Denver -Yale pulled off a big upset as No. 13 seeds in last year’s NCAA tournament, and it has a chance to make it two in a row from the same position.
Yale (22-7) beat Auburn in the first round of the 2024 tournament and faces another Southeastern Conference enemy when it plays No. 4 Texas A & M in the South Region Opener Thursday evening. The bulldogs are making their fifth performance in the NCAA tournament since 2016 and have advanced past the first round twice.
Bulldogs won both the Ivy League season and the conference tournament titles.
“It has only become an expectation of what you are and what you think you should do,” coach James Jones said. “I think we have come to the point where we have just reached the expectation that it is so good we think we should be, and we will work against it.”
Yale has dropped just once since the calendar flipped until 2025, March 1 against Harvard, and it goes from meeting the Ivy League team to one that plays at a conference that landed 14 teams in the NCAA tournament.
As 2024 showed, the bulldogs are not frightened by the big stage.
“A goal?” Sain Bez Mbeng said. “Advance. Win.”
Yale has an opportunity to give Ivy League a victory in three straight NCAA tournaments. In addition to last year’s victory over Auburn, Princeton beat Arizona as No. 15 Seeds in the first round in 2023.
The bulldogs are led by John Poulakidas, which on average was 19.2 points per match. Poulakidas burned the upset of Auburn by beating 6 of 9 from 3-point interval and getting 28 points
Junior Nick Townsend is second in the team at 15.4 points and leads in rebounding (7.2), and Mbeng pours 13.4 ppg.
While Yale has rolled, aggies (22-10) have fought into the route. They dropped four in a row after a five-game winning line, snapped that sliding by beating Auburn on March 4 when Tigers was ranked as No. 1, but later fell to Texas in double overtime in the Sec-Tournament Quarter.
Texas A&M, which ended 11-7 at the conference, knows that Bulldogs is not a team to take easy after seeing them beat Auburn last year.
“We will look back and study movie and do the right things in practice,” Senior Henry Coleman III said. “We will play hard and play Texas A & M basketball. They still have to protect us as well.”
None of the teams is long-only a rotational player, 6-foot-10 Yale Center Samson Aletan, is higher than 6 foot-9-so they match well.
Aggies are led by the guards Wade Taylor IV (15.7 ppg) and Zhuric Phelps (14.1). They average 74.3 points per match and allow 67.9, and they stand out on the glass where they average 41.2 returns per match, fifth in the country, even though they do not have a player who pulls down more than Andersson Garcia’s 6.2.
Texas A&M is not productive behind the arch, which makes only 31.1 percent of its 3-point attempts. However, Aggies compensates for that weakness by leading Division I in offensive returns by 16.2 per match.
-Michael Kelly, Field Level Media
