Monday, March 23, 2009

The NCAAs Are Not Allowed To Be Boring

With all four number one seeds going on to the Sweet 16, and an almost unbearable amount of chalk being thrown around (seriously, you'd have gone 22-10 just picking the high seed in round 1, and 15-1 with the high seeds in round 2)...

Well, it must be a really fantastic tournament, right?

The NCAA tournament has reached the level of NFL season in terms of being in a more or less every season hype monster. If the low seeds are upset, it's crazy exciting, best weekend in sports, etc., etc.

If the picks stay chalk, well, wow, what matchups we've got in the final rounds.

Um, far be it for me to call bullsquat here, but from where I sit, so far this tournament looks like the Big East tournament, only with more ballast. Perhaps UNC and Duke will make it an ACC run again, or maybe Gonzaga will finally pay off all of those years of teasing...

But well, no one watches the first two rounds of the tournament hoping for nothing more amazing than a single double digit seed (Arizona, who hardly fits the profile of a From Nowhere team anyway).

So I'm asking, from the point of view of someone who watched little more than Flynn and Devendorf as they kept my Orangemen alive... have these first four days been dull?

And if not, what is?

1 comment:

Steven Gomez said...

Well, Wisconsin-Florida State and Siena-Ohio State were pretty thrilling....

I remember one year in the late 90's where there were NO upsets, save for Pacific beating some overseeded 5-seed tomato can that everyone and their mother knew 12-seeded Pacific was going to beat before it happened. CBS did their best to chest-thump the Big Upset, but the game was a foregone conclusion. That was a pretty lame tournament.

This one's fairly predictable as well, and save for the two OT games I mentioned, most of the games were in the bag well before the final 2-3 minutes.

BTW, the Big East may get most of the cake, but Memphis is winning it all. They've got enough overall ability and talent on both ends of the floor to exploit the weaknesses of the other 1 seeds.