Michael Wilbon: This Season Needs Saving
Maybe a string of first-weekend upsets and buzzer-beaters will divert our attention from what has been a very ordinary season. We've become trained like seals to applaud at the very mention of Selection Sunday and the sight of a tournament bracket, and legitimately so, because March Madness has delivered more consistently and more dramatically than probably any annual event in American sports.
People love college basketball so much it's become blasphemous to criticize the product as a whole, to suggest the season was just, well, blah. But that's what it was. There aren't many great teams, if any.
There aren't many upperclassmen we're just itching to see. Conferences that often are loaded and deep, like the Big Ten and the SEC, are unimpressive at the top and dreadful beyond the first four or five teams. Even Dick Vitale, college basketball's biggest advocate, used the word "mediocrity" to describe the tournament field when it was announced yesterday evening.
Of course, we remember the college season based on how the NCAA tournament plays out. Not much that happened in the 2005-06 season was as memorable as George Mason's Cinderella run in March. If the tournament's dramatic and full of wonderful games, that's pretty much how we remember the season. And this season needs a bailout.
Don't get me wrong, I turn into a cheerleader the second week of March every year. I get all gooey-eyed over the conference tournaments, especially the one-bid leagues where the whole season comes down to a tournament final.
American University getting into the tournament for the first time is what makes the whole thing so wonderfully sappy and exciting. But this season needs a boost, lest it be crowded by Tiger Woods and the Houston Rockets, which as of this morning are the two best stories in sports by a mile. You couldn't watch Tiger sink that putt on No. 18 at Bay Hill without coming out of your seat. And if you love basketball, and don't have some cultural or political agenda, you can't watch the Rockets, without Yao Ming, and not appreciate the effort and teamwork and high school-like joy they get from playing together.
I hope the college boys can give me a little bit of what the Rockets have demonstrated over the last month -- and history suggests they will. At least we're starting with a tournament field relatively short on controversy. Okay, maybe Virginia Tech could have gone in over Baylor. And if I were an Arizona State Sun Devil and I were left out of the field, only to watch my blood rival, Arizona, get in after beating the Wildcats twice, I'd be a little nuts. Arizona State finished with a better conference record, had quality wins over Xavier, Stanford and Cal, yet had to be ripped when Arizona received an invite. Of course, the men's selection committee can counter with the fact that Arizona had a much better RPI and strength of schedule.
Still, we can pretty much skip the squabbling and get right to my tournament forecast. And I'm looking for a ton of upsets early. A ton.
The big-name, big-conference teams beyond the No. 1 seeds, simply aren't good enough to pick favorites when filling out a bracket. You want early upsets? I can see second-seeded Georgetown going to the Final Four; I also can see the Hoyas losing a second-round match with Davidson, which has won 22 straight games, just like the Rockets. I could see Duke going to the Final Four; I also can see Duke losing a second-round match with West Virginia or the aforementioned Arizona. And when we start dealing with high-profile schools seeded, say, fifth, I can see even more upsets. It's certainly not crazy to pick George Mason to beat Notre Dame, or Temple to beat Michigan State.
Actually, there are players I'm more interested in seeing than teams. Start with Michael Beasley of Kansas State and then move to Davidson's Stephen Curry. I want to see O.J. Mayo, who has gotten nothing but better late in his freshman season at USC. I want to see this kid, Dionte Christmas of Temple, a 6-foot-5 kid who has scored 37 and 29 points already this month. I want to see Cornell's Ryan Wittman (son of NBA Coach Randy Wittman) and U-Conn.'s 7-3, 265-pound athlete extraordinaire Hasheem Thabeet, who blocked 10 shots in a game against Notre Dame this season and whom I believe is going to be the next big man to have a major impact on the sport. I want to see George Mason's Final Four holdovers, Folarin Campbell and Will Thomas. I want to see all the shooters who play for Drake, which is pretty much everybody in a Drake uniform: Josh Young, Leonard Houston, Jonathan Cox and Adam Emmenecker. I want to see Wink Adams of UNLV -- just because his name is Wink.
There are plenty of presumably good first-round games to see them in, too, including Kansas State vs. Southern Cal, Beasley vs. Mayo. There's Indiana vs. Arkansas in the first round, Notre Dame vs. George Mason, Davidson vs. Gonzaga, Butler vs. South Alabama, Clemson vs. Villanova, Marquette vs. Kentucky. I like Georgia, given the Bulldogs' spirit in winning the SEC tournament, but I like their opponent, Xavier, even more.
I like North Carolina coming out of the East Region. I like Texas over Memphis in the South. I like Xavier over UCLA in the West and Georgetown over Kansas in the Midwest. Mostly, I like March Madness and the NCAA tournament too much to think it can possibly be as pedestrian as the regular season that preceded it.
People love college basketball so much it's become blasphemous to criticize the product as a whole, to suggest the season was just, well, blah. But that's what it was. There aren't many great teams, if any.
There aren't many upperclassmen we're just itching to see. Conferences that often are loaded and deep, like the Big Ten and the SEC, are unimpressive at the top and dreadful beyond the first four or five teams. Even Dick Vitale, college basketball's biggest advocate, used the word "mediocrity" to describe the tournament field when it was announced yesterday evening.
Of course, we remember the college season based on how the NCAA tournament plays out. Not much that happened in the 2005-06 season was as memorable as George Mason's Cinderella run in March. If the tournament's dramatic and full of wonderful games, that's pretty much how we remember the season. And this season needs a bailout.
Don't get me wrong, I turn into a cheerleader the second week of March every year. I get all gooey-eyed over the conference tournaments, especially the one-bid leagues where the whole season comes down to a tournament final.
American University getting into the tournament for the first time is what makes the whole thing so wonderfully sappy and exciting. But this season needs a boost, lest it be crowded by Tiger Woods and the Houston Rockets, which as of this morning are the two best stories in sports by a mile. You couldn't watch Tiger sink that putt on No. 18 at Bay Hill without coming out of your seat. And if you love basketball, and don't have some cultural or political agenda, you can't watch the Rockets, without Yao Ming, and not appreciate the effort and teamwork and high school-like joy they get from playing together.
I hope the college boys can give me a little bit of what the Rockets have demonstrated over the last month -- and history suggests they will. At least we're starting with a tournament field relatively short on controversy. Okay, maybe Virginia Tech could have gone in over Baylor. And if I were an Arizona State Sun Devil and I were left out of the field, only to watch my blood rival, Arizona, get in after beating the Wildcats twice, I'd be a little nuts. Arizona State finished with a better conference record, had quality wins over Xavier, Stanford and Cal, yet had to be ripped when Arizona received an invite. Of course, the men's selection committee can counter with the fact that Arizona had a much better RPI and strength of schedule.
Still, we can pretty much skip the squabbling and get right to my tournament forecast. And I'm looking for a ton of upsets early. A ton.
The big-name, big-conference teams beyond the No. 1 seeds, simply aren't good enough to pick favorites when filling out a bracket. You want early upsets? I can see second-seeded Georgetown going to the Final Four; I also can see the Hoyas losing a second-round match with Davidson, which has won 22 straight games, just like the Rockets. I could see Duke going to the Final Four; I also can see Duke losing a second-round match with West Virginia or the aforementioned Arizona. And when we start dealing with high-profile schools seeded, say, fifth, I can see even more upsets. It's certainly not crazy to pick George Mason to beat Notre Dame, or Temple to beat Michigan State.
Actually, there are players I'm more interested in seeing than teams. Start with Michael Beasley of Kansas State and then move to Davidson's Stephen Curry. I want to see O.J. Mayo, who has gotten nothing but better late in his freshman season at USC. I want to see this kid, Dionte Christmas of Temple, a 6-foot-5 kid who has scored 37 and 29 points already this month. I want to see Cornell's Ryan Wittman (son of NBA Coach Randy Wittman) and U-Conn.'s 7-3, 265-pound athlete extraordinaire Hasheem Thabeet, who blocked 10 shots in a game against Notre Dame this season and whom I believe is going to be the next big man to have a major impact on the sport. I want to see George Mason's Final Four holdovers, Folarin Campbell and Will Thomas. I want to see all the shooters who play for Drake, which is pretty much everybody in a Drake uniform: Josh Young, Leonard Houston, Jonathan Cox and Adam Emmenecker. I want to see Wink Adams of UNLV -- just because his name is Wink.
There are plenty of presumably good first-round games to see them in, too, including Kansas State vs. Southern Cal, Beasley vs. Mayo. There's Indiana vs. Arkansas in the first round, Notre Dame vs. George Mason, Davidson vs. Gonzaga, Butler vs. South Alabama, Clemson vs. Villanova, Marquette vs. Kentucky. I like Georgia, given the Bulldogs' spirit in winning the SEC tournament, but I like their opponent, Xavier, even more.
I like North Carolina coming out of the East Region. I like Texas over Memphis in the South. I like Xavier over UCLA in the West and Georgetown over Kansas in the Midwest. Mostly, I like March Madness and the NCAA tournament too much to think it can possibly be as pedestrian as the regular season that preceded it.
posted by Daily Observer at 11:55 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home