NCAA Tournament 2016: 10 takeaways from Friday's results, bracket upsets

Top 10 takeaways from Friday's NCAA men's basketball tournament games:

1. Middle Tennessee State might have been the only ones in the building on Friday who thought it would beat Michigan State.

Not only did the Blue Raiders do it, leading wire to wire in a 90-81 upset of the Spartans that some are calling the biggest in NCAA Tournament history, they did so with little of the wild postgame emotion that characterizes such a result.

"We came into the game thinking we were going to win," guard Perrin Buford said. "All the pressure's on them. We were just here trying to have fun and get it done."

Buford's postgame spike of the basketball was about as animated as Middle Tennessee got afterward.

2. Wisconsin's composure was the one impressive thing about its 47-43 win over Pittsburgh in a first-round game.

The Badgers were a train wreck offensively for much of the first half, unable to hit any kind of shot and looking overmatched at times against the physical Panthers defense. But coach Greg Gard stayed calm on the sideline and his players eventually figured it out, getting Pittsburgh into early foul trouble in the second half and hitting a couple of big shots in the end to advance.

"We played a lot of games like that early in the season," guard Zak Showalter said. "What tonight says is how far we've come as a team. We kept battling."

3. Thomas Walkup made a case for the best player nobody has heard of in the NCAA Tournament. The Stephen F. Austin senior forward helped dismantle West Virginia 70-56 in the first round of the East Regional by scoring a career-best 33 points and contributing four of the Lumberjacks' 16 steals.

With his long beard and solid build, Walkup looks like he could be chopping down trees instead of defenses.

"Most nights we play, he (Walkup) is our best player," Stephen F. Austin coach Brad Underwood said. "We're not on TV. We're on ESPN3, every home game, and we don't have many home games because nobody plays us at home. So once we get outside of our league, nobody knows about us, and we're trying to change that."

4. Maryland's Jake Layman appears to be finding his shooting range and his confidence, connecting on 5 of 8 3-point shots in the Terrapins' 79-74 win over scrappy South Dakota State in the opening round. He finished with a career-high 27 points, matching the mark he last hit during his sophomore year against Morgan State.

On March 11, Layman popped off for 26 in a Big Ten Tournament game against Nebraska. The trends are encouraging after Layman had not scored more than 20 in a game since January 2015.

If Layman becomes the consistent 3-point presence Maryland hoped he'd be entering the season, the Terrapins could be prepared to live up to their preseason hype, which had them ranked third in the first Associated Press poll. They eventually peaked at No. 2.

Layman scored a combined 14 points in two NCAA Tournament games last season while the Terrapins ducked out in a second-round loss to West Virginia.

"I'm happy for him and he had a chance to leave; he decided to stay -- ould have been late first early second, but I think he made a great decision," Maryland coach Mark Turgeon said. "He's a much better player today because of it."

5. Cal coach Cuonzo Martin was quick to dismiss the role that recent turmoil had on his team's performance Friday in the first round. But there can be little doubt things have been rough for the past few days, starting with the dismissal of assistant coach Yann Hufnagel on Monday over sexual harassment allegations and concluding when junior guard Jabari Bird pulled himself from the lineup before game time with what Martin described as back spasms. That was added to the broken hand that point guard Tyrone Wallace suffered Wednesday, ending his season.

Hawaii coach Eran Ganot knows something about turmoil after he inherited a team bound for NCAA probation -- the Rainbow Warriors are currently not eligible for next year's tournament -- and dealing with issues left over from a previous coaching staff. He said you can try to set that stuff aside, but it's always there.

"Cal's dealing with some distractions, adversity, I heard him, he said it right, everybody's dealing with some of it," Ganot said. "And it's going to keep coming. But the reality is you get ahead of it, you address it, you do the best you can and you move forward.

"And a lot of teams in this tournament have had to deal with that during the course of the season as well. Both teams in this game are not the only ones going through some of that. But I know the coaches, our job is to the student-athletes and to take care of them and make sure they're in a good place and that's the first thing we talk about and the last thing we talk about every night."

6. Villanova hasn't reached the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2009 when it went to the Final Four. The early departures include three losses in its second NCAA game as either a No. 1 or No. 2 seed.

Now that the second-seeded Wildcats are in the East Regional second round, where they face Iowa on Sunday, Villanova coach Jay Wright continues to be asked about his team's early exits.

"All season, if we would have answered those questions and if we lost this game today, we're idiots," Wright said. "To talk about that and to know how hard it is to get there would really be unintelligent. And that's really what we told our guys during the year.

"We said, guys, it's the job of the media to ask that question. It's their job. We can't answer -- and if we answer, we're idiots because we might not even get to the tournament. We might not get past the first round."

7. The first session on Friday at Chesapeake Energy Arena spelled trouble for second-seeded Oklahoma, even if the Sooners are playing just down the road from their campus.

Oklahoma successfully fended off CSU Bakersfield, which won the WAC Tournament to secure its first NCAA Tournament berth. But the Roadrunners threatened to pull off the huge upset and in the end kept a large majority of Sooners fans in the arena from raising much of a racket.

Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger acknowledged that his team might have to play much better in order to get past VCU in the next round.

"In the first half, I think we had four turnovers, yet I didn't feel like we took advantage of attacking the press like we need to," Kruger said. "I thought they had us out of step, out of rhythm a little bit with that.

"Didn't think our spacing was what it needs to be coming out of practice. Had four days -- it wasn't like they turned us over, but it wasn't like we attacked it as well as we need to or can do. Hopefully, we'll learn from that and get better by Sunday."

8. VCU controlled the momentum and the interior against Oregon State in its first-round victory.

The 10th-seeded Rams scored 46 points in the paint and had a double-digit rebounding edge over the seventh-seeded Beavers. VCU guard JeQuan Lewis scored a game-high 21 points and backcourt mate Melvin Johnson pitched in with 12.

That shows the Rams have the inside-outside combination to hang with Oklahoma on Sunday in a second-round game.

9. By delivering a 92-65 knockout punch of Green Bay, Texas A&M gained momentum heading into the second round. The Aggies were hoping for a matchup with rival Texas, but the Longhorns came up short against Northern Iowa, losing on a half-court buzzer-beater.

Texas A&M and Texas had met earlier this season in the Battle for Atlantis in the Bahamas. The Aggies won that game 84-73 in their first matchup since Texas A&M left the Big 12 for the SEC.

10. Northern Iowa guard Paul Jesperson's buzzer-beater from half-court defined the excitement of March Madness as the Panthers upset Texas 75-72 on Friday night in a first-round game in Oklahoma City.

The game appeared headed for overtime before Jesperson took an inbounds pass from Matt Bohannon, hurried up the court, moved past a defender and heaved the miraculous shot that banked off the glass and in.

"I was just hoping it was going in," Jesperson said. "It felt good when it left my hands."