most important date of the season, not only scored an unfathomable 17 points in 16 minutes while NPOY-sweeping Burke, hit with two early fouls, was fixed to the bench. It was awesome because Albrecht followed up his once-in-a-lifetime night by milking every last drip of his newfound celebrity: Spike tweeted at international modeling icon Kate Upton after learning of Upton’s attendance at the national championship game. Like I said, Big Ten: Awesome. There’s no confusion here.

Officiating Controversies. There is no escaping one lamentable truism about the 2012-13 season: the referees were not very good. Overall, on a composite game-by-game measure, the quality and consistency of officiating was rather low. Even if that’s just an arbitrary and fuzzy subjective measure, I can take it one step further. Just off the top of my head, I can point out three calls that directly affected the outcomes of important game. The first happened in Colorado’s January 3 road game at Arizona. The Buffaloes took the No. 3 Wildcats to the wire, and on the final possession, with the game knotted at 83, Colorado reserve guard Sabatino Chen banked in a wild three at the buzzer. GIFS and close-ups slowly made the rounds on Twitter, and most every angle confirmed what the real-time game tape appeared to say: Chen’s shot was good. The zebras thought otherwise – the shot was discounted. We later learned that standard definition replay monitors (the Pac 12 doesn’t use HD screens as a cost-saving measure) may have impaired the referees’ ability to clearly determine whether Chen’s shot went off before the buzzer. Like, Really? Incident No. 2: Kansas’ road win at Iowa State, wherein guard Elijah Johnson’s drive into Cyclones forward Georges Niang, resulting in an objectively false block call, actually merited an independent review from the Big 12 conference. Or, even better, we can talk about the national championship game, where Trey Burke’s perfectly clean block on Peyton Siva with just over five minutes remaining put the game seemingly out of reach for the Wolverines.

I’ve never felt comfortable pinning the outcomes of games entirely on the backs of officials; teams decide the games, referees impartially monitor the proceedings and anything that gets in the way is but another challenge in a game full of them. Everything evens out in the end, on balance. But then you get calls like Burke’s block and Niang’s blocking foul and the countless gaffes I failed to mention above, and it gets to a point where the competence and on-sight decision making of the most important third-party in sports is called into serious question. The Ed Rush Pac-12 officiating scandal only added more stink to the skeptical aura surrounding the entire profession. Officials are going to make mistakes. Judgments will be misguided. The human element of the game is not infallible. True. True. True. When the neutrality of those officials becomes a topic of debate, and we can’t wholeheartedly confide in those officials to respect the integrity of the game, the problem transcends mere block-charge minutiae or ticky-tack holding calls. The whole premise of a level playing field in college athletics is thrown into sharp scrutiny.

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Jesse Baumgartner is an RTC columnist. His Love/Hate column will publish each week throughout the season. In this piece he’ll review the five things he loved and hated about the previous seven days of college basketball.

Five Things I Loved This Week

I LOVED…. Mach Five speed. There reached a point in Sunday’s regional final between Louisville and Duke where lateral movement ceased to exist. There was Peyton Siva, there was Russ Smith, and there was 94 feet of court from end to end. It didn’t matter where and when they got the ball – they were heading straight to the hole, and you could try to keep up if you wanted. Those two bring a dimension that no other team in the country has, and they made some decent Duke guards look downright tortoise-like on both offense and defense throughout the second half rout. They ran ‘em straight out of the gym.

I LOVED…. Wichita State “shocking” (sorry, too easy) the world and making it out of the West Region, and more importantly striking another solid blow for mid-majors with its convincing win over a very good Ohio State team. While Gonzaga making it just two games as a #1 seed was rough, this WSU run helps erase some of that damage for quality schools in small conferences going forward.

I LOVED…. Trey Burke deciding to become The Man. For nine minutes against Kansas, literally everyone in the building knew exactly who the ball was going to and what he was trying to do. Didn’t matter. Ping, ping, ping, ping – the jumpers just kept raining in as he willed his Wolverines into overtime and on to victory. Any Player of the Year questions should have been answered right there.

Trey Burke Took Over, and Michigan Advanced…

I LOVED…. just how dumb the NCAA Tournament selection committee looked by putting Oregon as a #12 seed. I honestly believe it was one of the worst hack jobs in selection history, and the Ducks, who were possibly underseeded by about five slots or so, powered their way to the Sweet Sixteen and hung with a star-studded Louisville team for the full 40 minutes. Someone needs to take a long hard look at what went wrong there, and make sure we don’t ever, ever see it again.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Tonight’s Lede. Introducing The Second Weekend. The biggest story of the first weekend turned a nation of disenchanted hoops viewers into an almost undivided Florida Gulf Coast cheering section. The dunks, the dance moves, the head coach’s fairy tale wife, and everything else that endeared the country to FGCU was the perfect March story. It was a lot of fun, and it may not yet be over. It also obscured one surprising fact: aside from the wacky West region, the first three rounds played out pretty much according to plan. Wichita State and La Salle were shots out of the dark, but the rest of the field – even Oregon, seed optics aside, by all accounts looks like a top-four or five seed – was qualifiably chalky. Thursday night’s games gave us a little bit of everything: That wholly unpredictable 13-9 matchup out of the West, Indiana tried to crack open the tried-and-true Orange 2-3 zone, Marquette attempted (and succeeded) to win a game without throwing every Golden Eagles fan into cardiac arrest in the closing minutes and Ohio State looked out onto a region of utmost opportunity, with only two putatively favorable games standing in the way of a trip to Atlanta. After a week to collect your first weekend thoughts, we begin anew with more games to breakdown, slice up and analyze with objective eyes.

Your Watercooler Moment. Bye-Bye Hoosiers. 

The Orange zone flummoxed IU all game long (Getty Images).

Setting aside the hegemonically dominant title teams for which matchups – stylistic and individual – don’t negate talent and athleticism advantages, most National Title hopefuls need favorable team-on-team scenarios to keep the dream alive. They need their spread motion offense to churn at high speeds, to swing the ball around at a rapid pace and to not get bogged down into the most unfailingly meddlesome zone defense of all time. Indiana needed all of those things to fall just right in order to get by Syracuse Thursday night, but none of them did. The matchup nightmare that is Boeheim’s zone detonated Indiana’s uptempo offensive attack, and the Hoosiers – as has often been the case against stylistically discordant opposition this season – couldn’t make the right adjustments at the right times. Syracuse dominated from the jump by invading passing lanes and running shooters off the three-point line and never allowing the Hoosiers to dictate the terms of engagement. This was Syracuse’s game, to be played by Syracuse’s grinding half-court style, to the extreme detriment of an IU team many projected to not only advance out of a manageable East region, but also challenge Louisville in the national title game. One part of that equation is off the table, and the Orange – a team that caught lightning in a bottle at the end of the regular season and (save the second half of the Big East tournament championship game) has played well above its four-seed designation ever since – deserve all the credit. Indiana is going home earlier than it (and most fans) ever expected to, and frankly, there isn’t much the Hoosiers could have done to prevent that dour conclusion. Syracuse played like the one-seed it purported to be for large chunks of the season, and Indiana just didn’t hold up its end of the bargain.

Tonight’s Quick Hits…

• When Season-Long Doubters Are Put To Rest. If Ohio State doesn’t make the Final Four, it will be a disappointment. The favorable draw it was dealt with so much high-seed carnage in the first three rounds laid a golden two-game path to the Georgia Dome, a path that began Thursday with No. 6 Arizona. The Buckeyes are better than Sean Miller’s team, but if OSU was going to fall in Los Angeles, it was going to be because DeShaun Thomas was burdened with too much of the scoring load. This problem isn’t specific to Ohio State’s NCAA Tournament prognosis; the Buckeyes have dealt with this issue all season. And on Thursday, they dealt with it by unleashing LaQuinton Ross for 17 points, 14 of those coming in the second half, and a game-winning three with two seconds remaining that had the same basic set-up as Aaron Craft’s dagger to fell Iowa State in the third round. The only difference? Craft passed it up and Ross stroked it to push the Buckeyes into the Elite Eight.

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RTC is reporting from the East Region semifinals in Washington, DC, this weekend.

Syracuse Got to the Rim Repeatedly Tonight in DC

1. The Syracuse Zone Just Shut Down the Nation’s Best Offense. According to KenPom, Indiana came into today with a 122.8 offensive rating, the best in the country. IU also averaged 78.6 points per game this year, a statistic that put the Hoosiers among the top handful of teams in college basketball. This evening? At the 10:00-minute mark in the second half, the Hoosiers had a total of 37 points, marking the third straight game that the Orange had held an NCAA Tournament team (Montana and Cal) in the 30s or below. The fact of the matter is that no team, not even one the quality of Indiana, can adequately prepare for the albatross-long arms of the Syracuse zone and the athleticism of their interior people. Every shot within the arc was contested — the Orange ended up with 11 blocks — and the great equalizer of the three-point shot was cut off as well — IU shot 3-of-15, including an oh-fer from Jordan Hulls.
2. Cody Zeller Was Exposed. We noticed this during last weekend’s Temple game as well, but Zeller has trouble finishing plays inside against long and athletic forwards. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone, as it’s as elementary a concept as there is in college basketball — it’s difficult to score over long athletes. But Zeller has a tendency to make himself smaller by contorting his body so that it’s parallel with the ground, and even when he goes straight up to the rim, it hasn’t been with authority. Syracuse blocked or got a piece of six of Zeller’s misses tonight, and you had better believe that NBA scouts will be reviewing the tape of his last two games in particular to get a better sense of whether Zeller has the toughness and the explosiveness to finish at the rim in a league where everyone is a long athlete.
3. Bad Syracuse Only Made a Brief Appearance. If Syracuse is to win three more games to give Jim Boeheim his second national title, they’ll obviously have to keep playing exceptional defense in the same way that they did tonight. The recurring issue with this team has been what might endearingly be called “losing their minds” for large stretches of games. We saw it in the final three minutes of the California game last weekend, where the Orange blew a comfortable late lead to give the Bears a chance. We’ve seen it multiple other times this season as well. Except for a very brief stretch in the early part of the second half tonight, though, the Orange avoided that particular calamity here — MCW only had a single turnover, and while Brandon Triche (six) and CJ Fair (four) had way too many of the team total of 15, there weren’t enough of them in a row to give Indiana the lift it needed to make a substantial run. The closest the game ever got in the second half was a six-point margin at 38-32, but a layup on the other end allowed the Orange to race right back out to a quick double-figure lead. Bad Syracuse probably only appeared for a couple minutes tonight, and the team will need to keep it under wraps in order to push to the Final Four and beyond.

Star of the Game. Michael Carter-Williams, Syracuse. Given that his family has been dealing with a tragic fire at their home in the Boston area this week, it was a reasonable question to ask whether MCW would be fully focused on the game tonight. Needless to say, he seemed more locked in than he has for most of the season, scoring 24 points, grabbing six rebounds and four steals, but most importantly, only committing a single turnover. When MCW is on his game, Syracuse is very tough to beat.

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1. Jim Boeheim retirement rumor-mongering has become something of a cottage industry in recent seasons, so it’s always relieving when the man himself can add some clarity to the things that bounce around the world of message boards and e-mail chains. In his Sweet Sixteen presser yesterday, Boeheim took the time to end speculation as to whether he will coach the team in the 2013-14 season: “There is no process. There is no process. I’m coachin’ next year, I kid around a little bit and everybody gets crazy when I do so I’m not going to kid around about it anymore, I’m coaching next year, thrilled, got a great challenge, looking forward to it.” That is, unless he isn’t: “About September, if I don’t want to coach, I won’t coach.” That last little bit seems to open the door for a Jim Calhoun/Kevin Ollie situation, although Mike Hopkins has been the established head coach in waiting at Syracuse for years, so that type of manipulation seems unnecessary.
2. Match-ups between elite programs like Syracuse and Indiana are always great fun for a variety of reasons. Because these types of schools dip into the same small pool of blue-chip recruits, a lot of these players have long relationships, and these back stories can only help build intrigue for the games. IU”s Victor Oladipo spent a lot of time on Wednesday talking about his relationships with Syracuse’s DMV-area forwards Jerami Grant and C.J. Fair. Oladipo is very close with the entire Grant family, and descibed Jerami as a “little brother” while calling Fair a “good player” who is “a real cool dude to chill with.”  Much of the pregame speculation on the Syracuse end of things has been about whom Oladipo will be tasked with guarding. That assignment may very well be Fair, who has been SU’s most consistent scorer all season.
3. The Marquette-Miami game has its own built-in storyline heading into tonight’s Sweet Sixteen bout. Hurricane assistant Eric Konkol coached guard Trent Lockett, who has come on as a big factor in the backcourt for the Golden Eagles, at Hopkins High School. Both took an unconventional road to this NCAA Tournament match-up. Konkol found himself in the high school ranks after coaching under Jim Larranaga at George Mason while his wife worked on a degree at the University of Minnesota. He rejoined Larranaga in 2010, moving with him to Miami. Lockett spent his first three years at Arizona State, where he averaged over 13 points per game as a sophomore and junior before transferring to Marquette. Lockett had a big game in the Round of 32 against Butler, scoring 13 points on 4-of-7 shooting and grabbing six rebounds.
4. Dueling articles are always fun. Think Progress‘ Travis Waldron penned a piece called “The University of Louisville is Everything That’s Wrong With College Basketball“, where his basic thesis is that because Louisville is the most profitable college basketball program but their basketball alumni don’t all matriculate to the NBA and make millions of dollars within a year or two, they’re evil… or something. I’m not a fan of using someone’s alma mater and inherent biases to try to invalidate their arguments, but when Waldron brought up his Kentucky background a lot of things were cleared up. SB Nation‘s Louisville blog Card Chronicle writer Mike Rutherford responded with his own post: “The University of Louisville is Not Everything That’s Wrong With College Basketball“, and I think he sums things up pretty well in response to Waldron – “You forgot the #BBN hashtag as your signature.”
5. Alas, this year’s sprint towards NIT glory was not to be for the Providence Friars, who fell in the quarterfinals to Baylor in Waco last night.  The Friars had big performances from the usual suspects – Bryce Cotton led the team with 23 points while Vince Council and Kadeem Batts were close behind with 21 and 20 points, respectively. Kris Dunn was the only other Friar to score, however, and Baylor took advantage of Providence’s limited depth to cruise to a 79-68 victory. With Providence now out of the NIT, the three remaining Big East teams in the NCAA Tournament are the conference’s last representatives in postseason play this season.

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Two rounds of NCAA Tournament play have come and gone. Favorites have flopped, upsets have left bracket-wielding fans frustrated everywhere and Florida Gulf Coast is in the Sweet Sixteen. That last one still doesn’t register; how does a team that gained full Division I postseason eligibility just this season, with an entrepreneurial and supermodel-boasting wife in tow pushing them along the whole way, knock off, in sequence, National Player of the Year and projected lottery pick Otto Porter, then follow it up by utterly demoralizing Jamaal Franklin and San Diego State?

Of all the interesting storylines heading into the Sweet Sixteen, none is more captivating than Florida Gulf Coast (Getty Images).

Everyone will have their eyes on FGCU to see what happens next, naturally, but the next round of bracket proceedings, the Sweet Sixteen, offers more than one team, one storyline, one Brett Comer lob, to watch. Here are 16 items, one specific to each team, to keep an eye on — with the common denominator of shining a new analytical light on each match-up. If Florida Gulf Coast has already revolutionized everything we’ve come to know about today’s scoring-averse, slowdown, micro-managed game, where does that leave us – the humble writers who serve to clarify, in long form, what you see on the court – in attempting to understand the remaining rounds of this Tournament? Onward:

1. Is Louisville The Best Thing On The Block? It sure looks that way, and that’s without even seeing Louisville come up against a team capable of challenging Russ Smith and Peyton Siva on the perimeter, of pulling Gorgui Dieng away from the basket, and decoding Louisville’s No. 1 efficiency defense. Colorado State was the closest thing, and the Rams were hopelessly overmatched on both ends of the floor. The Cardinals got the good side of Russ Smith in that match-up, scoring 27 points and committing just one turnover, and when that happens and Louisville maintains its trademark stingy point-prevention, Rick Pitino’s team is tough to beat. The question is whether Oregon, criminally underseeded as a #12, can use its bruising defensive style to counter the Cardinals’ championship formula. Louisville has done nothing thus far to refute its national frontrunner status, and unless Ducks coach Dana Altman can poke holes in U of L’s defensive fortress with Damyeon Dotson and E.J. Singler on the perimeter, and Arsalan Kazemi keeps up his insane rebounding pace (he’s averaging 16.5 boards per game in Tournament play), the Cardinals will maintain that status and waltz into the Elite Eight undeterred.

2. The End Of Ohio State’s One-Dimensional Scoring Problem.

For most of the season, behind Ohio State’s plainly suffocating perimeter defense, headed by one rosy-cheeked point guard roundly regarded as the nation’s best on-ball defender, lay an offense with one glaring problem: DeShaun Thomas was doing everything. For as devastating as Thomas can be, and as versatile as his scoring arsenal has become – Thomas is just as quick to camp out on the perimeter as he is to back down an opponent in the post – the Buckeyes needed a reliable ancillary scoring option. And during Tournament play (and increasingly at the end of the regular season), they’ve gotten exactly that. In a second-round bout against Iona, Sam Thompson (20 points) and Lenzelle Smith (12) were in double figures; Craft (18) stole the show in the next match-up with Iowa State, and there was no greater symbolic statement to his newfound offensive chutzpah than when he looked off Thomas on a critical final possession, lulled Cyclones’ forward Georges Niang to sleep with a deft walk-up dribble, and iced a game-winning three while holding up his wrist on the follow through as his teammates celebrated a squeaky escape. LeBron James took notice. You should, too.

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Brian Otskey (@botskey) is the NCAA Tournament’s East Region correspondent.

The East Regional begins Thursday night in Washington, DC, with Marquette vs. Miami (FL) followed by Indiana vs. Syracuse. Be sure to look out for the West, South and Midwest Regional Resets later today. Also make sure to follow RTCEastRegion for news and analysis from Washington throughout the week.

The Verizon Center Will Host This Year’s East Regional

New Favorite: #1 Indiana. Despite a challenge from Temple on Sunday, nothing changes for the Hoosiers. This team remains the prohibitive favorite to get to Atlanta out of this region but will have to get through two teams playing well in order to do that. With Syracuse defending as well as it is and Marquette and Miami staying hot, the road is not as smooth for Indiana as it looked when the brackets came out last week.

Horse of Darkness: #3 Marquette. The Golden Eagles nearly lost both of their NCAA Tournament games over the weekend but, as the old adage goes, they survived and advanced. Marquette has limitations but this team is tough as nails and plays with great confidence in pressure situations. A potential Elite Eight match-up with Indiana and former head coach Tom Crean would also serve as extra motivation to push through to Atlanta.

Biggest Surprise (1^st Weekend): #3 Marquette. It’s hard to pick a surprise in a region that saw all four top seeds advance to Washington but we’ll go with the Golden Eagles. Marquette was a trendy upset pick in the first round and was outplayed by Davidson for 39 of the 40 minutes in that game. Even after escaping Davidson in the round of 64, the Golden Eagles were on the ropes yet again Saturday against Butler. It’s not a surprise that Marquette is playing in the Sweet Sixteen; the surprising thing is the way it got there.

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