As college basketball enters its final push to March, I took a look at five x-factors for five men’s contenders—players who may not be the leading name on the score sheet every night, but who possess the ability to get their teams over the top when it counts. They are as follows.
Zakai Zeigler, Tennessee
Stop me if this sounds familiar: Tennessee is a top team with an elite defense that occasionally gets hamstrung by its own sporadic scoring. The Vols have had success the past few seasons employing similar defense-first approaches—Rick Barnes has done a stellar job on that front—but haven’t made it past the first weekend of the tournament in that period, and have done so just once in his tenure. So while there’s plenty of reason to trust their effort and consistency on the defensive end to keep games close in the postseason, there’s fair skepticism as to whether these guys will actually score enough to make a deep run.
