There's no real secret as to what did in Michigan State in the NCAA championship game. Yes, there was the superior talent on North Carolina. The Tar Heels shot really effectively in the first half. North Carolina could actually make free throws. The issue for Michigan State, though, was their inability to hold onto the ball.
The Spartans turned the ball over 21 times in the game. The poor ball-handling made it easier for North Carolina to go on runs big runs and stopped Michigan State attempts to come back cold.
This certainly wasn't the same Michigan State team we watched the past two weekends. But it was the same North Carolina team we all thought, back in November, was the best team in the country by a mile.
If ever a national championship game felt like a coronation, it was 2009.
There were reasons, over the past three months, to doubt these Tar Heels. There was Ty Lawson's bum toe. There was that weird and inexplicable loss to Boston College. There were memories of the way they went out, too soon, in the tournament the past two years. The 2007 collapse against Georgetown. The 2008 pasting by Kansas.
This is it. The last game of the 2008-09 basketball season. Whether you're rooting for Michigan State or North Carolina join is for a live chat at 9 PM ET and stick with us through the night. We'll be talking about the game, how the teams got here, the Arizona and Memphis quests to find someone to take their job, and anything else that comes to mind.
Tom Izzo has used words like "enigma" and "challenging" to describe Raymar Morgan. He has spoken of the difficulty he's had in finding the multi-talented junior forward to keep his mood up, and to play with consistency. In a year of challenges overcome at Michigan State, Morgan has represented one of Izzo's most persistent coaching conundrums.
But after Morgan went off for 18 points, nine rebounds and five steals Saturday night in the Spartans' national semifinal victory over Connecticut, the word Izzo used to describe Morgan was short and simple: "Best."
Specifically, the Huskies' own guards killed them against Michigan State. In one of those nights where the stats do not lie, A.J. Price, Kemba Walker and Craig Austrie were every bit as miserable as their numbers suggested. They took 29 of the Huskies 59 shot attempts, but only scored 26 of UConn's 73 points.
Here's a question to nibble on between games: Where would Michigan State have finished in the Big East?
Remember the Big East? The monster conference of all-time? The beast? The 16-team behemoth that grabbed three of the four No. 1 seeds in this tournament? That just 10 days ago had a chance to have four teams in the Final Four?
Well, the champions of the Big Ten have just taken out two of those No. 1 Big East seeds en route to the NCAA title game, in which they will play the winner of tonight's Villanova-North Carolina game Monday night. They've done it with grit and toughness and hard-core rebounding -- qualities we normally associate with the Big East but of which Michigan State has brought truckloads to this tournament.
This is what we have been waiting all week for, through non-stories like Ty Lawson legally playing craps, through analysis beaten into the ground, through the cycling of the coaching carousel. Well, Michigan State and UConn tip off at 6:07 PM EST. We will start the live blog at 6 PM ET. Join us after the jump.
Rebound. Make the shooters beat you. Rebound. Make Thabeet roam. Rebound.
These are the five keys for Michigan State if it's to win its Final Four game. The most important are the first, third and fifth, but Nos. 2 and No. 4 could make the difference if the game is close.
Connecticut has only lost four games this year. One was in six overtimes, so we're going to throw that out. The other three all offer clues on how to beat the Huskies.
It's been a tough season for Michigan State to get to full health. That the Spartans finally appeared to be fully healthy by the time they reached the Elite Eight had to make coach Tom Izzo a little more encouraged. Naturally, that just could not be true for this season. Raymar Morgan, who appeared to only have bloodied his nose in the game with Kansas on Friday, has a broken nose.
It won't stop the starting forward from playing on Sunday against Louisville. When Izzo appeared on CBS before the start of Saturday's games, he said that Morgan would be wearing a protective facemask, adding that "he would look a bit like [Detroit Piston Richard] Hamilton."
No, it was most certainly not pretty. Until the second half of the final minute, Michigan State never looked like it had this won. It had trouble all night finding somebody other than Goran Suton to give them any consistent scoring, and in the first half Kansas beat the Spartans at their own game -- pushing them around on the boards.
But while Kansas proved to be a more worthy defending champion than anybody imagined it'd be, Michigan State has more.
There's no real secret as to what did in Michigan State in the NCAA championship game. Yes, there was the superior talent on North Carolina. The Tar Heels shot really effectively in the first half. North Carolina could actually make free throws. The issue for Michigan State, though, was their inability to hold onto the ball. 
Specifically, the Huskies' own guards killed them against Michigan State. In one of those nights where the stats do not lie, 
Here's a question to nibble on between games: Where would 
It's been a tough season for Michigan State to get to full health. That the Spartans finally appeared to be fully healthy by the time they reached the Elite Eight had to make coach 
No, it was most certainly not pretty. Until the second half of the final minute, Michigan State never looked like it had this won. It had trouble all night finding somebody other than 
