NCAA tournament updates: Penn eliminated; four games today in Philly; Villanova looks to make a run

It was early January when Brad Underwood knew his friend was in a good place. His Illini basketball team was visiting the Palestra for a neutral site game against Penn State when Fran McCaffery stopped by to chat.

The two coaches had spent the previous eight years helping one another navigate and endure the pressures of a rapidly evolving Big 10. Leading a major college basketball program was rapidly evolving into a careful-what-you-wish-for kind of thing. They were men from an era when coaches built legacies via relationships and culture, an era when there was something meaningful in the association between the name on the front of the jersey and the university standing behind it.

The previous spring, when Iowa fired McCaffery, the winningest coach in school history, it was another sign of the times. Except, here McCaffery was now, looking like a man who’d rediscovered something.

For the first time since 2022, the NCAA men's basketball tournament has to go through Philly.

Well, at least part of it.

The recently-renamed Xfinity Mobile Arena, home of the 76ers and Flyers, will host six tournament games this year – four first-round games Friday and two second-round matchups Sunday.

Well, the dream was fun while it lasted — all two-ish hours of it.

The bid for a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket disappeared for more than 25 million people by mid-afternoon on Thursday, fueled by 12th-seeded High Point’s first-round stunner over fifth-seeded Wisconsin.

That was just the start. By the end of the first day of March Madness, fewer than one of every 2,400 entries in the ESPN bracket challenge were blemish-free.

 Villanova vs. Utah State in a college basketball arena on the sunny campus of San Diego State University is about as random as it gets, even by NCAA Tournament standards.

The Wildcats and Aggies meet Friday at Viejas Arena (4:10 p.m., TNT), and the winner likely has a Sunday date with top-seeded Arizona, which is 32-2 entering the tournament and has Final Four and championship talent.

But while the lone matchup between the two schools was in 1960 — a 73-72 Utah State victory in an NIT quarterfinal — there are some familiar threads at play Friday.

David Mirkovic had 29 points and 17 rebounds, and No. 3 seed Illinois dominated No. 14 seed Penn 105-70 on Thursday night in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

Keaton Wagler added 18 points, seven assists, and seven rebounds for the Fighting Illini (25-8), who moved on to face No. 11 VCU in the second round on Saturday.

Kylan Boswell had 13 points, while Ben Humrichous and Tomislav Ivisic each chipped in with 12 as Illinois shot 50% from the field and made 15 three-pointers while outrebounding the much smaller Quakers 48-25.

At the beginning of this season, Villanova did not look poised to make the NCAA Tournament.

The Wildcats suffered disappointing losses to Fairfield and Princeton in November, and opened the 2025-26 women’s basketball season with a 2-2 record. Just four games into the season, the team already felt the urge to regroup.

When envisioning how they wanted the rest of the season to go, the Wildcats turned to two players for advice: senior forward Annie Welde and senior guard Maggie Grant. While Welde and Grant get limited playing time in games, their experience — four years in the Villanova program — has been valuable.