DENVER — Yale pulled off a big upset as a No. 13 seed in last year’s NCAA Tournament, and it has a chance to make it two in a row from the same position.
Yale (22-7) beat Auburn in the first round of the 2024 tournament and faces another Southeastern Conference foe when it plays No. 4 Texas A&M in the South Region opener Thursday night. The Bulldogs are making their fifth appearance in the NCAA Tournament since 2016 and have advanced past the first round twice.
The Bulldogs won both the Ivy League regular-season and conference tournament titles.
“It’s just become an expectation of what you are and what you think you should do,” coach James Jones said. “I think we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve just reached that expectation that this is how good we think we should be, and we’re gonna work toward that.”
Yale has lost just once since the calendar flipped to 2025, March 1 against Harvard, and it goes from facing Ivy League teams to one who plays in a conference that landed 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament.
As 2024 showed, the Bulldogs aren’t intimidated by the big stage.
“A goal?” senior Bez Mbeng said. “Advance. Win.”
Yale has an opportunity to give the Ivy League a win in three straight NCAA Tournaments. Besides last year’s win over Auburn, Princeton beat Arizona as a No. 15 seed in the first round in 2023.
The Bulldogs are led by John Poulakidas, who is averaging 19.2 points per game. Poulakidas fueled the upset of Auburn by hitting 6 of 9 from 3-point range and scoring 28 points
Junior Nick Townsend is second on the team at 15.4 points and leads in rebounding (7.2), and Mbeng is pouring in 13.4 ppg.
While Yale has been rolling, the Aggies (22-10) have struggled down the stretch. They dropped four in a row after a five-game winning streak, snapped that skid by beating Auburn on March 4 when the Tigers were ranked No. 1, but later fell to Texas in double overtime in the SEC tournament quarterfinals.
Texas A&M, which finished 11-7 in the conference, knows the Bulldogs aren’t a team to take lightly after seeing them beat Auburn last year.
“We’re going to look back and study film and do the right things in practice,” senior Henry Coleman III said. “We’re going to play hard and play Texas A&M basketball. They still have to guard us, too.”
Neither team is long — only one rotation player, 6-foot-10 Yale center Samson Aletan, is taller than 6-foot-9 — so they match up well.
The Aggies are led by guards Wade Taylor IV (15.7 ppg) and Zhuric Phelps (14.1). They average 74.3 points per game and allow 67.9, and they excel on the glass where they average 41.2 rebounds per game, fifth in the nation, despite not having a player pulling down more than Andersson Garcia’s 6.2.
Texas A&M is not prolific behind the arc, making just 31.1 percent of its 3-point attempts. However, the Aggies make up for that weakness by leading Division I in offensive rebounds with 16.2 per game.
–Michael Kelly, Field Level Media
