A lot of people are probably going to pick No. 14 Stephen F. Austin over Texas Tech as the big first-round upset in this region, but I don’t see any of the No. 3 seeds getting immediately ousted this year.
Rather, the big upset here is the Thundering Herd’s nfl youth jersey stampede to the round of 32.
I don’t get many opportunities to write about mid-major schools, but when it did happen this season, Marshall always seemed to feature prominently. The Thundering Herd landed at No. 7 in my early-February ranking of the best Cinderella candidates. (No. 4 among teams who made the tournament.) And in a mid-January list of the 10 underhyped stars you should be paying attention to, Marshall had not one, but two players in Jon Elmore and Ajdin Penava.
This team takes and makes a ton of three-pointers. Per Sports Reference, the Thundering Herd rank 13th in made threes, averaging slightly more than 10 per game. That’s how they knock out Wichita State and its dreadful perimeter defense in the first round. And once they get hot, they could stay hot against a West Virginia perimeter defense that allows a lot of deep balls.
At full strength, Texas Tech is remarkable on the defensive end of the floor. The Red Raiders struggled in the first few games of Zach Smith’s 13-game absence and again had some issues in late February while Keenan Evans was well below 100 percent because nfl replica jerseys cheap of a toe injury. And yet, they finished the year with the third-most efficient defense in the country.
Because of the defensive prowess, when Evans is having average-or-better offensive outputs, Texas Tech almost always wins. The Red Raiders are 20-2 when he has an O-rating of replica nfl jerseys 100 or better. The two exceptions were a road game against Oklahoma back when Trae Young was still the best thing since sliced bread (27 points, 10 assists) and a neutral-court game against Seton Hall in which the Pirates played their best game of the season (11-of-20 from three-point range; 15 offensive rebounds).nfl replica jerseys
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