2001: A Bracket- Busting Odyssey

There are always upsets in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but nothing quite like what happened in 2001.

A day after 15th-seeded Hampton defeated second-seeded Iowa State, 58-57, 13th-seeded Kent State and Indiana State were winners and so were 12th-seeded Utah State and Gonzaga.

In all, according to the Associated Press, 13 of the 32 first-round games were won by underdogs.

Trivia time: Duke, under Coach Mike Krzyzewski, has been to the Final Four 10 times. How many times have Krzyzewski’s Blue Devils won the national championship?

Highs and lows: Of Duke this season, Gregg Doyel of CBS Sportsline.com says the high point was a 97-66 victory over No. 2 Texas on Dec. 10. The low point was an 83-76 loss to North Carolina on March 4.

“Losing to North Carolina is not good,” Doyel wrote. “Losing to North Carolina at home is worse. Losing to North Carolina at home on senior day? Awful.”

Fairly safe offer: Arby’s has announced that if a 16th-seeded team defeats a No. 1-seeded team in the first round of the NCAA tournament, it will give away a crispy chicken fillet sandwich to customers on April 3 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. All that is required is proof of the upset from a newspaper clipping.

Because a No. 16 has never beaten a No. 1, this is almost as safe as an offer Taco Bell made in March 2001. The restaurant chain placed a 40-by-40-foot target in the South Pacific off Australia and said it would feed everyone in the U.S. if the 150-ton Mir space station, upon returning to Earth, hit the target.

Eliminating the bubble: CBS’ Billy Packer has said this before about the tournament selection process and said it again Tuesday on FSN’s “Best Damn Sports Show Period”: “I would do something really drastic. I think the time has come to eliminate all the guaranteed bids and let everybody be an at-large.”

That certainly would lessen the chances of a No. 1-seeded team losing in the first round.

Name game: Greg Cote of the Miami Herald says his favorite tournament names are Alabama Birmingham guard Squeaky Johnson, George Washington forward Pops Mensah-Bonsu, and “the boy king himself, Oral Roberts guard Ken Tutt.”

Looking back: On this day in 1989, Michael Adams of the Denver Nuggets surpassed his NBA record of 379 three-point shot attempts in a season when he attempted six in a 119-102 victory over the San Antonio Spurs. Adams finished the season with 466 attempts. The record is now 678, set by George McCloud of the Dallas Mavericks in 1996.

Trivia answer: Three.

And finally: Eddie Einhorn, former owner of the TVS network that televised college basketball, says coaches went from hating TV timeouts to embracing them. In his new book, “How March Became Madness,” Einhorn says that Marquette’s Al McGuire, desperate for a timeout but not wanting to use one of his own, once ran up the sideline to where Einhorn was sitting and said, “Eddie, are you going to call a TV timeout?”

Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.