NCAA MARCH MADNESS
March Madness 2023: Kennesaw State, the main candidate to be this year’s Cinderella story
This will be the Owls’ first time at the NCAA tournament after leaving division II in 2005.
Life is full of tests, people say. Imagine being so down on your luck that you have to sell your dog to keep a roof over your head. Well Sylvester Stallone did just that. He had to part ways with his bull mastiff for 50 bucks, to pay for rent and food. Within the week, he wrote the screenplay for Rocky. With that money, he bought his dog back for three thousand dollars. The best underdog story ever written, Rocky, came from the biggest Cinderella story.
That’s how Kennesaw State feels at this moment. They are, without a doubt, this tournament’s biggest Cinderella story. No one would have had them in any bracket at the beginning of the season. This is a team that left division II back in 2005 and hasn’t had a winning season until this year. In 2019, when coach Amir Abdur-Rahim’s first arrived, the team finished with a 1-28 record, and they successfully turned it around by ending this season with a 26-8 Record.
Can Kennesaw State win March Madness?
The team is seeded at 14 and has a complicated path to the Final Four. But this is March Madness, and anything can happen. The team sure feels like they have something to prove, and we shouldn’t count them out because they have been able to turn their luck around.
In an interview given before heading to the tournament, KSU guard Chris Youngblood said, “We bought into Be One No Ego, and now we’re connected man, we don’t care about who gets the credit, and us being able to sustain that throughout the entire season is why we’re pretty successful.”
A team with this kind of mentality is a team to fear. Their first game is against number 3 seed Xavier on Friday at 12:40 p.m ET.