The NCAA basketball tournament is upon us. Ranking up there with the Super Bowl and the World Series, March Madness is the time of year when televisions turn to gold, impressions are made permanent in most couches and the slew of snacks in and around the coffee table seem to multiply upon consumption. Watching college basketball for those first four days straight through with no signs of slowing down is what sports fans wait all winter for.
We know how much is riding on these games. For some, it’s a matter of school pride. The appeal of rooting for the underdog squads from no-name conferences to upset final four shoo-ins gives college students and all sports fans alike a chance to cheer all month. Then, there are those of us who have laid down large sums of money in hopes that our inspired genius at 1:30 in the morning will bring big daddy lovely goodies if our combination of a few Cinderellas, some borderline-risky and no-brainer picks pay off. There’s nothing like frantically pacing the room as the first-round scores are announced on CBS as we nervously double-check these picks that now seem just so idiotic, some of which we now can’t read because our sweaty palms have faded the pen-marked team names.
But alas, there’s more to the tournament than screaming wildly at the TV and weeping softly after surrendering months of working weekends to some random guy who’s pool you jumped into only days before. The NCAA basketball tournament showcases the best basketball has to offer, and it does so dramatic fashion in an amazingly short amount of time.
This year’s NCAA tournament bracket brought oohs and ahhs like it does every year, but some of the seedings this year just didn’t seem to make any sense. First off, I’m a UConn fan, but I don’t think they deserved a two-seed. They were impressive down the stretch, winning nine straight to end the season and Big East Tournament, and they kept pace with Maryland and Oklahoma despite losing to both. But losses to St. Bonaventure and Rutgers looked really bad, and had they won those games they might have been close to the top 10 during the middle of the season.
Boston College making the tournament was nonsensical. Apart from being a cross-city rival, BC just played terribly this season. They lost 11 games this season, including 9 within their conference, and Troy Bell showed nothing down the stretch to prove that neither he nor his Eagles wanted to make the tournament.
And what about Gonzaga? They were seeded 6th overall in the AP poll early this month, and somehow they were granted a six-seed. They were 29-3 this season. Plus their name is just really fun to say. Gonzaga. Yelling it really loud just makes you want to raise your hands in the air and go run off and buy boxes of Gonzaga! merchandise and become an overnight fan.
One team that was overlooked was Butler. They went 24-8, and although they lost to Arizona twice and had some other soft losses, the Bulldogs are a young team. They beat Wisconsin and Wake Forest and should have been given a spot. Sometimes judging a team on the number of “quality wins” is important in tough conferences, but when good teams don’t play as stiff competition, they get shafted. This is nothing new, but it’s too bad to see them miss out.
Real quick, what’s with this play-in game? What the heck is the point of winning your conference only to be told you aren’t there quite yet and must play one more time to get in (for the wonderful chance to play a Duke-caliber team?). It’s like some dramatic ‘How about you just eliminate one team from the field?’ I guess that’s too easy, and as we all know, nothing in life is easy.
Oh yeah, and I think BU made the tournament, too. For all their hard work, they’ll be playing Cincinnati tonight, which is probably the best situation they could’ve been placed in being a 16 seed. Cincinnati is big, strong and fast, but they’ve bowed out early over the last few years. Some teams are just like that. If BU can keep it reasonably close by controlling the clock, playing harassing defense like they did to Maine last Saturday and hitting a whole bunch of three pointers, it’s possible they could become the first 16 seed to knock off a No. 1. Of course, if this situation were to arise, that would mean BU would be coming off the heels of probably the greatest upset in NCAA tournament history, and their following game would be held on St. Patrick’s Day. Will it happen? We all certainly hope so.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
