Maryland men’s basketball coach Mark Turgeon knows firsthand how good the two teams in Monday’s NCAA tournament final are.
The Terps played at Villanova in a closed preseason scrimmage on Halloween and faced North Carolina a little more than a month later in Chapel Hill.
Turgeon wasn’t surprised that the Wildcats and Tar Heels won their respective semifinals Saturday in Houston. What Turgeon and many others didn’t expect was the dominance of their victories over Oklahoma and Syracuse; the Wildcats, in particular, had a Final Four-record 44-point romp over the Sooners.