Sorry, I've been gone nearly a month ... a week of being sick, a couple weeks of trying desperately to catch up, and then a week without a topic will do that, I guess ...
It's "March Madness" time and, so, I wanted to mention some things that bug me about it:
1. When teams are said to have "shown that they deserved" or "shown that they did not deserve" a bid to the NCAA tournament. We hear this kind of thing every year, yet, as I argue about all kinds of sports tournaments, it's all about matchups. The right matchup and a team has a good shot at winning; the wrong matchup and the team has a poor shot. So, as some would have it, Villanova "justified" selection to the tournament by winning two games. Yet, given a different matchup in the first round, perhaps they don't win at all and then it's "Did they deserve to be there?" On the women's side, Florida State was questioned as a team that maybe didn't belong in the tournament, yet, they won their first game because they had a matchup that worked for them. I'm tired of this need to make everything to black or white ... That's why I say screw declaring a national champion in college football. If West Virginia hadn't lost to Pittsburgh, LSU wouldn't be national champion and Ohio State might have had a more favorable matchup. In the end, it wouldn't have really told us who the best team was. The same sentiment goes for college basketball. The NCAA tournament just lets people have a final winner of some sort. It's still all about matchups and a team's run to the Final 16 or Final 8 is highly determined by that. Just ask Georgetown this year after running into Davidson ...
2. The "Elite Eight" moniker for the round of eight. This seemed to start in the early 1990s when it seemed like there were two possibilities being tossed around: Elite Eight and Great Eight. The industry fell onto the standard "Elite Eight," I assume in keeping with the trend of starting the descriptor with the same letter as the number of teams left--e.g. Sweet Sixteen and Final Four. Yet, the word "Elite" bothers me so much because of what it implies. Do I really want to perpetuate the idea that elitism is good? "Great" has its issues, as does "Sweet" for that matter, but I find them more tolerable. Actually, "Final Eight" is what I say and "Final Four" seems most appropriate, since that's most descriptive of the situation--i.e. these are the final 4 or 8 teams left in the tournament. What's next? "Thirsty Thirty-two?" "Scintillating Sixty-Four?"
3. Billy Packer -- I'm not the first or last to say that he bugs me, but the other day it finally dawned on me what about him bugs me so much. He is blatantly dismissive and utterly smug about it. When, for instance, the other day, during the telecast of his game, he mentioned that no one had Davidson in the Final Eight, the way he put it (and I don't remember or have the exact language) was so dismissive of the idea that one could have conceived of them there that it was downright offensive (probably particularly so for me personally, since I had them in the Final 16 and seriously considered picking them against Wisconsin). He is typically dismissive of schools from non-BCS leagues, their qualifications, and their chances. He is also dismissive during games of the possibilities of teams winning or coming back to win and, while I've seen him have to eat his words before (a UCLA comeback in the last 2 minutes during the regular season, I believe against Stanford, I think 9 years ago), he seems not to learn any caution from it. I know other announcers can make statements that might be similar, but I guess the way that Greg Gumbel or Jim Nantz or others say it makes it at least feel like they recognize variety of opinion and possibilities.
4. When two non-BCS schools ranked between 5 and 12 are asked to play one another in the first round. This year the Drake-Western Kentucky, Kent State (another team that was victim to the "they don't belong there" syndrome, just because they happened to have 1 bad half of shooting)-UNLV, Butler-South Alabama, and Gonzaga-Davidson matchups all fit. When one of these teams makes the top 4 seeds, little can often be done to keep them from being matched up with a non-BCS school (though, in that regard, at least the committee did put the BCS 14 seed Georgia against Xavier and not match up two non-BCS schools). So, I understand in those situations. However, over and over again, the non-BCS schools are judged more severely when they fail to win tournament games than the BCS schools are. These are often held as indictments against non-BCS conferences getting more than one bid. When the tournament selection committee then makes them play one another in the first round, it compounds the problem for these schools and their conferences within the hierarchy of big-time college athletics. I think the selection committee should be much more cognizant of this.
5. CBS's decision to turn damn near everything into the "one shining moment" motif. Enough already ...
Lest I seem like a complete crank (though, that was what baseball "fans" were called back in the day, so I'm not completely opposed to being called that), here are things that I have enjoyed:
1. Stacey Dales -- She's done work on football and on men's college basketball. As a former women's college basketball player herself at the University of Oklahoma, she gets most prominently featured on ESPN for their women's college basketball coverage. When I hear here analysis and reporting, she seems intelligent, articulate, and insightful.
2. The Vern Lundquist-Bill Raftery pairing -- They seem to be having fun and I seem to catch it. While Nance-Packer is CBS's number one team, if given a choice, I'll tune into a blowout that Lundquist and Raftery are calling instead of a close game that Nance-Packer are calling ... that is, if I'm not listening to my radio instead. Gus Johnson is great, too ... and lucky as hell ... he got to call the Davidson-Kansas mid-major barnburner this year and, if memory serves me right, he was on the call for Gonzaga putting themselves on the map and nearly beating Connecticut in the round of 8 back in 1999.
3. Making out brackets for both men's and women's NCAA and NIT tournaments. Heck, I would have even done the CBI tournament for 16 men's teams, but I didn't want to deal with how they changed the matchups based on who was left after the first round. Bradley and Tulsa go for all the marbles in the rubber match of the three-game championship tonight ...
4. And, since my preference is to listen to the radio, hearing Tommy Tighe always brings back so many great memories ... And calls by John Thompson, Brad Sham, Dave Sims, and the whole lot make me smile.
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