When I bitched and moaned about the total lack of underdog victories in the Sweet Sixteen (which was merely the icing on an extremely chalky cake after a first weekend almost devoid of major upsets), the common response was that I should stop whining and appreciate the beauty of an Elite Eight featuring all the “best” teams, because such a scenario would surely produce a bevy of extremely entertaining games with a high quality of play. As one commenter put it, “I’d rather see a great game between two great teams than watch a 1 seed destroy a mediocre team that played above its head for a couple of games and then ran out of steam.”
Well, six games later, how is that “great team between two great teams” theory lookin’ for ya? Because it seems to me, we’ve just watched an Elite Eight that featured exactly one genuinely exciting game — North Carolina vs. Georgetown — followed by a Final Four that produced just as much excitement as last year’s incredibly boring semifinals, namely, zero. As commenter NDLauren, who attended today’s games in Atlanta, aptly put it, “Ugh.”
Have there been great teams on the floor? Yes. Have they been paired in matchups that appeared very compelling? Yes. Have those matchups produced great games? No, which just goes to show that you can’t script sports drama. It has to happen organically, and it’s incredibly myopic to pretend that drama (or the lack thereof) in a given instance was pre-ordained by seed numbers or preceding events. A matchup that looks great on paper doesn’t guarantee a dramatic game, nor does a David vs. Goliath mismatch guarantee that drama won’t happen. (Heck, Butler has given Florida more of a game than anyone else in this tournament so far!)
Bottom line, this is the worst NCAA Tournament since I started religiously watching the NCAA Tournament in the early ’90s. Have there been some extremely dramatic, exciting games? Of course! But if you choose any 63 college-basketball games at random, at least a handful of them will inevitably be dramatic and exciting… and that’s all the more true in a “win or go home” setting, where any close, down-to-the-wire game is inherently dramatic and exciting. In other words, there are always going to be some really good games, but that doesn’t mean this has been a great NCAA Tournament. On the contrary, the total lack of truly stunning upsets, the chalk-filled nature of the later rounds, the relatively ordinary number of really exciting games (and the fact that several of them happened simultaneously, while other timeslots were totally devoid of excitement), and the general lack of drama in the Elite Eight and Final Four, have combined to make this tourney a total dud, IMHO. (Well, as compared to other NCAA Tournaments, that is. Even a “dud” of an NCAA Tournament is still the greatest sporting event of the year. But that doesn’t mean I can’t wish it was better!)
Of course, there’s one game left, and here’s hoping Florida and Ohio State go to quintuple-overtime and play the greatest game in college basketball history. Then at least we’ll have something to remember this tournament for. Otherwise, I’m afraid the fine folks at CBS might have to cut “One Shining Moment” a verse short this year, due to a lack of compelling source material.
But that’s just my opinion, and I know I’m a bit of a weirdo when it comes to preferring games like Butler-Southern Illinois over games like UCLA-Kansas. So, what do y’all think?
UPDATE: Looks like I’m vindicated in my belief that this tournament has totally sucked. Nearly 24 hours after I posted this, the poll results show that a whopping 40% agree that the tourney has been one of the worst in years, and another 25% think it’s been below average. Less than 15% think it’s been above average… and most of them probably go to Florida or OSU. ;)
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Categories: NCAA Basketball & Pools
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April 1st, 2007 at 3:27:25 am
Honestly, if the parity we’ve been hearing about since George Mason’s trip to the Final Four last year was really just a one-time, anecdotal aberration from this big school, Thad-Five, Big-6-Conferences-Paying-Coaches-$5-mil-per-year, outpaying and outrecruiting all the small schools bullshit, college baskeball will become incredibly uninteresting. People will stop watching; Revenue will go down; Salaries will go down; And suddenly, the small schools might actually have a chance. Either way, this shit cannot continue. The Thad Mattas of the world and big school administrations led by the likes of Andy Geiger are ruining college basketball, and I wish they’d just go the fuck away.
And the sad thing is that there are shitheads (especially in the media) who actually love seeing this boring, big-school dominance. Case in point? Billy Fucking Packer. Man I hate this man. Did anyone else see him gush over Greg Oden today? Did anyone else notice the non-casual, “I have a mancrush on you” pat on the back that Packer gave Oden after the post-game interview? It wasn’t as if Packer were just putting his hand on Oden’s back while interviewing him. He actually had to turn away from the camera and stick his hand out to pat Oden on the back after he’d already taken two steps away. He had to go out of his way to do it. You could see this look of admiration and school-boy envy emanating from Packer’s dusty, geriatric ass. It made me sick to my stomach that this pathetic son of a bitch still has a job after what he said about St. Joseph’s in 2004. He is a piece of shit and he deserves nothing more than outright condemnation for his unintelligent, uninformed, blind loyalty to the ACC and every other big school conference out there. Honestly, people like Billy Packer exemplify everything that is wrong about collegiate athletics.
Why? Because people like Billy Packer don’t just have biases. They influence the very culture and mainstream perception of college sports. Recruits go to Duke and recruits go to Florida and recruits go to Ohio State because dipshits like Packer say these schools are the best schools at which to play. And damnit, kids listen. The best players all go to the same schools. So Billy Packer isn’t just expressing a bias, by encouraging big school dominance he’s removing that one element of sport that engenders all of the excitement in the first place: parity. Without it, the idea of “contest” evaporates and you’re left with a contrivance. America doesn’t want to see a manufactured cycle of “dynasties” by the same damn teams. We want competition, anticipation, and damnit, a little bit of unpredictability. Is that really too much to ask for?
Bill Packer - YOU SUCK. Go be “pals” with Steinbrenner; you think very much alike.
April 1st, 2007 at 4:13:37 am
I am guessing this is not the same Patrick that throws a hissyfit when Brendan pokes fun at Sen. Santorum….
Either way I think you take your complaint too far. Yeah the Billy Packers and Seth Davises of the world are annoying and shape public and player perceptions, but I guarantee you that the inequalities are more deeply rooted than TV personalities. Certain schools draw, and certain coaches draw (and certain coaches at certain schools are even more lethal). Pete Carroll is able to get top talent at USC every year despite a roster full of All-Americans because there are always twenty recruits out there who are unafraid of the competition and want to play with the best talent. Similarly, certain guys in college basketball can just flat-out recruit: Billy Donovan, Coach K, and Roy Williams are all fantastic recruiters at big-name schools. Kelvin Sampson will turn around Indiana, and my bet is Kentucky will be deadly again soon, too. I honestly don’t think Ben Howland is a great recruiter, but fUTLA will never hurt for talent and Howland is a great coach, so they will continue to be regulars at the Final Four.
Bottom line: Recruits don’t go to these schools because Packer and Davis tell them to, they go to these schools because they like the coaches and [gasp] the actual schools. Everyone knows ESPN college football recruiting analyst Tom Lemming is a Domer homer, but he can’t outrecruit Pete Carroll or Ron Zook — only Charlie Weis can (or can try).
April 1st, 2007 at 4:26:44 am
Andrew, I’m 99% sure it is the same Patrick, actually. In addition to being a Rick Santorum fan, he’s also a Xavier fan, which may explain some of the animus toward Thad Matta :) … and he’s also a fan of small schools (small Catholic schools in particular) generally.
I actually agree with Andrew that you’re overstating your case a bit, Patrick. I obviously agree that Billy Packer is an assbag of truly epic proportions, and he certainly is not an agent for positive change in college basketball, but he also doesn’t have the power to completely hold back the floodgates of parity. And while there is no denying the influence that Packer and his ilk have, there has also been a great deal of attention paid to the mid-majors in the last couple of years. So it’s not like the media is completely one-sided.
I think the biggest reason there were fewer upsets this year is not some long-term trend, but rather, random chance. The law of averages dictates that, if they play the tournament long enough, eventually there will be a year like this.
The second-biggest reason is that the mid-majors and low-majors actually weren’t as strong this year as last. For example, while the Missouri Valley is a deeper conference this year, it’s not as strong at the top. Same goes for the Colonial. The WAC had Nevada and a whole lot of nothing. The MAC, often a multi-bid threat, was just bad this year. Across mid-majordom generally, it wasn’t a terrible year by any stretch, but it wasn’t great either. So in that sense, you could kinda sorta see this coming.
And then, to make matters worse, the committee “stacked the deck” with its ridiculously bad seeding job in the lower half of the bracket (don’t listen to the people who claim they did a great job… correctly determining which are the top 20 teams in the country is easy, it’s the details where the committee’s job gets hard, and they messed up a LOT of details this year, in ways that made early-round upsets less likely), so you ended up with vulnerable teams like Virginia playing weak opponents like Albany, and strong mid-majors like TAMU-CC playing much better teams than they should have. And of course, first-round matchups like Butler vs. Old Dominion and Nevada vs. Creighton made it impossible for all of those teams to have a chance to make noise simultaneously. I mean, those are literally four of the best six or seven mid-major teams in America right there, and they were forced to cannibalize each other on the tournament’s first two days.
All that said, let’s not forget that FOUR teams from non-power conferences made the Sweet 16: Memphis, UNLV, Butler and Southern Illinois. The only reason Butler and Southern Illinois weren’t considered “Cinderellas” is because they had high seeds, which is largely a result of the fact that mid-majors get more respect now than they have in the past. If Butler and SIU in 1997 had had the same exact seasons that they did this year, I bet they’d have been seeded in the #6-9 range. So that’s actually a positive step.
It’s also a positive step that we, as mid-major fans, see Butler and SIU in the Sweet Sixteen, and we say, “That’s not enough! We want more!” It just goes to show how far college basketball has already come. No way is parity dead or dying.
In terms of media coverage, I think the schools with the biggest gripe might be the Atlantic 10, Conference USA and (especially) Mountain West schools, who don’t get grouped in with the cute & cuddly “mid-majors” (nevermind that the Missouri Valley is better than any of those leagues, with the MWC being the only one that’s close), so they don’t get that sort of attention… and yet also don’t get the attention that the BCS schools get… so they kinda fall between the cracks. That UNLV was absurdly seeded as a #7 is case and point.
The oft-repeated notion that the success of Gonzaga, George Mason, Southern Illinois, Butler, Winthrop, etc., means the term “mid-major” is obsolete, is woefully naive and misses the key difference between major and mid-major schools, namely, money. The BCS schools will always have drastically bigger budgets than those programs, which means those programs will always be something less than “major,” no matter how successful they are on the court. And even in terms of on-the-court stuff, people who claim that the Missouri Valley Conference is now effectively a power conference, are kidding themselves. Missouri State went 12-6 in the MVC, and didn’t qualify for the NCAA Tournament. Show me a team in any power conference that has won twice as many games as it’s lost in conference play, finished third in the standings, and not gone dancing, during the 64-team era. Likewise, Creighton went 13-5, finished second in the conference, won the conference tournament… and got a #10 seed. Again, show me a team with a similar resume in a major conference that hasn’t been favored in its first-round game (or its second-round game, for that matter). And I’m not even objecting to either of those decisions by the committee. I’m simply using them as evidence to prove it’s completely silly to claim that the MVC is no longer a mid-major, or the term “mid-major” is now obsolete or whatever.
We do need a better terminology, though. For one thing, the term “mid-major” is too often used to refer to low-major conferences. If we’re going to be precise/accurate about it, it should be something like this:
Major conferences: Big East, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, Pac-10
Mid-major conferences: Missouri Valley, Atlantic 10, Colonial, Conference USA, Mountain West, Horizon, MAC, WAC
Low-major conferences with a single mid-major member: WCC (Gonzaga) and possibly now Big South (Winthrop) … you could make a case for C-USA here, too, but because they play I-A football, their budgets are such that they are likely to recover and become more than just the Memphis Invitational
True low-major conferences: Everybody else (which isn’t to say that a particular low-major conference can’t produce a really good team or two in a given year — see, e.g., the Southern Conference this year, with Davidson and App. State, or America East two years ago, with Vermont — but these conferences are not consistent two-bid threats, like the true mid-majors)
April 1st, 2007 at 10:38:30 am
I think the WCC is a mid-major league and Gonzaga falls somewhere between high major and mid-major. Other teams from that league have had success. It was only a couple of years ago that San Diego had a really good team and Pepperdine historically has been good as well.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:44:54 am
I agree with you, Brendan, and even as I wrote my post last night I recognized that I was ascribing too much fault to Billy Packer et al. There are a lot of factors at play that effectively “stack the deck” and provide schools like Ohio State and Florida punched tickets to the Final Four. I went off on Billy Packer because I needed to vent (and because he deserves the scorn, though I’m sure he’ll never read my post).
As you mentioned, the big school budgets, the shmoozing ability of certain high profile coaches, the multimillion dollar television contracts with the major conferences, and the unfair NCAA seeding are also big factors in tilting the playing field toward the “powers”. It sucks, and I wish there were some way to defeat it.
Anyway, I also have to disagree with you that the MVC is a better conference than the A-10. While there is no question that the MVC was better than the A10 both this year and last, over the past 15 to 20 years, the A10 certainly takes the cake. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to argue otherwise. If I remember correctly, the Missouri Valley has only had 1 team make the Elite Eight during that span of time (Bradley, last year). Since 1996, the A10 has had 8 trips to the elite 8: Temple (1991,1999,2001) Rhode Island (1998), Massachusetts (1995, 1996), Xavier (2004), and St. Joseph’s (2004). Additionally, the A10 has had 1 final four team (Massachusetts - 1996) and 3 National Players of the Year (Marcus Camby, Kentucky, 1996; David West, Xavier, 2003; and Jameer Nelson, St. Joseph’s, 2004). The MVC has clearly been better over the past two years as the A10 has only qualified 2 teams, but in recent history (i.e. past 15 to 20 years), the A10 is better, no question.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:46:43 am
I meant to say, “Since ‘1991′, the A10 has had 8 trips to the Elite Eight.”
April 1st, 2007 at 11:47:56 am
Shit, I meant to write, Marcus Camby, MASSACHUSETTS, 1996. Kentucky never has and never will be in the Atlantic 10. Total brain fart.
April 1st, 2007 at 12:07:12 pm
While there is no question that the MVC was better than the A10 both this year and last, over the past 15 to 20 years, the A10 certainly takes the cake.
I completely agree. I was talking about the strength of the conferences right now, not over the past 15 to 20 years. It is precisely because of past successes that the A10, C-USA and Mountain West are generally not grouped with the mid-majors. (In the C-USA, it’s because of past successes mostly by teams that aren’t even in the conference anymore!) But the reality is that they aren’t true major (or “high-major”) conferences, and you can’t reasonably put them in an “in between” group but leave the Missouri Valley and Colonial out of that group… which is why I think they should all be considered mid-majors.
April 1st, 2007 at 12:13:08 pm
Also, Andrew, you’re probably right, I’m probably thinking too short-term with the WCC. It should probably be grouped with the mid-majors but regarded like the MAC… historically good leagues that have been “down” (outside of Gonzaga) the last couple of years.
April 1st, 2007 at 2:24:29 pm
Where’s the choice: Don’t give a damn!! on your survey??!! ;-D
April 1st, 2007 at 5:13:38 pm
Brendan, I don’t think I ever brought up the WCC….
Patrick, your comparison of the MWC and the A-10 is relatively flawed because the MWC has only been around for roughly a decade or so. Before that most of the MWC teams were part of the WAC. If you want to learn about history, let me just point you in the direction of UNLV back in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
April 1st, 2007 at 5:21:29 pm
Andrew, I was responding to Andrew H re: the WCC. And Patrick didn’t compare the A-10 to the MWC, he compared it to the MVC. :)
April 1st, 2007 at 7:02:40 pm
I think the biggest reason there were fewer upsets this year is not some long-term trend, but rather, random chance. The law of averages dictates that, if they play the tournament long enough, eventually there will be a year like this.
I think the fact that George Mason and LSU blew up the brackets last year is also a reason why nobody like them did it this year.
Think about it: if you’re a tiny little Cinderella school in the Big Dance, all of a sudden making the Final Four doesn’t seem like such a silly goal. Before, you might have been satisfied with a Sweet 16 berth, or even just one win, but now the dreams are bigger, and you lose focus on getting that first upset. Winthrop, this year’s GMU heir-apparent, blinked once and let a 20-point lead on ND disappear.
Meanwhile, from the other end, a power-conference school need only show its players game tape of Michigan State, North Carolina and UConn all biting it to George Mason last year to really drive home the point of how underestimating the small schools leads to getting bounced.
I think the next couple of NCAA tournaments may be similarly “chalky,” and then sooner or later the pendulum will swing again.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:11:46 pm
Ahhhhhh, thanks. These eyes ain’t what they used to be. ;-)