The pep bands will play on, in New York and Louisville and Kansas City and Las Vegas, in Greenville and Seattle, but there will only be silence coming from here.
The mighty Triangle has struck out.
With Duke’s overtime loss to Colorado on Monday in the NCAA women’s tournament, the Triangle — the self-proclaimed center of the college basketball universe — won’t have a representative in either tournament’s second weekend for the first time since 1996 and for only the fourth time since the men’s tournament first expanded in 1975.
It’s a historic zero, especially coming a year after the Triangle alone accounted for half of the men’s Final Four — from hoops feast to basketball famine.
The men’s teams have collectively failed to make it out of the second round twice in recent years, but in both instances, there was a women’s team still playing — N.C. State in 2021, North Carolina in 2014. Duke, playing at home as a No. 3 seed, was the only team of all of them actually expected to advance this year, and not only did the Blue Devils fall short, they didn’t get any help from elsewhere.
It’s a grim state of affairs, with only the Duke men’s ACC title as consolation, although N.C. State’s return to the tournament for the first time since 2018 was certainly cause for optimism. And unlike the men, the women can’t blame the rest of the ACC for hurting their seeding: Four of their ACC peers are in the Sweet 16, including both of Miami’s teams.
So is this the beginning of a trend, or a historical aberration?
On the women’s side, this was a rebuilding year for N.C. State after a long period of local dominance, while Duke and North Carolina are both clearly on the upswing. On the men’s side, Jon Scheyer’s debut season at Duke was still a success and N.C. State’s program is back on solid footing, even if North Carolina flirted with disaster from the start and found it at the finish.
The expectation level for the Duke and North Carolina men, and all of the women’s teams, will continue to be a top-four seed that paves a path to the Sweet 16. Until that fundamentally changes, it’s still easy to paint this as a one-off, like 1996.
And was 1996 ever a blip: Starting in 1997, the Triangle had at least one team not only in the second weekend but in either Final Four for the next 14 years.
At least, unlike 1996, there’s a hockey team to occupy everyone’s attentions, with the high-flying Carolina Hurricanes entering perhaps the most pivotal week of their season so far — albeit minus Andrei Svechnikov, lost for the year to a torn ACL during the ACC tournament, and with increasing concerns about the state of their goaltending.
The Hurricanes will at least be one of their postseason tournament’s top seeds, but they do share one fundamental expectation with their hoops counterparts: If they don’t make it to at least the third round, their season will be a disappointment as well.
College basketball will go on without the Triangle, a year after it seemed like it could barely exist without it, but there’s work ahead everywhere to make sure this is merely a vacation from the second weekend, and not the beginning of a trend.
The bar here is set higher than this. Period.
