No. 5 seed Michigan holds off UC San Diego 68-65 in March Madness nailbiter

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No. 5 seed Michigan holds off UC San Diego 68-65 in March Madness nailbiter

2025-03-21 13:33 Last Updated At：13:41

DENVER (AP) — Vladislav Goldin and Michigan proved a bit too much for UC San Diego when the Russian center scored 14 points Thursday night and the fifth-seeded Wolverines overcame Tyler McGhie's 25 points to escape with a 68-65 win in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

McGhie's 3-point attempt at the buzzer with 7-footer Danny Wolf in his face hit the back iron and the Wolverines and their fans finally exhaled.

“Yeah, I think I got the shot I wanted,” McGhie said. “Step-back, going left. I thought it was in. Hit the back iron. Couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.”

In handing the Tritons their first loss since Jan. 18, Michigan advanced to face fourth-seeded Texas A&M, which turned away Yale 80-71, in the next round Saturday.

McGhie's bucket with 2:29 left gave the 12th-seeded Tritons their only lead at 65-63 and Ball Arena was rocking every bit as much as it does when Nikola Jokic feeds Denver Nuggets teammate Aaron Gordon for an alley-oop.

Tre Donaldson, who was on the Auburn team that was upset by Yale in last year's NCAA Tournament, responded with a 3-pointer to restore Michigan's lead.

Goldin, who picked up his fourth foul at the 8:25 mark, grabbed an aggressive offensive rebound and was fouled with 19.3 seconds left. He sank both free throws to make it 68-65.

The Tritons (30-5), who moved up from Division II in 2020, won the Big West regular-season and tournament titles and earned the league's automatic NCAA Tournament bid in their first season of Division I eligibility.

The Tritons brought the nation's longest winning streak into March Madness, having won 15 straight. But the Big Dance, the big stage, the bright lights — not to mention coach Dusty May's talented Wolverines (26-9), who made an unlikely run to the Big 10 Tournament title, looked like they would be too much for the Tritons.

UC San Diego settled in, however, and put a scare into Michigan.

“We knew they were going to make a run,” May said. “They just keep coming at you, keep coming at you. They believe, as well. They have older guys. Man, they put on a performance in the second half.”

It was more than five minutes into the game before the Tritons finally scored.

“I just thought we found our rhythm and we played more of the way that, honestly, we’ve been playing all year," said UC San Diego coach Eric Olen, who built his team through the transfer portal by bringing in three D-II stars — guards McGhie, Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones and Hayden Gray. "I was glad that we found that and gave ourselves an opportunity.”

Goldin's three-point play with 1.8 seconds left in the first half sent Michigan into halftime with a 41-27 lead and he opened the second half with a free throw for a 15-point cushion. He wouldn't score again until the final minute.

In between, it was the Tritons who looked tournament-tested and the Wolverines who looked a little wide-eyed.

“This tournament throws so many things at you,” Donaldson said. “These games aren’t going to be all lopsided. They might be tight like we were today. You never know. We’ve been in games like that all year through the Big Ten. We just find a way to win. That’s the biggest thing in this tournament.”

Two years ago, Goldin was a key player on FAU’s Final Four team. When Michigan fired coach Juwan Howard and hired May away from FAU a year ago, the new coach brought his old center with him to Ann Arbor.

Together, they orchestrated the Wolverines’ turnaround from an 8-24 campaign in Howard's final season to finish second in the Big Ten before dispatching Purdue, Maryland and Wisconsin in the conference tournament.

Will Tschetter's 3-pointer that made it 59-49 shouldn't have counted because he was out of bounds when he caught the pass. The officials missed it.

AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness. Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here.

Sudan's army says it seized key buildings in Khartoum after retaking the Republican Palace

2025-03-23 01:53 Last Updated At：02:00

CAIRO (AP) — Sudan ’s military on Saturday consolidated its grip on the capital, retaking more key government buildings a day after it gained control of the Republican Palace from a notorious paramilitary group.

Brig. Gen. Nabil Abdullah, a spokesperson for the Sudanese military, said troops expelled the Rapid Support Forces from the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service and Corinthia Hotel in central Khartoum.

The army also retook the headquarters of the Central Bank of Sudan and other government and educational buildings in the area, Abdullah said. Hundreds of RSF fighters were killed while trying to flee the capital city, he said.

There was no immediate comment from the RSF.

The army's gain came as a Sudanese pro-democracy activist group said RSF fighters had killed at least 45 people in a city in the western region of Darfur.

On Friday, the military retook the Republican Palace, the prewar seat of the government, in a major symbolic victory for the Sudanese military in its nearly two years of war against the RSF.

A drone attack on the palace Friday believed to have been launched by the RSF killed two journalists and a driver with Sudanese state television, according to the ministry of information. Lt. Col. Hassan Ibrahim, from the military’s media office, was also killed in the attack, the military said.

Volker Perthes, former UN envoy for Sudan, the latest military advances will force the RSF to withdraw to its stronghold in the western region of Darfur.

“The army has gained an important and significant victory in Khartoum militarily and politically,” Perthes told The Associated Press, adding that the military will soon clear the capital and its surrounding areas from the RSF.

But the advances doesn’t mean the end of the war as the RSF holds territory in the western Darfur region and elsewhere. Perthes argued that the war will likely turn into an insurgency between the Darfur-based RSF and the military-led government in the capital.

“The RSF will be largely restricted to Darfur ... We will return to the early 2000s,” he said, in reference to the conflict between rebel groups and the Khartoum government, then led by former President Omar al-Bashir.

At the start of the war in April 2023, the RSF took over multiple government and military buildings in the capital including the Republican Palace, the headquarters of the state television and the besieged military’s headquarters, known as the General Command. It also occupied people’s houses and turned it into bases for their attacks against troops.

In recent months, the military took the lead in the fighting. It reclaimed much of Khartoum and its sister cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North, along with other cities elsewhere in the country. In late January, troops lifted the RSF siege on the General Command, paving the way to retake the palace less than two months later.

The military is now likely to try to retake the Khartoum International Airport, only some 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) southeast of the palace, which has been held by the RSF since the start of the war. Videos posted on social media Saturday purportedly showed soldiers on a road leading to the airport.

The RSF was accused on Saturday of being responsible for the deaths of at least 45 people in the Darfur city of al-Maliha.

The pro-democracy Resistance Committees, a network of youth groups tracking the war, said the RSF entered the city on Thursday and carried out attacks. The dead included at least a dozen women, according to a partial casualty list published by the group.

Al-Maliha, a strategic desert city in North Darfur near the borders with Chad and Libya, is around 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the city of el-Fasher, which remains held by the Sudanese military despite near-daily strikes by besieging RSF.

The war, which has wrecked the capital and other urban cities, has claimed the lives of more than 28,000 people, forced millions more to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine sweeps parts of the country. Other estimates suggest a far higher death toll.

The fighting has been marked by atrocities including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the United Nations and international rights groups.