After what I thought was the most dramatic day of the tournament so far (and please go back and relive it with my recap), I entered Sunday exhausted. And Sunday’s tournament games seemed exhausted too. There were a few too many mismatches and a few too many blowouts. But before we get to those, let’s start with the good stuff:

#3 Iowa St. defeated #6 North Carolina

There are a lot of ways I expected North Carolina’s season to end.

-I expected the Tar Heels to have a game where they missed a bunch of threes and couldn’t compete. But Leslie McDonald nailed a late three to give the Tar Heels a 79-76 lead.

-I expected the Tar Heels to miss some key free throws and have that cost them a tournament game. But North Carolina wasn’t even in the bonus until the final seconds, and when James Michael McAdoo went to the line, he buried both shots in crunch time.

Instead we got the unexpected.

-Marcus Paige, a brilliant ball-handler, threw the ball away in the final minutes.

-North Carolina, a team that loves to run, was out-run by Iowa St.’s Naz Long, who snuck behind the defense for a three in the final minute.

-And a North Carolina team that has played better defense than offense, couldn’t keep the opposing team out of the lane in the final seconds of a tie game. DeAndre Kane unexpectedly cut to his left, and cut through a double team for the go-ahead lay-up.

Perhaps for North Carolina, the unexpected only made sense. The Tar Heels this year beat the teams ranked first, second, third, and fourth in the preseason AP poll. They also lost to multiple teams outside the Top 100. They started ACC play 1-4 and ended ACC play 12-1. So of course, the moment Iowa St.’s Georges Niang went out with a foot injury, and North Carolina became the presumptive favorite, they went down. The moment Steve Kerr began discussing how Iowa St.’s team had nothing left in the tank, the Tar Heels played their worst stretch of basketball. In this season, it only made sense.

North Carolina fans will and should complain about the clock operation on the final possession. The fact that the clock did not start on time may have impacted whether the player put up a prayer shot or Roy Williams called timeout. But Kane’s shot was the difference, and on an afternoon where he scored 24 points, Kane was the hero.

#8 Kentucky defeated #1 Wichita St.

Experience vs talent.

The world’s greatest mid-major vs a power conference blue blood.

An undefeated record vs a decorated history.

A Final Four club from last year still looking for respect vs an underachieving team still looking for redemption.

Many people wanted to see one of the two teams go down in flames. But neither team seemed overmatched. No one was exposed. No one was overrated.

For a time, the game seemed to swing on experience. Wichita St. did a fabulous job anticipating where Kentucky would pass the ball and converted several live ball steals into fast-break baskets. This gave Wichita St. the early lead.

For a time, the game seemed to swing on talent. At the start of the second half, Julius Randle had a monster dunk, a beautiful assist on a three, and he muscled for an offensive rebound to get his team back in the game.

Sometimes the two themes swung in contrast. Wichita St. had been killing Kentucky by sneaking players along the baseline for alley-oops or back-door cuts. Then Julius Randle decided he had seen enough. At 9:10 left he made an amazing block to stop Ron Baker from sneaking behind the defense one more time.

And then a funny thing happened down the stretch. The game stopped being about a contrast in styles, and started being about who would make more plays. James Young drove the lane for a gorgeous basket. Cleanthony Early hit an impossible turn-around jumper along the baseline. James Young nailed a three. Ron Baker nailed a three. And the game came down to a shot at the buzzer that was off the mark.

I don’t think the game quite lived up to the immense hype. (This wasn’t quite Duke vs Syracuse for the first time in ACC play.) But it came close.

#10 Stanford defeated #2 Kansas

I want to apologize to Stanford fans. I have never believed in this team because I have never believed in the lineup rotation. After Aaron Bright was declared out for the season, Johnny Dawkins decided that he was going to run three forwards out on the floor at all times, with much of the offense running through point forward Dwight Powell.

In 2014, I don’t believe in that philosophy. It is just too hard to get the right spacing with three big men on the floor. More distressingly, despite a tall front line, Stanford’s defense has often been porous. They effectively had the 13^th tallest lineup in the nation (according to Kenpom.com), and often had four players 6’6” or taller on the floor, but with the team getting shredded by Arizona, Arizona St., and UCLA late in the season, it didn’t quite seem like the right formula.

But in the NCAA tournament, Dawkins lineup choice has proven to be brilliant. His tall wing players frustrated New Mexico’s Kendall Williams in the first round. And his tall front line put up a wall against Kansas. Much like San Diego St. had done against the Jayhawks, by simply holding their position, Stanford kept the Jayhawks from getting buckets inside.

(Stanford’s ability to get back defensively and keep the game in the half-court was also remarkable. Even when Kansas got steals late in the game, the Jayhawks couldn’t turn those steals into lay-ups, and still had to work half-court sets.)

But having said all that, I still can’t get enthusiastic about this upset because of what we missed out on. Because Kansas went out so early, we never got to see Joel Embiid in the NCAA tournament. And because this game got caught up in the half-court, Andrew Wiggins was not able to show his full-court athleticism to the nation.

Stanford had the right plan, but as a viewer I still felt cheated. I think it says a lot when the key sequence of the game might have been a series of inside baskets by Stanford’s Stefan Nastic. Nastic is a solid college post-player. But as the announcers noted, he isn’t the kind of player who can make a shot beyond three feet. And you couldn’t help but feel that if Joel Embiid had been in the game, Nastic might not have got those inside looks. Nastic’s baskets gave Stanford a 7 point lead early in the second half. Normally, that wouldn’t be much, but given the half-court game and tempo, it was actually too much for Kansas to overcome.

But I also have to point some of the finger at the Kansas players who were in the game. Despite playing in a friendly environment in St. Louis, the Jayhawks never did enough to create energy and get the fans in the game. There was a sequence in the second half where Kansas turned the ball over, saved it from going out of bounds, and then no one on Kansas made a real effort to run and get the ball. The Jayhawks seemed like they were sleepwalking.

Whereas Duke lacked the personnel on defense, and Syracuse hit a huge rut offensively, Kansas had a versatile lineup that should have been able to compete in any situation. But on Sunday, they showed almost none of that. Besides Conner Frankamp’s late threes and Tarik Black’s key baskets, all the Kansas players that played meaningful minutes had ORtgs below 75. Given the talent on this team, that sort of execution left a bit of an empty feeling.

- The Land of Blowouts

#4 UCLA defeated #12 SF Austin

On Friday I raved about UCLA sharing the ball, and that was even more on display in this mismatch. The Bruins had 21 assists and even Travis Wear got in the act with six dimes. According the announcers, the Bruins also went a full 30 minutes without a turnover.

#1 Virginia defeated #8 Memphis

Rachel Nichols shared this nice anecdote: Virginia’s Joe Harris not only talks in his sleep, he sleepwalks. But given how well he is playing this season, his teammates/roommates told him he can do whatever he wants.

#1 Arizona defeated #8 Gonzaga

The turnover differential (21 for Gonzaga, six for Arizona was highlighted all game long), but it is worth noting that until garbage time Arizona was also shooting over 50%.

#6 Baylor defeated #3 Creighton

I picked Baylor to advance to the Sweet Sixteen in part because of their amazing late season splits. And after Creighton struggled with Providence’s zone defense in the Big East tournament, I thought the Blue Jays would have trouble against Baylor’s zone. But I never expected that Doug McDermott would score only three points in the first half of a game.

The most touching moment in this game was probably head coach Greg McDermott pulling his starters off the floor, one at a time, for a series of embraces. I think we sometimes forget that not only was this Doug McDermott’s final game, this was also the final game for play-maker Grant Gibbs, and shot-maker Jahenns Manigat. And Ethan Wragge’s career also comes to a close. Wragge, who shot better than 41% in every year of his career, and made at least 66 threes in every year of his career, was the perfect three point shooter to play off of McDermott’s double teams. Creighton had a Top 10 offense for three straight years, and this was more than just Greg McDermott.

#11 Tennessee defeated #14 Mercer

Tennessee held a 24-4 rebounding advantage at the end of the first half. Sometimes we talk about how the raw rebounding numbers are misleading. Offensive rebounding percentages say a lot more. But this is a case where the counting stats speak emphatically. Rebounding differentials like that aren’t supposed to happen after middle school.

When Tennessee is clicking, their length and athleticism can be suffocating. They started out the game against Mercer with a steal and easy fast-break basket. The next possession, Tennessee forced a shot-clock violation. Tennessee also ended the first half by forcing a shot-clock violation. (This is almost impossible to do but there was a 0.6 second differential between the shot-clock and game clock.)

This is a team that absolutely blew Virginia out of the water in late December.  This is a team that has absolutely been crushing teams in March.

And that’s why I am always surprised when I look up the Volunteer’s stats. They rank near 250^th in the country in the rate of turnovers forced. They don’t actually get out and run much, as they have one of the slower paces in the country. Tennessee is one of those teams where the eye test doesn’t really match the recorded stats.

Or maybe Tennessee is simply this tournament’s biggest enigma. On the one hand, they barely qualified for the tournament. They were lucky to draw a slumping UMass team. They were also lucky to draw an underdog Mercer team. On the other hand, their margin-of-victory stats now suggest they are one of the top teams in the country. The Sweet Sixteen will provide a fine litmus test.