BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Weeks before Chris Webber’s infamous timeout helped seal the 1992-93 men’s college basketball national championship for North Carolina over Michigan, something happened in the center of the West Regional that rocked office pools across the country.
Georgia Tech, five days removed from a victory over those title-bound Tar Heels in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament final, couldn’t keep up with a team from Baton Rouge that, in five previous tries, had never won a game in the NCAA tournament.
No. 13 seed Southern pulled the 93-78 upset, sending the fourth-seeded Yellow Jackets out of the McKale Center in Tucson, Ariz., with a first-round exit.
“I knew we had made history because I paid attention to past Southern teams,” said former SU guard Aaron Hammond, a freshman backup on the 1992-93 team. “Great players had made it to the tournament and not been able to bring victory back to Baton Rouge. We wanted to do that.”
Twenty years later, Southern returns to the NCAA tournament as an even bigger underdog.
The Jaguars will face No. 1 seed Gonzaga, which finished the regular season ranked atop the national polls, as the No. 16 seed in the West Regional on Thursday afternoon in Salt Lake City. Southern will try to become the first team to win a 1-vs.-16 matchup in NCAA men’s tournament history.
No comments:
Post a Comment