How do you like your bracket now, shot caller? Did you have Stanford and Kentucky, both No. 1 seeds, going out on the first weekend? You couldn't have had Nevada going to the Sweet 16 because you didn't even know Nevada had a team other than UNLV until Saturday night. Go ahead and tell us you had Alabama, Vanderbilt and Xavier advancing. I want to see the bracket that has St. Joe's going further than Kentucky.
The NCAA men's basketball tournament got off to a fairly boring and predictable start. There were no buzzer-beaters and only a couple of upsets Thursday and Friday. The first round played out as if the selection committee had set the field with the assistance of a crystal ball. But that all changed, thankfully, by Saturday, when true madness finally grabbed hold of the tournament.
By Sunday evening, we were reminded of just how dramatic the tournament can be, and of the teams we simply shouldn't trust in an office pool. Gonzaga was wonderful to watch as an underdog, but appears doomed whenever it has to play as the favorite. Cincinnati failing to justify its seeding (again) is bad enough, but losing to Illinois by 24 is unthinkable. I should be slapped for putting Mississippi State in my Final Four (although Xavier is clearly better than we thought even after beating St. Joe's 10 days ago). And what are we supposed to make of Stanford now?
Since reaching the Final Four in 1998, all the Cardinal has done is tease. And while we're on the subject of Stanford, I don't want to hear any more about East Coast bias, okay? I don't want to hear from another coach west of the Rockies about how the western teams get unfairly dogged by Easterners. I don't want to hear from any sportswriters from L.A. or Seattle criticizing us for not staying up late enough to watch WAC and Pac-10 games. Why would we need to stay up late to see that weak junk? You may want to go West, young man, to see the best in the NBA, but not in the NCAA.
Stanford is out. Gonzaga is out. Arizona is out. Washington is out. They stunk. The Pac-10 had its lights punched out faster than Michael Spinks by Mike Tyson. By Sunday night, after Kansas had eliminated Pacific, Nevada was the only western representative of the 16 teams remaining. The entire western region had fewer teams than the state of Alabama.
But the biggest shocker might have been Kentucky's loss to UAB, a ninth seed. And it wasn't just the loss; it's that UAB's players appeared every bit as talented as Kentucky's.
Oh, it's very explainable. "The college game, the whole landscape of it, is changing more than we ever thought it could possibly change," Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said over the weekend in Denver where his defending champions won two games to reach the Sweet 16. "The big schools always survived by getting the great [high school] players. That's how they beat those other guys. But they're not getting the great player, so there's not as much separation."
It speaks directly to Boeheim's point that Kentucky didn't have a single player named to the all-Southeastern Conference team. Yes, Kentucky was the No. 1 seed overall, but it's important to keep in mind that Kentucky in the 1980s would have had a Tyson Chandler or an Eddy Curry. In fact, a partial list of players who skipped college altogether speaks to the issue even further.
Kwame Brown would be a junior, probably at the University of Florida, which lost in the first round to Manhattan. Curry and Chandler would be juniors and Amare Stoudamire a sophomore, and they wouldn't have gone to mid-majors. LeBron James would be a freshman. You don't think Kentucky would have one or more of those players? Seven of this year's best high school seniors could be headed to the NBA and not to Arizona, Duke, Kansas or wherever.
Suppose Chris Bosh was in his sophomore season at Georgia Tech? Would they have struggled so deep into Sunday's game against Boston College? Suppose Texas had T.J. Ford, who would be a junior? Suppose Maryland had Chris Wilcox or U-Conn had Caron Butler, both of whom would be seniors? How good would Syracuse be if Carmelo Anthony was still in school?
While the elite programs lose their best players early and also miss out on the very top high school kids, UAB has five seniors. Nevada's experienced players (juniors Kevinn Pinkney and Kirk Snyder plus senior Todd Okeson) are simply better than Michigan State's players and it showed Thursday. Only the No. 1 seeds in the tournament have a decided advantage anymore, and only for one game.
"Twenty years ago, this never happened," Boeheim said. "If you were an [elite] program, you'd win your first-round game by 20 points, your second by 15, and you'd maybe have a tough game [in the round of 16]. That's not the case now."
Still, those elite programs expect to win. And we expect them to win even though their players aren't much better than those of schools that don't have pedigree. The losses, even the close games, are a reflection of how little separation there is between the top 10 teams and those between 30 and 50.
That doesn't mean the losses don't hurt as much. After North Carolina, with no seniors to speak of, lost a second-round game to Texas, Tar Heels Coach Roy Williams said of defeat in the tournament. "It reaches in and grabs your heart and pulls it out and shakes it in front of your face."
Of the four regions, only the East Rutherford bracket has its top four seeds (St. Joe's, Oklahoma State, Pitt and Wake) intact. There's bedlam everywhere else. The Phoenix Region has Nos. 2, 5, 6 and 8. Atlanta has Nos. 1, 3, 5 and 7. And St. Louis has Nos. 3, 4, 9 and 10.
Somebody asked Boeheim, in the wake of his team beating Maryland and Alabama beating Stanford, if he was relieved the top-seeded Cardinal had been eliminated. "Hey, this isn't an office pool," he said. "It's who's playing the best."
And those office pool brackets are evidence enough that it's very, very difficult now to predict what teams will keep playing well in March.
