Michigan State upsets Duke to get to the Final Four

On Selection Sunday, when the NCAA tournament bracket was unveiled for the world to see.

There weren’t many complaints about the bracket itself, but just about everyone seemed to have a problem with the way that Michigan State was bracketed. The Spartans, the Big Ten regular season and tournament champions, were slotted into the No. 2 seed in the East Region, on a collision course with Duke in the Elite Eight.

That was, many believed, completely unfair.

And they were right.

Duke was the No. 1 overall seed and did not deserve to be forced to play the juggernaut that is Tom Izzo’s Spartans for the right to get to the Final Four.

Cassius Winston scored 20 points and added 10 assists in the final game of the Elite Eight on Sunday night as No. 2 seed Michigan State beat No. 1 seed Duke, 68-67, to get to the Final Four.

The winning bucket came courtesy of Kenny Goins, a fifth-year senior and former walk-on that entered the year having shot just 15 threes in his career. With 43 seconds left, Tom Izzo called a timeout, down 66-65, and drew up a play to get Goins coming off of a pindown for a three.

And he buried it:

The Spartans won despite giving up 24 points and 14 boards to Zion Williamson. This is just the second win against Mike Krzyzewski that Tom Izzo has landed in his illustrious coaching career.

It might also go down as his most memorable win that did not come in a national title game.

This Duke team was a juggernaut all season long, a group that had the eyes of everyone thanks to the biggest brand we’ve ever seen come through the collegiate ranks in Williamson. They were the No. 1 overall seed. They were the favorite to win the national title everywhere after their 118-84 humiliation of Kentucky on the first day of the regular season. They will send three players into the top five of the 2019 NBA Draft, and that doesn’t include Tre Jones, who might sneak his way into the back-end of the lottery if all goes well for him.

Duke is and was always going to be the story.

And they came up short of the Final Four thanks to this Michigan Stte team.

Xavier Tillman finished with 19 points and nine boards, doing as good of a job on Williamson as you can do against a player that finished with 24 points and 14 boards.

R.J. Barrett finished with 21 points, six boards and six assists for Duke, who finished the season with a 32-6 record and nothing but an ACC tournament title to show for the season.

It’s almost too perfect that the man — yes, man — that ended Zion Williamson’s college career is a fifth-year senior that started out his career as a walk-on.

Hell, Kenny Goins almost didn’t end up at Michigan State because the Spartans didn’t have a scholarship to give him initially. The Troy, Mi., native and lifelong Spartan fan was a good high school basketball player, but one that looked like a better fit at one of the directional Michigans as opposed to UM or MSU.

Even when Goins was offered a spot as a preferred walk-on, he struggled with the decision of whether or not to play his college ball in East Lansing. Goins’ mother had mounting medical bills, and the weight of a full tuition was not something that he wanted to burden his family with.

“My dad, I remember him saying at one point, ‘Don’t even worry about the money thing,'” Goins told MLive.com of the conversation that finally convinced him to accept the offer that Michigan State made. “‘If that’s what’s holding you back, don’t even worry about that, just pick, and we’ll figure out the money thing after.'”

It didn’t take long for the Spartan coaching staff to figure out that Goins was going to be a contributor to their program. By his second year on campus, he was a scholarship player. By his third year on campus, he was a starter.

But no one — and I mean no one — could have imagined after the first two years that Goins played in East Lansing that, with less than a minute left in a one-point game in the Elite Eight against the No. 1 overall seed, Tom Izzo would draw up a play that would put Goins in a position to fire up a potentially game-winning three.

He did not shoot a single three-pointer as a freshman. He didn’t shoot a single three as a sophomore. He did, however, shoot a combined 62.9 percent from the free throw line in those two seasons. Heading into his redshirt senior year, Goins had attempted all of 15 threes in his career.

That’s changed this season.

Goins is firing up more than four threes a night, banging them home at a 36 percent clip and doing so as the best pound-for-pound rebounder on Michigan State’s roster. He’s become an invaluable cog in Izzo’s lineup, and nothing proves that more than what happened on the final possession of regulation.

As I detailed in the video below, one of the staples of Michigan State’s offense is to have Cassius Winston run off of a back-screen and he initiates an action. This allows the Spartans to move him around the floor as they get the defense chasing him. The counter to this — which they only ran twice against Duke — is for Winston to set a pindown for Goins, which allows them to then get Winston into an open-side ball-screen action with the other big that is on the floor:

The final possession of the game wasn’t even necessarily drawn up for Goins.

One of the options in the set that Michigan State ran is for Goins to shoot that three, but if you watch the play, Winston is in the middle of setting a back-screen for Xavier Tillman when Goins lets that shot go. There was more to that action than what we saw, but we never actually saw it.

That’s because Kenny Goins, the walk-on who didn’t attempt a three until he was in his fourth year in the program, broke off a play with 38 seconds left, down 66-65 in the Elite Eight against the No. 1 overall seed, and buried a three over a player that not 10 minutes early had blocked one of his three-point attempts.

And the fact that it was that player making that play that sent Zion Williamson, R.J. Barrett and the rest of the Blue Devils packing just about sums up March Madness perfectly.