North Carolina will play South Carolina, and Iowa State will play surprising Creighton to try to make the Final Four.
GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) – We know a lot of eyes will be on the college basketball world starting tonight. After all both Duke and North Carolina are among the 16 teams that remain alive in the NCAA men’s tournament. This is the home of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and Greensboro typically ranks in the top three or four TV markets for college basketball. There’s a lot of interest. But if you can divert your eyes a few minutes from Mike Krzyzewski’s bid to win another national title in his final season at Duke and Hubert Davis’s bid to win one in his first at UNC, we direct your attention to the Greensboro Coliseum. That’s where, starting Friday, one region of the women’s Sweet 16 will pare four teams down to one for its own Final Four next weekend in Minneapolis. And you may have as much of a vested emotional connection to these games in Greensboro as to those relegated to your TV screen. That’s because the North Carolina Tar Heels women remain alive and will play at 7 p.m. Friday against South Carolina, the top-seeded, No.1-ranked, coached-by-the-highest-paid-coach team in the nation. Third-seeded Iowa State is here, too, but the fourth team is upstart Creighton, which upended second-seeded Iowa – you know that girls’ high school basketball was a 6-person game in the Hawkeye State before most colleges even fielded Title IX-mandated teams, don’t you? – and blew into the NCAA’s second weekend for the first time in school history. UNC (1994) and USC (2017) are both former NCAA champions, and Iowa State has a long history of many tournament appearances under one of the sport’s winningest coaches (Bill Fennelly). UNC and USC play at 7 p.m. Friday, followed by Iowa State and Creighton. The games will be broadcast on ESPN and ESPN2. But you can get tickets easily, too.
