This is March.
Saturday provided us with a full slate of conference championship games in college basketball which meant a lot of automatic bids for the NCAA Tournament were set to be punched. In bigger conferences, there isn’t a ton of drama when it comes to who gets in and who doesn’t for conference title games as both teams are usually assured a place in the Big Dance no matter the outcome.
However, for smaller conferences the automatic bid is often the only way into the tournament so an upset in a conference championship game can mean heartbreak for one team and jubilation for the other. That’s exactly what happened in the first title game of the Saturday schedule as Vermont hosted UMBC in the America East Championship.
At 27-5 (15-1 in conference) Vermont was the favorite to make the tournament, while 23-10 (12-4) UMBC was a solid second seed but not the anticipated automatic bid from the America East. Like many small conference tournaments, Vermont had the right to host the final as the top seed and so the challenge was even greater for UMBC, but they managed to go on the road and earn a 65-62 victory and punch a ticket to the NCAA Tournament thanks to a dagger three just before the buzzer.
