Harvard Wins Its First NCAA Tournament Game Ever, And They Weren't Even Supposed To Be Good This Year
It's the first NCAA tournament win in the history of the school, and it comes in a year that no one expected.
Harvard was really good last year. They rose into the Top 25 and got a 12-seed in the tournament before getting bounced in the first round.
Then, right before the 2012-13 season, two of the teams best players — Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry — withdrew from school as part of a widespread academic cheating scandal.
Princeton — which was the near unanimous favorite to win the Ivy League — was in firm control of the league throughout the year. But then they fell apart in the final week of th season, losing two games on back-to-back nights and letting Harvard sneak into the automatic NCAA bid.
So it wasn't exactly a storybook season, but at the end of the day Harvard found their way into the tournament and pulled the upset. It just shows how solid of a program coach Tommy Amaker is building there that they were still competitive enough to beat a 3-seed in a "down year."
They thoroughly outplayed New Mexico (who was a trendy Final Four pick among basketball nerds), and it was a deserving win.
So congratulations to the underdogs at Harvard!
Here's a taste of how the Harvard community responded.
Jeremy Lin was really happy:
And the satrical Harvard Lampoon fired out a solid-gold tweet:
They play Arizona next.