Lent Day 22: March Madness

I missed yesterday. It was not a slip of my commitment. It was a combination of two things. One, I had another visit by whatever GI issue I keep having. So that was fun. Two, we had a toilet overflow and cause water damage, which led to having to call Servpro and deal with a phalanx of industrial fans all over our house. So that was funner. I didn’t have the bandwidth to come up with anything to write. (Throwing some business lingo in there.) 

Today, though… Today is the first round of MARCH MADNESS, BABY! That’s right. The NCAA basketball tournament starts today. Sixteen college basketball games today; sixteen college basketball games tomorrow.  These two days should be national holidays. Actually, tomorrow there are thirty-two college basketball games because the Women’s Tournament also kicks off. So much basketball! As I write this, I am watching Furman threaten to topple four-seed Virginia. That sentence shows why this sporting event is so amazing. I would never waste time watching Furman play anything sports-related. But it is March Madness. Furman would rarely be able to play on the same court field as Virginia. But it is March Madness! Furman hasn’t been in the tournament in 40 years; they haven’t won a game in the tournament in 49 years. But it is MARCH MADNES!! Furman would never have a chance at beating Virginia in sports ball. BUT! IT! IS! MUTHA-FUDGY! MARCH! MADNESS!!!
I am not a Furman fan. Yes, they are located in South Carolina. I’ve been there once to see Jim Gaffigan in concert. I have some really good friends who went there. And they have the excellent abbreviation of F.U. So there are things to root for. But when it comes to March Madness, I love chaos. I want to see as many upsets as possible. From when I was very young, I watched March Madness. My dad loved it. I discovered the magic of bracket prognostication with the insert in the Sports Illustrated. It may be my favorite annual sporting event. (I say annual because The Summer Olympics are my favorite sporting event, but it only happens every four years.) What makes it so great? I’m glad you asked. This looks like a perfect opportunity to create a list. 

ANYONE CAN MAKE IT IN There are 64 slots in the tournament, and about half of them are reserved for conference champions. All the conference champions. Yes, the big conferences have way more representation, but a Furman(Southern Conference Champs) can make it in to the tournament. You can even have a pretty crappy team get hot and win their conference tournament and qualify for the Big Dance. (OH MY GOSH! FU just won!!!) Let’s take for example, UCF back in 1996, by senior year. They were awful - a HUGE drop-off from my sophomore year when they were pretty good and qualified for the NCAA Tournament. My Knights went 8-18 in the regular season. But they were in the TAAC tournament. They somehow won the tournament and qualified for March Madness with the worst record of any team ever. Go UCF! They promptly got thrashed by the Marcus Camby led UMass, who later had to vacate their wins due to player payments. So did they actually win then? Hmmm. Anyways. Every team has a shot to get into the tournament. It doesn’t matter how small your school is - if you are Division I, you could end up in the tournament. Ivy League? Yup. Mountain West? Yup. Anyone could get in… and once you get in … 

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN Like I just interjected, 13 seed Furman who never gets into the tournament just beat 4 seed Virginia of the mighty ACC Conference. This happens literally every year. A lower rated team, often from a smaller conference, knocks off a bigger name, higher rated team. It happens so often that a lot of people will pick 12 over 5 every time in their brackets. I do that. I will pick at least three 12 seeds over 5 seeds. Recently we have seen more 4/13 upsets. The only game close to a gimme is the 1/16 matchup. There has only been one 16 team knock off a 1 seed when Virginia(oh man, Virginia likes getting upset) got beat by the legendary UMBC Retrievers. But there are upsets all over the place. And, sometimes, you have a team like 15 seed St. Peter’s make a run to the Elite Eight. Why are upsets so common? Some of these smaller conference winners are actually really good teams. And they often are playing mid-level teams from bigger conferences. So you have a Furman team who is awesome at shooting three pointers. They also have a really stifling defense they can kick into. They are playing a team that finished who finished second in the ACC. There isn’t necessarily a whole lot of difference in talent between those two teams. And when you think about needing to just win ONE game on a neutral court (today’s game was in Orlando). A small school’s fans will travel to get there because this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. The game today sounded more like a Furman home game than a neutral game because anyone who isn’t a Virginia fan is rooting for an upset. So Furman was down by twelve, and then they went on a 16-2 run. Now the game is tight with a few minutes left. Maybe one of Virginia’s players tries too hard to win on his own and throws the ball blindly down the court. A skinny kid from Furman steals it, throws it to another skinny kid who shoots a three. Upset. 

DRAMA It isn’t just the upsets that make for compelling watching, it is HOW the upsets happen. (By the way, I had to take a break while writing this. I’m literally starting back up right after #15 Princeton knocked off #2 Arizona. MARCH MADNESS BABY!) When a lower seeded team hangs tight throughout a game, the higher rated team starts to get really nervous. This compounds the issue. Back in 2019, UCF beat VCU and went to the second round of the tournament. They played #1 ranked Duke. They had no business staying close with Duke, but it happened. The longer they stayed close, the more Duke got affected. Duke ended up winning 77-76, but it could have (should have) gone the other way. That is what happens in these games. It happened in the Arizona/Princeton game that just ended and the Furman/Virginia game. In both games, the better team was up by double digits. But the lesser team didn’t give up; they kept on coming. They both went on tears where they shut down the favored team. Then when the game was at the end, they pulled ahead and won. Furman did it in dramatic fashion - sinking a three with 2.2 seconds left. March Madness always has a few games where someone will launch a shot right at the buzzer to win the game. There is such high drama. There is the excitement of an underdog winning, the thrill of a big school limping away, the potential of a Cinderella team making a run. And those close finishes are awesome! I root for a team that came up on the short end of a buzzer beater game, so I know it sucks. But when I’m a neutral observer, the drama of these games beat anything Hollywood could generate. 

CHAOS When it comes to the NCAA Tournament, I’m like The Joker. I just want to watch the world burn. I want to see top seeds lose. I want to see low seeds win. There are teams that are always villains to me (Duke - looking in your direction). There are teams that are from schools I detest (UF - who UCF beat last night in the NIT! HAHA!). I always root against those teams. I love it when two teams ranked in the teens end up playing in a later round. When a brilliant coach or top player has to bow out early. Muuhuuuhaaahaahaa. CHAOS! It’s FAAAANTastic. There is no other tournament that has the potential for this level of chaos, either. College football has bowls, but no follow up games. The playoff has two levels of games, but there aren’t any underdogs in those games. College baseball playoffs require multiple losses for eliminations. Pro football only includes the top teams. Pro basketball and baseball both have series instead of single games. The NCAA Tournament is the only win-or-go-home setup in sports. Well, unless you count tennis.  And nobody counts tennis. There just is something so unique about March Madness. It is wild and crazy and entertaining and chaotic. There are tons of games going on at a time, so you hop from one upset to another buzzer beater game to another upset. It’s brilliant. 

BRACKETS I can’t go through this list without mentioning the brackets. People who don’t know anything about sports still do brackets. You take the full slate of 64 teams and try to predict each game until the finals. It is ridiculous. There is no way I know who is going to win between San Diego State and College of Charleston. (San Diego State) I have never watched either team. I recognize a lot of teams from my many years of watching sports. But, seriously, just because I’ve been on the College of Charleston campus and that Marshall Faulk and Carl Weathers went to San Diego State - that doesn’t help me at all! But I do the brackets every year. And I’m mathematically eliminated every year by the end of the second round. I’ve taken to naming my brackets Mathematically Eliminated. And I laugh. Because the more chaos and the more drama, the worse the brackets. It feels like we are involved, even though it is just a silly game. I haven’t checked mine yet today. Chances are good they are already busted. 

GOOSEBUMPS How can you not feel like the Grinch at the end of his holiday special when you see a tiny college knock off a national powerhouse? We LOVE David and Goliath stories. Why do you think David and Goliath is such a well known story? Because it is a David and Goliath story. The little shepherd boy killed the nine foot giant. (What did they call David and Goliath stories before David and Goliath? Was there another well known story back then? Like Jehoroash and Big Louie?) For over 30 years, I have been a UCF fan. UCF is not the biggest school in the country - it is the second biggest, but that’s not the point. It has been an uphill struggle for the school to get respect. Florida already had three powerhouse school in UF, FSU, and Miami. UCF was a 1-AA school when I started there. It had to move up through the ranks, through crappy conferences and mid-majors. Finally, next year it joins what’s left of the Big 12 - one of the big five conferences. That means UCF will finally have access to all of the bowl bids and NCAA tournament slots that a school in a major conference has. But for over three decades, I have been a fan of one of those small schools who consider an invite to the Big Dance something rare and incredible. Just getting there is an accomplishment. WINNING there is so far beyond what anyone would expect. The kids at those schools are elated to be included. They don’t see a 7 seed and an early exit as a failure. They see a 15 seed and early loss as a success. There is so much money now in college sports. The transfer protocol is basically free agency. Naming Image and Likeness means players can make millions of dollars before going pro. And truly great college basketball players play one year and then hit the draft. But for those other schools? Those guys are there for four years. They don’t have NIL deals. Nobody wants them in the transfer protocol. They aren’t going pro. They are working on their degree while practicing, trying to get set up for a job in the real world. This one game … it is everything to them. A team like University of Maryland, Baltimore County may never make it back. Or it could take 40 years like with Furman. So they give it their all. Some of those big schools may be taking it a little easy, worried about their potential next matchup. Not UMBC. They pour everything they have into their game. They hope they can stay close, catch Goliath focused on something else. Then they shoot a dagger three at the end and knock off a team they had no business beating. It’s more than just drama. It is the goosebump moment, watching a bunch of skinny kids falling into a dogpile. Remembering that this is a game at its heart. It’s why college sports will always be better than professional. For most college athletes, they still care. Which makes us care more. 

WOMEN’S TOURNAMENT “What's the argument here? NBA, WNBA. One is a sport, one is a joke. I love sports, I love jokes.” - Dwight Schrute. I didn’t grow up watching a ton of women’s basketball. We would watch the tournament sometimes. But, unless UCF is involved, I don’t pay a lot of attention. Part of it is … I’m trying to be nice about this … women’s basketball in the 1980s … wasn’t good. There were some great players who would float through, but … it just wasn’t good. Then UConn started winning everything everywhere all the time. That was boring. Plus the coach of UConn is a prick. But things are different now. Have you watched a women’s game lately? They are crazy good. We have some friends who have season tickets to the South Carolina women’s team. Between hanging out with them a lot and USC’s tournament run last year, we watch a lot of USC Women’s basketball. If you don’t know, the Gamecocks’ women’s team is ranked #1 and is undefeated. Plus they won the title last year. (By the way, when I say USC it is ALWAYS South Carolina, not the other USC in California. Just so you know.) We’ve lived here in Columbia for seven years now - the first sporting event for USC that we went to was a women’s basketball game this year. Honestly, I kind of prefer the women’s game. It reminds me of older NBA games, when there was more passing and inside game. The games between USC and UConn, LSU, Florida, Georgia have been so exciting to watch. I can’t wait for the tournament! Between men’s and women’s games, there are going to be 32 games going on tomorrow! Sports ball overload!

March Madness is awesome. I plan to watch as many games as I can. I have some that I definitely will not miss. (AnyUSC game, Furman’s second round game) And when a school I’ve never heard of wins at the last second against a Goliath team, I’ll jump up and scream loud enough to scare my kids and dogs. Like I did in the Furman game today. Sure, the finals will probably be two of the big established schools playing. But there’s always the chance that some unexpected underdog will weasel their way in. That’s why I watch. MARCH MADNESS BABY!