It was hailed by Dick Vitale as the “biggest upset in March Madness history” when the 15 seeded Saint Peter’s Peacocks upset the second seed, Kentucky.
Peacocks Head coach Shaheen Holloway though simply stood on the sideline, showed no emotion and shook hands of the Kentucky players when the final buzzer sounded.
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“Proud of my guys for battling, like we do all year,” Holloway said to ESPN.
“This is something that these guys understand, no disrespect to anybody, but we wasn’t coming down here just to lose. We came down here to fight and we did.”
According to the form book, Saint Peter’s wasn’t supposed to stand a chance against the Wildcats. This program from a school in Jersey City, New Jersey, with an enrollment of about 2,300 students, that plays in the little known Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference and entered Thursday as a giant underdog.
But it was the Peacocks who gave John Calipari his first opening-round loss since he became coach of the Wildcats while being just the 10th No. 15 seed to win a first-round game since the tournament grew to 64 teams in 1985.
Putting Jersey City on the map, in New Jersey, we come from a small state,” Saint Peter’s guard Daryl Banks III said. “Probably a lot of people probably don’t even know who we are. It’s huge for our school and everybody back home.”
“Sad day,” Calipari said. “Not just we lose a game. It’s that this season ended with this group and how much joy they brought to me and our staff. And I’ll just say one thing: that you have an eight-point lead, and I’m a guy that’s been through a lot of these, you have an eight-point lead with three minutes to go, you win the game.”
Kentucky were amongst the favourites to come out of the East Region and even reach the Final Four. However they didn’t enter the tournament playing the basketball that they wanted to.
They had a late-season slump, first losing at Arkansas and then lost to Tennessee in the semi-finals of the SEC tournament.
Kentucky was 4-of-15 on three-pointers in that 85-79 loss that ended their season.
