Men’s college basketball, women’s college basketball – there’s no shortage of college ball, every night.
Don’t worry, we’re here to help you figure out what you missed but shouldn’t have. Here are all the best moments from the weekend in college basketball.
It’s men’s conference tourney time
Just as the women’s tournaments begin to wrap up — more on that in a bit — the men’s tournaments get started. Most of the mid-majors already got going on that front, sure, but now it’s Power Conference time. The fields for the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, ACC and Big East are set, thanks to some major final-weekend clashes and last-minute upsets.
No. 15 Purdue is unlikely to still have that designation for long, considering it lost to unranked Wisconsin in its final game of the regular season, 97-93, and that coming after barely beating Northwestern earlier in the week. The Boilermakers are the 7-seed in the Big Ten, giving them a bye until the third round of that massive 18-team conference tourney, but out of the four teams that will play their first game that day, Purdue is the one that feels most likely to disappoint again.
[2026 Big Ten Men’s Basketball Tournament: Bracket, Scores, How to Watch]
Losing three out of four, with the lone win being against Northwestern and also just barely a W, will cause that kind of negativity. Purdue isn’t a bad team by any means, but it does have a 13-7 record in Big Ten with some close calls attached, too — this is the wrong time to be in a funk.
In other finale failures, No. 4 UConn fell to unranked Marquette, 68-62, after blowing an 8-point lead. Marquette did get a lead of its own up to 12, and the Huskies cut it down, bringing things as close as 2 points with 43 seconds left.
UConn couldn’t do more than that, however, and Marquette picked up the W against a ranked opponent — and might have even bumped UConn out of the top-seed line in the process, while also keeping it from the regular-season Big East title and the No. 1 spot in the conference tournament in favor of No. 18 St. John’s. We’ll just have to wait and see what FOX Sports’ Mike Decourcy has to say about the former, though.
At least Michigan State’s defeat at the hands of Michigan didn’t signal a potential catastrophe. Well, besides every official in the country now keeping an extra eye on Jeremy Fears Jr. and the groins he may or may not be kicking at any given moment, anyway. The Spartans were swept in the regular season by the Wolverines, yes, but the worst that comes out of this, as far as the playoffs go, is that Michigan State might have to face 6-seed UCLA instead of a worse team, should the Bruins advance against whichever of 11-seed Minnesota and 14-seed Rutgers wins their round-two matchup.
Still! This was a chance to secure the 2-seed outright, which did not happen thanks to Nebraska and Illinois winning their finales, and Michigan getting the dub times two in 2025-2026 is not a great sign. Want deeper thoughts on what this matchup means, though? FOX Sports college basketball analyst Michael Cohen has got takeaways for you.
The first 2026 autobids
There are already quite a few teams that have punched their ticket for March Madness, thanks to winning mid-major conference tournaments, but let’s highlight the first two to manage the feat — the first men’s team, and the first women’s. Western Illinois’ women made it to March the old-fashioned way, by winning the Ohio Valley Conference tournament against Lindenwood. The Leathernecks won, 71-65, staving off a potential defeat after star forward Mia Nicastro went down with an ankle injury… but then came back in a couple minutes later to lead the charge and preserve what had been a 16-point lead.
Nicastro, a semifinalist for the 2026 Becky Hammon Mid-Major Player of the Year award thanks to averaging nearly 10 rebounds per game while ranking fourth in the nation in scoring, dropped a game-high 21 points in 38 minutes with 12 rebounds for the double-double.
Meanwhile, the men’s side was a bit more passive — that conference tournament hasn’t actually been played yet. However, if you recall from reading all about the mid-major NEC earlier this season, the sheer volume of successful, transitioning Division II teams in the conference meant that chances were good that at least one team in the championship game was going to be ineligible for March Madness.
So, Long Island is going up against ineligible Mercyhurst in the conference title game, and while the latter can still be the NEC champion, the automatic bid, by default, goes to Long Island. Which at least just happened to be regular-season champion for the NEC in addition to winning its way to the championship game.
What a buzzer-beater (and an upset!)
The Patriot League conference championship game isn’t going to have its top seed in it, as Navy fell to 4-seed Boston University in dramatic fashion. Leaving 3.6 seconds on the clock was apparently too much time for the Terriers, as Chance Gladden sent a 40-foot prayer toward — and into — the basket before the freshman guard ran out of time.
Gladden was tied with Navy senior center Aidan Kehoe for the game-high with 26, and added 2 rebounds, 4 assists and a block, as well — each and every bit of that day important, considering it took a near-halfcourt heave to win in the end. And as implied by the seeding, this was a significant upset for the Patriot League: with the top seed toppled, the Terriers will take on 2-seed Lehigh on March 11. If BU wins, it will earn entry to March Madness for the first time since 2011 — while it was the winner of the 2020 Patriot League conference tournament, there was no March Madness that year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. As for Lehigh, its last time in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was 2012, when it defeated 2-seed Duke in the round of 64, led by future NBA player CJ McCollum. It’s been awhile for either team, but it has been even longer for Navy, which hasn’t made it to The Big Dance since 1998.
Duke wins ACC tournament in OT
As promised, most of the women’s Power Conference tournaments have wrapped up, with just one, the Big East’s, awaiting its conclusion. Not that you have to wait long there, since it will be played on Monday night. The ACC, though? Already a settled affair: No. 13 Duke took down No. 12 Louisville, 70-65, in overtime. While the Blue Devils shot just 39% on the day and didn’t hit a noteworthy number of 3s — just 8 — the Cardinals kept them in the game by fouling just a little too often. Despite leading for 78% of the title game, Louisville eventually faltered because Duke went to the line 26 times and sank 18 free throws, compared to 6 of 9 for the Cardinals. Every Blue Devils’ starter shot at least 3 free throws, with senior guard Taina Mair, one of two on Duke with 19 points, going 6-for-6 from the stripe. Mair also had a double-double, thanks to 12 boards.
Louisville led nearly from the jump, putting up a 21-14 first quarter, but let Duke back in little by little: the Cardinals were outscored by 5 points in the second, added just one to their lead in the third, then saw Duke close the gap in the fourth with a mere 14 points scored — it’s always the way where one more bucket would have avoided overtime, but it still feels like it needs to be said when Louisville scored just 11 points in the frame.
Duke would put up 10 points in overtime to give itself its largest lead of the game, and Louisville failed to grab the ACC’s automatic bid. The Cardinals are ranked, sit 12th in the NCAA Evaluation Tool and are a top-10 team in Wins Above Bubble, however — their seat in March is no less guaranteed than Duke’s.
UCLA dominates to clinch Big Ten bid
UCLA continued its rampage through the Big Ten, adding on to its unblemished regular-season conference record with not just a sweep through the tournament, but also a terrifying 96-45 W against No. 9 Iowa. Defeating a top-10 team by 51 points is absurd in a vacuum, but when you consider that the Hawkeyes had just handled No. 8 Michigan 62-44 mere days before, well. The Bruins are ridiculous, and historically so: that’s the largest margin of victory over a top-10 opponent ever, per ESPN Insights, in addition to the most lopsided Big Ten tourney final in history.
UCLA managed to hold senior forward Hannah Stuelke scoreless for 25 minutes. Sophomore guard Chazadi Wright couldn’t get clean enough looks from deep, and went 0-for-7 on 3s. Sophomore center Ava Heiden was productive, but mostly comparatively speaking — 15 points with 4 rebounds and no assists is a relatively quiet game for her.
The Bruins showed off their depth, with every starter scoring between 10 and 19 points, and with just one of them playing at least 30 minutes. Senior center Lauren Betts didn’t put up eye-popping numbers, but she still had 10 points, 4 rebounds, 3 assists, 3 steals and a block, and that was while having to share the paint with Heiden — Betts put in the work even if it didn’t all show up on the stat sheet. And her younger sister Sienna Betts picked up the not-really-slack, too: the freshman forward scored 14 points in 18 minutes with 7 rebounds, 5 assists and a block.
Texas wins SEC tournament
Don’t crown UCLA as NCAA champions just yet, however. Consider that No. 3 South Carolina has been routing difficult SEC opponents left and right for months now, but just lost to the same team that marred the Bruins’ otherwise perfect record: Texas. The No. 4 Longhorns have one real weakness, and it’s catching up if they have fallen behind. Texas just doesn’t score effectively enough against elite opponents, and basically not at all from deep, to make up a significant deficit. So, against South Carolina, the Longhorns solved that problem preemptively by going up 27-12 in the first quarter.
As Texas was able to limit its shooting from 3, it ended up hitting 54% of its shots, and South Carolina was never able to solve for the Longhorn D. It also did not help that the Gamecocks were abysmal at the line: Texas did foul enough to send South Carolina to the charity stripe 23 times, but it sank just 12 of those opportunities. Hitting even all 23 wouldn’t have changed the final score on its own, but every little bit of help was needed in a game where South Carolina was outrebounded, outscored in the paint and turned the ball over more often, too.
The loss to Texas was the least UCLA-like the Bruins have looked all season, for similar reasons of early disruption. Both teams — and any other — cannot let Texas build an early lead and be able to avoid its biggest weakness from there on out, especially now that every game is a must-win.
[Men’s College Basketball Rankings: Florida Surges, Virginia Cracks Top 10]
The Longhorns, by the way, have won eight in a row since losing to Vanderbilt in a way that caused coach Vic Schaefer to declare that they “had no heart,” and with an average margin of victory of 22 despite a number of those games being against current — and now former — ranked squads, as well as a trio of SEC tournament games.
West Virginia wins Big 12 tournament
Last up for completed Power Conference tournaments is the Big 12, in which No. 15 West Virginia took down top-seed and 10th-ranked TCU, getting revenge for last season’s defeat in the final as well as the regular-season sweep the Horned Frogs hit the Mountaineers with. In the last of those losses, TCU won by 9 points — West Virginia returned the favor here, 62-53. You could call it a low-scoring affair, but given these two teams rank 11th and 12th in Defensive Rating, and that 105 combined points is actually the most in a matchup between the two this season, well.
West Virginia shot just 40%, but that bested TCU’s 33%. The Horned Frogs made three additional treys, but in 16 more attempts — West Virginia made up the difference by going 13-for-15 from the line compared to TCU’s 5-for-6, while getting two additional buckets.
What worked best for West Virginia here was disrupting the rhythm that lets fifth-year guard Olivia Miles take over a game as either an elite scorer or facilitator — or, in the worst-case scenario for her opponents, both. Miles is a threat to put up a triple-double or numbers near to one, but here the Mountaineers held her to 6-for-14 shooting that included half of TCU’s 3-pointers, a single rebound, 4 assists and 2 steals. That’s a good night for most players, but a subpar one for Miles, whose performance drives the entire TCU offense. Given defense wins the Horned Frogs most of their games, that’s a problem, and one none of her teammates could solve for.
UConn, Villanova advance to Big East final
The Big East isn’t settled yet, but it will be on Monday night. The undefeated No. 1 UConn Huskies took down 8-seed Georgetown (84-39) and 5-seed Creighton (100-51) en route to the conference finals, where they will meet Villanova. The Wildcats had a slightly tougher time getting to their third showdown with UConn of the season, as 7-seed Providence gave them a real challenge in an impressive game for both sides, but No. 3 Seton Hall fell 62-48 thanks to Villanova’s defense.
While the Wildcats thrive with the 3 ball, here, they weren’t falling: instead, Villanova limited Seton Hall’s attack, keeping the Pirates to 3-for-16 shooting from beyond the arc and 33% shooting overall, thanks to physical defense that kept their shooters bullied throughout. Villanova won in the paint, forced 16 turnovers that converted into 23 points and kept bodies in front of shooters.
That kind of aggressive, in-your-face defense is going to be necessary against UConn, which cruised through its first two games while sitting the starters and even the primary reserves for the bulk of the second half and fourth quarter, respectively, on both occasions. The undefeated Huskies have only been behind at halftime once all season long, and it was against Villanova in the last meeting between the two. We’re about to see if UConn has learned anything since that last matchup, or if Nova, which is March Madness-bound regardless just like its coming opponent, has figured out how to keep pace with the Huskies for all four quarters.
