St. John's upsets Kansas in NCAA Tournament, reaches first Sweet 16 in decades

Dylan Darling's layup. That is the sentence St. John's fans will be repeating for years. With Kansas unable to convert on their final possession, Darling's late bucket sealed one of the more jarring upsets of the 2026 NCAA Tournament and sent the Red Storm to their first Sweet 16 appearance in over two decades. The Madison Square Garden crowd, watching from New York, apparently lost its collective mind. The Kansas bench looked like they had been told some very bad news.

St. John's last Sweet 16 appearance before this came in 2000, when the program was still coasting on the credibility built through the Lou Carnesecca era. The 26 years between those two appearances included a lot of first-round exits, coaching changes, and near-misses that never quite materialized. This one did. Darling's layup made it real.

How the final possession played out

Kansas had the ball with enough time to work for a good look. They did not get one. The Red Storm defense forced a difficult shot attempt that did not fall, and St. John's came away with the rebound and the win. The sequence was brief and brutal in the way that tournament basketball endings tend to be, the kind of possession that coaches will spend the off-season reviewing on film and probably wishing they could.

Charles Barkley, calling the game for ESPN, did not soften his reaction. Barkley criticized Kansas's execution on that final possession sharply and on air, which is not unusual for him but tends to get more attention when the target is a program with Kansas's profile. The Jayhawks have four national championships and a brand built on elite program management. Losing in the second round to St. John's, with a failed final possession, is the kind of exit that generates uncomfortable questions.

What Dylan Darling's layup actually meant for the program

Darling is not a household name in college basketball, which makes the moment more satisfying for St. John's fans rather than less. March Madness has a long history of producing this specific kind of story: a player who spent most of his career in relative obscurity making the single most important basket of his program's recent history. His layup was not a three-pointer or a buzzer-beater in the conventional sense, but in context it was the shot that closed the door on Kansas and opened one for St. John's.

Head coach Rick Pitino, who took over the St. John's program in 2023, has now delivered something the school had not seen in the tournament since before he arrived. Pitino's hire was controversial given his history, but results in college basketball tend to resolve those conversations faster than anything else. A Sweet 16 appearance in his third season is a concrete outcome, and it makes the program's trajectory harder to argue with.

Kansas's tournament exit and what it means for the program

Kansas entered the 2026 tournament as a high seed with legitimate Final Four expectations. Bill Self's programs have consistently turned regular season success into deep tournament runs, which is part of why this exit stings more than a typical second-round loss would for another program. Kansas has reached the Final Four six times since 2002 and won the national championship in 2008 and 2022. A second-round exit to St. John's does not erase any of that, but it will fuel off-season discussions about roster construction and end-of-game decision-making.

Barkley's on-air criticism focused specifically on the final possession rather than the game overall, which is a fair distinction. Kansas played well enough through most of the game to be in a position to win. What happened in the last thirty seconds is a separate conversation, and it is the one that will follow the program through the summer.

St. John's Sweet 16 opponent and what comes next

St. John's will face their Sweet 16 opponent later this week. The bracket placement puts them in a region where a Final Four run is possible but would require beating at least one more top-five seed. The Red Storm are playing with the kind of confidence that comes from having already beaten a program that was supposed to end their season, which counts for something in tournament basketball even if it does not show up in any statistical measure.

The last time St. John's won a Sweet 16 game was in 1999, when they advanced to the Elite Eight. They lost that game to Ohio State. Whether the 2026 version of this team can go further than that remains to be decided, but they have already cleared the bar that had been sitting in front of this program for most of the 21st century. St. John's Sweet 16 game is scheduled for Thursday, March 27, 2026.