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The Marty Smith Podcast: Jimmy Dykes Makes His Final Four Picks Ahead of NCAA Tournament

It’s March Madness time, folks. However, before the festivities, Outsider’s Marty Smith released a new episode of his podcast and had on color commentator Jimmy Dykes on the program to talk about a myriad of college basketball topics. Marty puts Coach Dykes on the spot a bit, as he asks Coach to give the listeners his Final Four picks ahead of the NCAA Tournament.

However, Dykes, on the spot, was able to pick four teams in four different regions without even looking at the official bracket. It was an incredible move. For Dykes, he had Kentucky, Gonzaga, Iowa, and Tennessee. The four teams are in incredibly different positions and come into the tournament with different stories. For Kentucky, Dykes likes how they’ll play on neutral sites and what Oscar Tshiebwe will do drawing fouls. With Gonzaga, teams are just going to struggle to contain Chet Holmgren and Drew Timme. Then, the Hawkeyes have the offensive firepower to run the NCAA tournament with Murray and the team scoring at will. With the Vols, Dykes likes how they have evolved over the season. He also likes that they’ve already beaten great teams like Kentucky and Arizona.

Co-host Wes Blankenship then picks Coach Dykes’ brain a bit about the Bulldogs’ newest head coach in Mike White. It’s a big hire for the Georgia basketball program, following the rough ending to Tom Crean’s tenure in Athens. However, Wes is concerned based on the reactions from Florida fans about White making the move to UGA. Dykes is all about it, though. He loves the hire for the Dawgs as he thinks very highly of Coach White and what he was able to do at Florida. Even though he had to follow a legend like Billy Donovan, White won at least one tournament game in three consecutive seasons at Florida before this year. There is the reason for optimism for the Bulldogs in Athens, says Dykes.

Dykes and Marty can also not understand what happened with Tennesee and Texas A&M. Two very different circumstances, but it was bizarre to the guys nonetheless. For the Aggies, even after the wonderful run in the SEC Tournament, they were left out of the NCAA Tournament. It was thought that the Aggies were a shoe-in based on their run over the weekend in Tampa. Instead, the Aggies went to the NIT. For Tennessee, they beat Kentucky again and won the NCAA Tournament, and were still a No. 3 seed. Notably behind Kentucky and Duke in the seeding.

Either way, Dykes and Marty were not pleased with the Committee and what happened to both schools. You can listen to The Marty Smith Podcast on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.