UConn basketball Twitter turns travel issues into motivation ahead of Final Four
The UConn Huskies men’s basketball team is doing everything possible to keep their players as motivated as possible ahead of their second trip to the Final Four in as many years. Even if that means creating fake narratives to fire their players up. The Huskies have had a number of mechanical issues with their planes, which means they won’t land in Phoenix until early in the morning on Thursday. They’re expected to arrive at 2:00 AM EST. Check the post they made to their social media pages.
Their plane was supposed to take off at 6:00 PM EST on Wednesday evening. But due to mechanical issues, they’ll be landing much later than the other teams. So, they posted a couple of tweets to their Twitter account, ‘so we took that personal,’ from Seth Davis of CBS Sports. Sometimes teams need to just really dig for things to motivate them before big games. And this UConn team has been such a heavy favorite for the entire tournament, they’re a great example of that.
Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports is worried that the Huskies won’t be on time in Phoenix, because two nights before a game is apparently the most important for sleep for each team. He’s got a number of reasons to be worried about the Huskies and their travel schedule–$600,000 of them to be exact. Before the tournament started, he bet BIG on the Huskies to win it all at a +360-money line. Portnoy wagered $600k to win a total payout of $2,760,000. That’s a lot of cheddar on the line.
An extremely high percentage of the nation’s brackets are riding on the Huskies winning this year’s NCAA Tournament and with good reason–they’ve looked like one of the more dominant teams in college basketball history. They’ve thoroughly destroyed all of their competition in getting to the Final Four.
The closest any team has come to beating UConn was Illinois and they were tied with the Huskies near the end of the first half, 23-23. Then, UConn proceeded to go on a 30-0 run and decided to extinguish all hope for the Fighting Illini. They went on to thrash them by 25 points to punch their tickets to the Final Four. UConn has whipped every other team they’ve faced in this tournament by more than 25. They’ve ruthlessly marched through Stetson (91-52), Northwestern (75-58), San Diego State (82-58), and Illinois (77-52).
Not only are the Huskies deep and talented on the offensive end side of the ball, but they’re dominant defensively. They became just the seventh team in NCAA Tournament history to ever hold their four opponents to below 60 points in leading up to a Final Four. UConn also became the first reigning champions to make it back to a Final Four since the Florida Gators did it in 2006-2007.
For now, the Huskies stand on the cusp of college basketball history. They’ll take on the No. 4 seed Alabama Crimson Tide on Saturday, March 6th. Tip-off time for that one is set for 8:49 EST and the game will be nationally televised on TBS. The Huskies are currently 11.5-point favorites, according to DraftKings.