NCAA Basketball: Top 25 NCAA Tournament upsets since 2000
By Joey Loose
19. #8 Alabama 70, #1 Stanford 67 (2004 Round of 32)
No matter what you seemed to throw at the Stanford Cardinal back in 2004, they seemed to find a way to pull out the win. Their season began with 26 straight wins; dropping their final regular season game on the road to the Washington Huskies. After winning the Pac-10 Tournament, the AP No. 1 team was given a 1-seed and expected to contend for a national title.
What wasn’t expected was what happened in their second-round game against an underrated Alabama Crimson Tide squad. Just about a month earlier, the Crimson Tide were in the midst of a five game losing streak and looked lost in SEC play.
They strung together a number of solid wins to end the year, including a win at the No. 4 Mississippi State Bulldogs in mid-February, and wound up getting an 8-seed in the Tournament. After a first-round win over the Southern Illinois Salukis, few expected they would challenge Stanford.
After a season of dominance (and a few miraculous shots along the way), the Cardinal never could pull away from the Crimson Tide. Stanford built up a 13-point lead in the second half, but blew it away on a 16-0 Alabama run. Down eight with under a minute to go, they pulled back into the game on a pair of 3-pointers from Matt Lottich, but couldn’t quite finish the job. Unlike earlier in the season, the last-second shot did not fall and Stanford’s season ended in misery.
Kennedy Winston had 21 points to lead the Crimson Tide, while both he and Earnest Shelton made double-digit free throws, making enough shots to hold onto that late lead. Alabama got enough offense, despite shooting just 21 percent from 3-point land and being heavily out-rebounded by the country’s No. 1 team.
Stanford got 15 points and 11 rebounds from Justin Davis, but players like Lottich and future NBA guard Josh Childress just didn’t hit enough shots.
This pesky Alabama squad would upset the Syracuse Orange five days later before falling to eventual national champion Connecticut Huskies in the Elite Eight. For such a great Stanford squad to fall in the first weekend was monumental, especially coming against a Crimson Tide team that looked lost only a month earlier.