KANSAS CITY — Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark made a tough decision late Thursday night that guaranteed widespread reaction across the country, hardly all of it laudatory.
Less than 24 hours later, Yormark was rewarded for his goodwill gesture.
Despite the hype, marketing and promotion over the Big 12’s LED glass floor, the league and its commissioner were the subjects of routine mockery after sporadic slippage and one legitimate injury interfered with the basketball through the first three days of the men’s tournament.
Yormark swallowed his pride and decided to unplug the digital floor in exchange for good ol’ American hardwood.
“We have a tremendous final four tomorrow night,” he told me late Thursday night. “That should be the story.”
Instead of a story, the Big 12 and college basketball were delivered an epic in Friday night’s opening semifinal between No. 1 Arizona and No. 7 Iowa State. The Wildcats’ buzzer-beating 82-80 win was nothing less than arguably the best game of this splendid season. Arizona senior/Big 12 Player of the Year Jaden Bradley hit a fallaway 17-footer from the wing at the buzzer over an immaculate defensive effort from Cyclones freshman defensive stud Killyan Toure. When the ball swished, that shot and this game buried the previous three days worth of chatter about the court.
“It was a crazy shot,” Bradley said. “It was great defense.”
This is how you flip the script.
Adding to the frenzy and upping the cosmetic appeal was the lack of timeouts called in the final frantic minutes, especially in the closing possessions. Lloyd had multiple in his pocket and didn’t use them.
“It set the stage for something epic to happen,” Lloyd told me. “In those games, you feel like Will Ferrell in Old School, where he gets up there and he’s doing the political argument against like James CarvuCarver, or something like that, and he and he kind of blacks out.”
Lloyd blacked out a little bit. The game was that great, the moments bursting with drama, the big shots happening a pace too quick to ingest them all properly.
Bradley being the hero was apt. BYU superstar AJ Dybantsa led the nation in scoring, but the league’s coaches voted for who they believed was the best player on clearly the best team.
“I thought it was pretty tough for him the last couple days to win an award like that,” Lloyd told CBS Sports in the coach’s locker room after the game. “It is big, and he’s not a guy that tries to take up any extra space in the room. He’s not about individual things at all. And then to have people come back at him and say, ‘No, you shouldn’t have got it.’ I think that’s a tough space to put a young guy in. Even giving him the MVP trophy before the game yesterday is kind of weird. He hasn’t experienced anything like that and he just wants to be one of the guys. And then for him to come out and put a stamp on it, and a game like this, I think, is really cool.”
The frenzied finish that flooded into Bradley’s winner was a work of art. Arizona and Iowa State combined to make a shot on their final 11 possessions, including seven in a row from 3-point range. Arizona finished with 1.24 points per possession to ISU’s 1.21.
“It’s like shooting in the ocean, you feel like you can’t miss,” Dell’Orso said.
“I think it’s an amazing feeling,” Iowa State All-American Joshua Jefferson said of playing in a 40-minute masterpiece.
The night just as easily could have gone his team’s way.
“They were able to make one more play tonight,” Iowa State coach TJ Otzelberger said. “Just like they’re Final Four contenders, so are we.”
The Cyclones got off to a 14-2 start and they also had a flurry 9-0 run to end the first half that had the joint blaring thanks to three 3-pointers from Cyclones senior forward Milan Momcilovic.
“Larry Bird showed up,” Lloyd told me. “Thank God, the half ran out.”
Momcilovic sank eight 3-pointers, becoming just the fourth player in the history of the Big 12 Tournament to make so many triples in one game.
“Great player, crazy shooter,” said Bradley.
Momcilovic’s 28 points were a game-high, but only two more than Arizona’s Anthony Dell’Orso, who had career-best 26 points (including six 3s) after combining to score 23 in his four previous games.
“You enter into that kind of flow state,” Dell’Orso said. “And guys just brought everything. There were multiple facets of the game other than just shooting that go unnoticed, but we definitely pay attention to that.”
Everything crescendoed to Bradley’s buzzer-beater, the first by any Big 12 player in any game since 2022 (Kansas‘ Bobby Pettiford vs. Wisconsin) and also the first winning shot as time expired in this tournament since Monte Morris beat Texas at the horn in the 2015 quarterfinals from damn near the same spot.
“They really made us dig deep literally 40 minutes. We were just trying to hang on by a thread, stay in the game,” Lloyd said.
God it was great. The NCAA Tournament is the main event for clear and obvious reasons, but every single year we are reminded why March Madness is the motto just as much for the two weeks that feed into Selection Sunday. And this game was one of the best conference tournament battles of the past decade.
It was Arizona’s ninth win this season over a ranked team (second-most in college basketball history). The only teams to get 10 were 2024-25 Florida, 2010-11 Connecticut and 2000-01 Duke. They all won the national title.
Arizona may well become the fourth/next to do it.
The result won’t change anything for Selection Sunday. Arizona is a lock No. 1 seed going to the West and Iowa State will most likely be a No. 2 seed in some other region of the bracket.
Sometimes, a great game is all we want. On Friday, it’s what the Big 12 needed. Until tonight, the tournament was heavily trending toward being remembered for a floor that lit up like a casino game and induced some conspicuous extracurricular slipping and sliding while a basketball tournament was trying to play out.
Lloyd made sure to credit Yormark and the Big 12’s director of basketball, Brian Thornton, for not being too proud to stick with the glass floor. Lloyd and Kelvin Sampson in particular endorsed the switch from the moment they were asked on Thursday.
It’s those two coaches who will still be on the sidelines for Saturday night’s title game.
“Shows a lot of courage and great leadership,” Lloyd told me. “I mean, on two levels. The foresight and the fortitude to try something outside the box and then have it not work and pull it back. It’s pretty special. The Big 12 makes basketball a priority and and that’s pretty special to be a part of. I don’t know if every power conference can say that, but we definitely can say that with our leadership.”
Arizona will play in a second straight league championship game, and it will be a rematch: Houston beat Arizona for the league championship in this building a year ago. Now, again, the Big 12’s two best teams will battle for a trophy. Arizona won 73-66 at Houston back in February.
Now it goes for its Big 12 Tournament title. Houston is still vying for the last No. 1 seed.
The stakes are clear. And look us now: Talking all about hoop. It’s back to being about the basketball, about the tournament, about the teams.As it always should have been. The Big 12 is more than good enough to sell the product on the floor and have that be enough. Turn on the lights, let the coaches and players take care of the rest and who knows what they’ll give you?
Sometimes it’s one of the best games you’ll ever see.
;)
