STANFORD, Calif. (AP) — The resume was imposing: a top seed, two national titles, a 59-game winning streak at home.
Then along came Harvard.
Bucking history and making it at the same time, Harvard became the first 16th-seeded team to win an NCAA tournament game by jolting Stanford 71-67 Saturday night.
“This is one of the best wins I’ve ever experienced,” said Allison Feaster, whose 35 points and 13 rebounds led Harvard and shattered the Cardinal’s aura of invincibility on their home floor. “I can’t tell you the amount of adversity we faced, just coming in here. But somehow, we did it.”
Before Harvard’s victory, top seeds were 75-0 against 16th seeds in the women’s and men’s tournaments. The Ivy League champions won their first NCAA tournament game in three tries and in the process snapped Stanford’s 59-game winning streak at Maples Pavilion.
“We’ve set a lot of records this year, but they’re sure not as big as this one,” Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said. “We’ve broken records and created history, but this tops the list.”
“I’m just very, very happy,” Delaney-Smith added. “No one thought we could do it but us.”
Women’s top seeds were 19-0 against No. 16 seeds since the tournament expanded to 64 schools in 1994. Top-seeded men’s squads were 56-0 against No. 16 seeds since that tournament went to 64 teams in 1985.
Harvard (23-4), already with the most wins in the program’s 16 years, advanced to the second round Monday night against No. 9 seed Arkansas, a 76-70 winner over No. 8 seed Hawaii.
Stanford (21-6), weakened by injuries in the last week that sidelined stars Vanessa Nygaard and Kristin Folkl, lost at Maples for the first time since an 82-65 setback to Purdue in the 1994 West Regional final.
“It’s just been a horrible week,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said. “(The loss) wasn’t the worst of it.”
Still, it was a shocking end to a run of success for Stanford, which made six trips to the Final Four since 1990, including two national titles.
“We didn’t play with the type of confidence we played with all season. We didn’t get the perimeter shooting we got all year,” VanDerveer said.
From the start, Stanford struggled without Nygaard, its top outside shooter, and Folkl, its leading scorer and rebounder. Nygaard tore a ligament in her left knee in the season finale at Oregon State a week ago and Folkl sustained a similar injury in practice Tuesday.
Stanford couldn’t replace the lost production and couldn’t handle Feaster, the nation’s leading scorer.
“Maybe the chemistry wasn’t there,” said Stanford’s Olympia Scott, who had 18 points. “Obviously, we weren’t the same team.”
Stanford entered as the nation’s top shooting team, hitting 53 percent of its shots. But it slipped to a season-low 33 percent against Harvard, which shot 63 percent in the first half and 46 percent for the game.
The absence of Nygaard and Folkl forced Stanford into major shifts with little time to adjust to the changes.
“We made turnovers at crucial times. We made poor decisions far too often, and when you’re shooting poorly like we did, it all adds up to even more pressure,” VanDerveer said. “Then, beyond that, when the other team is shooting as well as Harvard did, it put even more pressure on us.
“It seemed like our people were trying to do things by themselves instead of within a team framework, but they haven’t played together enough.”
Saturday’s summary
Harvard’s victory was the biggest but not the only upset on Saturday. One of the other notable surprises came in the Midwest Regional, when Becky Hammon and Katie Cronin combined to lead 12th-seeded Colorado State to an 81-75 victory over No. 5-seed Drake.
Colorado State’s victory was part of a night of upsets in the women’s tournament as two No. 11 seeds and a No. 10 also advanced. But there was no upset in Knoxville, where top-ranked Tennessee began its quest for an unprecedented third straight national title with a 102-58 thumping of Liberty in a Mideast game featuring the nation’s only unbeaten teams.
In Champaign, Ill., 11th-seeded Cal Santa Barbara upset No. 6 seed Vanderbilt 76-71 in overtime in the Mideast, handing the Commodores their earliest exit in coach Jim Foster’s seven seasons. Cal Santa Barbara will meet Illinois, which beat Wisconsin-Green Bay 82-58.
Virginia Tech, seeded 11th in the West, knocked off sixth-seeded Wisconsin 75-64 in Gainesville, Fla., and 10th-seeded Louisville beat No. 7 seed Utah 69-61 in a West Regional game at Durham, N.C.
Also in the West, Hawaii beat Arkansas 76-70 at Stanford, Florida beat Montana 85-64 at Gainesville, Fla., and Duke beat Middle Tennessee 92-67 at Durham, N.C.
In the Mideast, Iowa State beat Kent 79-76 and Rutgers got by Oregon 79-76 in Ames, Iowa, and Western Kentucky beat Stephen F. Austin 88-76 in Knoxville. In Midwest games at Ruston, La., Louisiana Tech beat Holy Cross 86-58 and Clemson beat Miami 60-49. Purdue won the other game at West Lafayette, downing Washington 88-71.
Early Sunday action
No. 7 North Carolina 85, No. 12 Fla. International 72
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Tracy Reid is a major part of North Carolina’s success, but the No. 7 Tar Heels proved once again Sunday she is not the only part.
Reid became North Carolina’s all-time leading scorer with 17 points in an 85-72 win over No. 12 Florida International 85-72 in the second round of the NCAA tournament Mideast Regional.
But the All-American forward played only 26 minutes because of the stomach flu. Others chipped in with huge efforts off the bench as the second-seeded Tar Heels (26-6) advanced to a regional semifinal for the fifth time in the last six years.
“Sometimes we depend on her too much, we get caught up in watching Tracy on the floor or trying to get her the ball,” said North Carolina coach Sylvia Hatchell. “So, when she wasn’t in there, we were running our motion offense and we were scoring every time.”
“We just had some great teamwork when Tracy wasn’t in there.”
Reid, an All-American forward, now has 2,160 points in her career, surpassing Tonya Sampson’s school record of 2,143 set from 1991-94.
The Tar Heels were led in the second half by reserve Jessica Gaspar, who kept FIU at bay with eight points in the opening 7:17 of the period after the Golden Panthers had cut a 13-point North Carolina margin to four. Gaspar finished with 15 as FIU never got closer than seven down the stretch.
“Jessica is a big-time player,” said Hatchell. “She likes the competition. She thrives on that. Jessica loves to be physical and the tougher the competition the more she likes it.”
The No. 7 seed Golden Panthers (29-2) saw their 18-game winning streak snapped. FIU hadn’t lost since a two-point defeat at Campbell on Jan. 5.
Gergana Branzova led FIU with 20 points and 10 rebounds.
Reid’s two free throws 50 seconds into the game gave her the career scoring mark, but nothing else went right for the Tar Heels in the early going as they fell behind by as many as 11.
The Golden Panthers made their first nine shots to build their double-digit lead on North Carolina’s home court. FIU then hit the offensive skids as the Tar Heels switched to a match-up zone defense.
North Carolina went on a 17-0 run to take control of the game as FIU went seven minutes without scoring, going 0-for-8 from the field with five turnovers. Most of the damage was done with Reid on the bench as freshmen Juana Brown and Laquanda Barksdale scored seven and six points respectively.
“I knew our defense wasn’t working,” Hatchell said of FIU’s early success. “So, we just had to experiment and try some different things because we were going zone on a made (shot) and man on a miss, but the man was a sagging man. It confused them completely.”
“They did switch defenses on us, and at that point we got a little impatient and got behind the eight ball,” said FIU coach Cindy Russo.