– by Adesina O. Koiki
A Lot of Sports Talk editor-in-chief
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WASHINGTON — There is a pretty good chance that fans who support teams such as BYU, SMU and Xavier, if asked on the spot, would not know in which state Davidson College is located. For the next four days, however, those same fans will be fixated on the school’s men’s basketball team, hoping it continues to win and gives them one less thing to worry about on Selection Sunday.
Our coverage of the 2022 Atlantic 10 Men’s Basketball Tournament begins with the quarterfinals, where the top-seeded Davidson Wildcats (located in Davidson, North Carolina) look to complete one of the stellar non-Stephen Curry seasons in program history with a tournament championship to go along with their outright championship clinched last weekend. Possessing a 25-5 record, including an away victory over surefire NCAA Tournament team Alabama just before Christmas, the Wildcats are all but assured an NCAA Tournament bid when the bracket comes out in just over two days’ time.
Bubble teams across the country are hoping those winning stays true to form in the nation’s capital, as a Wildcats’ tournament victory may very well assure that the Atlantic 10, a league which traditionally sends multiple teams to the NCAA Tournament, will be a one-bid league in 2022.
A couple of bubble teams going into championship week reside in the A-10, and they are both looking to cement a bid with a long tourney run while bursting teams’ bubbles by giving the A-10 a second team to the Big Dance. Second-seeded Dayton, which has wins against Davidson, Kansas and Miami this season to go along with home defeats to UMass-Lowell, Lipscomb and Austin Peay, kept its A-10 and NCAA Tournament hopes alive with a lose victory over Massachusetts in the first game of the evening session. No. 3 VCU however, saw city rival Richmond, seeded sixth in the A-10 Tourney, deal the Rams a crippling blow to their Big Dance hopes with a 75-64 win as Jacob Gilyard exploded for 32 points.
*Editor’s note: Above the byline is the photo gallery from Friday’s quarterfinal games, with all photos taken by DC-area photographers Yusuf Abdullah, Elliott Brown and Phillip Peters. After clicking on the first photo to enlarge the picture, make sure to press the left and right arrow buttons to scroll through the rest of the pictures. There are 31 pictures in total.
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