Thank you, Davidson players, coaches, staff, students and fans. It was a ride that was both sweet and elite.
We'll close Season 4 with an epilogue on Tuesday.
]]>Some play twisted games with fear. They put themselves in uncomfortable, disruptive situations that press that fear button, set their bloodstream awash in life-affirming adrenaline and cortisol. Throughout history, entire nations have been manipulated into fearful submission with laws and religions. In modern times, there's an entire fear industry, countless chairs facing countless couches. The hired friend leans in close, asks countless variations of the question, "What, exactly, are you afraid of?"
Fear is often triggered by something outside that activates the mechanism inside. Sometimes we fear that something inside will betray us. There is fear of the invisible and unknown, fear of the physically present, dangerous and looming. There is the panic that engulfs and immobilizes, as well as the phobia that propels into performance.
But all fears have one thing in common. Nobody's afraid of things that have already occurred. If one is running from the past, it's only because of a fear of repetition -- worse, bigger, more damaging this time. The object of fear is always somewhere in the future.
Fear is of the end.
]]> But the end is already on its way, it will arrive no matter what. The end is black, all-consuming, relentless, and it is undeniable. The end will come despite therapy, over-the-counter medications, herbal teas, breathing exercises, whistling in the dark, or meditative visualizations that don't include it. The end will take no prisoners because it is not a prison -- it is, simply, the end.Yes, the end will come, whether you're crippled with anxiety about it or not. The end simply doesn't care.
And this is the end of The Mid-Majority's fourth year of existence. All of the remaining small-college teams have been eliminated from the NCAA Tournament... and by extension, so have we. There's nothing left to do but write the epilogue to a season that was.
And what a beautiful season. It began with a dedication, back when the first cold winds of November blew across New England. Back then, there were 225 teams outside Division I's eight richest conferences, all with theoretical shots at the national championship. For the past five months, we've made a point of cover them as well as we possibly could by driving across the country, sleeping in truck stops and attending games nearly every day. Our goal, as it has been for four years, has been to celebrate mid-major over high-major victories as well as the special ethos of basketball at this level. It ended for us on March 30, when the final representative exited the NCAA Tournament in the Elite 8, on a last-second shot that flew wide left.
It ended, as it always does, with a loss.
In between those two timeposts, we've had a lot of fun, haven't we? We saw Maryland fans so stunned they couldn't even sing their favorite song. Our pet cartoon basketball Bally got mauled by a Memphis Tiger, had his power-conference secrets exposed, met his mortal enemy and was later photographed with pretty girls. We revived Finals Week in December and not many readers played hooky. We made LOLBallys, wrote a kung fu movie. We never bought into Rhode Island. We drew a Red Line (okay, two), laughed at Xavier's hubris and talked to a 7-7 dude. I stopped doing radio (the best decision ever), they actually put me on TV, and we did a six-hour ESPN.com chat, the longest ever for someone not named Bill Simmons (and third-longest overall). We held out for nearly two days not knowing the Super Bowl score, but in the end, the Valpo student section made sure we knew.
We fell in love with Campbell, hit 100 games again, we ended the regular season with awards and cheerleaders, warned against office pools. We were broken-hearted by VCU, Illinois State, Belmont and Butler. But we reveled in Siena's win and celebrated with Western Kentucky after a Sweet 16 berth. Then we reveled in Davidson's wonderful win over Wisconsin to join the Elite Eight, but the blinding Just Balls tie couldn't make that shot go in.
It was a packed five months, to say the least.
In total, we attended a site-record 117 games all across Hoops Nation, and defeated our chosen standard of measurement, everywhere-official Steve Welmer. Then we gloated about it. That's 508 college basketball games over the past five years, and I honestly think that nobody attends as many. If you have (and I'm presuming you'd be some kind of scout, I'll gladly abdicate my throne and give you proper credit. Then I'll race you next season.
And I wish next season started tomorrow, I really do. For the first time since Season 1, I'm not going to spend three months of burnt-out, brain-dead recovery time, telling The Official Wife of the Mid-Majority™ never to mention basketball or anything orange ever again. I said it after the 100 Games Project and I'm saying it now: I miss it already.
I miss it for a variety of reasons, the greatest of which is that this was the first of the four Mid-Majority seasons that really made sense. First and foremost, there was unprecedented financial clarity -- moving the statistics that formed the base of the original site over to a new venue, then having people pay for access, has helped offset the navigation confusion of the past few seasons as well as offset the travel expenses for the whole year. It also made a few bucks for the investors too.
(And if you reeeeally want to help support the site, contact us about helping finance our BB State Season 2 expansion plans. Our people will be in touch with your people.)
This season, I finally struck the right chord of editorial balance. Along with tri-weekly contributions to ESPN.com and monthly filings to Basketball Times, there was plenty of material left over for the site that got me on those radar screens to begin with. Unlike Season 3, when TMM stumbled and lost its way on account of its unsure place in the universe, this season had unprecedented focus. It was only when a wise man (my dad) reminded me last summer that in a business where one's work is constantly crafted by others to fit commercially viable molds, sometimes it's really important to maintain an outlet where creative freedom is unchallenged and unfiltered.
And that's the role of this humble little site, with its daily audience that couldn't sell out a Missouri Valley Conference arena. An audience that's likely much smaller than the chorus of conscientious objectors who hate that I cover their schools, who have seemingly decided as one that "mid-major" is just as demeaning a hyphenated descriptor as "monkey-fucker." That's okay, everyone's in denial of something or other.
Despite the "haters," this season was bigger and more awesome than ever before, from daily Boubacars to Bally photos, to open-book travelogues of life on the road, to our fair-minded but still slightly flawed rating system, to a successful interview series that featured old-school Final Four heroes Artis Gilmore and Dolph Pulliam. There were old standbys, too, like the Mid-Majority Baller of the Week and Game! Of! The! Night!
But like Bob McKillop, I'm looking for the Perfect Season too. This wasn't it. I didn't maintain the consistency I was hoping in features I was hoping would be weekly, too much time passed between interviews or travelogues. There weren't as many cartoons as I was hoping to draw, there just wasn't enough time. There never are enough cartoons. Still haven't figured out how not to gain 15 pounds over the course of the season. But that's all stuff we'll work on in Season 5.
So Season 4 is over. I hope that I've put across in these past five months what enormous and intricate logistical architecture is necessary to make something like this work -- scheduling, travel, game after game, and enough time to write about it coherently afterwards. I certainly can't do this alone. In addition to the boundless love, faith and understanding of my beloved wife, there are a lot of people whose trust, expertise and support are necessary for a Mid-Majority season to happen at all.
This season would have been D.O.A. on many occasions -- or at least the sword, ceiling and basketball hoop stanchion of Damocles would have hung over it -- if not for the initial class of Basketball State investors. I want to thank the Chicago Timbles (the Ramblers will rise again!), Josh "How Those Numbers Lookin'" Jackson and the fabulous anonymous B.U. Boys. Your dividend checks are in the mail.
Special thanks to Kim Baxter at ESPN.com, easily the most efficient and assiduous editor I've ever worked with, and easily the most tireless and dedicated. That's not to take anything away from John Akers at BBT, whose personal and professional sacrifices for the great game of basketball are beyond those of anyone I've ever met. And thanks as well to all the sports information directors at mid-major schools from coast to coast, who do this because they love this and aren't getting rich writing game note blurbs with clever headings. You all have my respect and unwavering awe.
There are folks who have been on board since the very beginning, folks who have had every opportunity to jump off. Mike Brodsky (to whom I still owe money to from Season 1... it's coming, I promise), Jen from N.C., Rod from Asheville, Cortney Basham, Mike Litos, Andrew Baker, Jeff, Travis and everyone else who gets on me when I try to pass off weak crap on this website. If I forgot you, write in to complain. It's probably because it's been too long, we're due for a chat anyway. I have a lot more time to answer e-mail and chat on the phone now.
Lastly, thanks to everybody who bought a BB State subscription, everybody who sent in a question to an ESPN.com chat (especially those I couldn't get around to because of time constraints), everybody who submitted an entry to a Bally contest, everybody who wrote in with well wishes or just a complaint about how I didn't say enough nice things about your team. I'll try harder next year.
Keep in touch, don't be a stranger, and we'll see you all on November 1 when we do this damn thing all over again.
Seriously, what's the big deal about failure? Failure is hard-coded into the cosmic program. Everything is pre-programmed to fail. Failure is the natural, default state of the universe.
Every human day is filled with miniscule victories and tiny defeats, but the universe is adamant that each of us finishes below .500. In the end, the body will fail to protect the soul inside. Every fear-driven effort to outlive that fragile vessel is doomed to be forgotten eventually, or swept over by lone and level sands as a colossal wreck, boundless and bare.
It ends with a loss. Everything does.
A basketball season is a far less lethal metaphor: it begins, travels its uncertain trajectory, and ends. In early March, teams crumbled and expired by the hundreds, eliminated at the gates of their conference tournaments, or by falling short in those minor brackets or in the at-large muster. In the past two weeks, they've perished one by one, far long after we became too numb to feel sadness for any individual passing.
Even the champions end the season with a loss, in a certain way. It will be the final time that team will ever exist in that perfect state, in that formation and at that exact age. From then on, it will be a constant struggle to recapture that lost magic captured in a still frame. The main difference, perhaps, is that they will have far fewer regrets than the rest of us.
But why have any regrets at all? Why mourn the inevitable? We all know it's coming, the end. Why fear its onset? Why pay heed to its existence when the beginning, middle, and penultimate points are so rewarding, so worth getting lost in? The end will take care of itself, it will pick its own time. No matter what.
And for each of our 225 teams, and for us, the end has already come and gone.
Thank you, Davidson players, coaches, staff, students and fans. It was a ride that was both sweet and elite.
We'll close Season 4 with an epilogue on Tuesday.
]]>But I'm wearing the tie. Repeat, I am wearing the tie.
The letter that really sold me was T. Jensen, a self-described Jayhawk fan who commented on the nervousness this morning in Rock-Chalk land. They know that they're up against something special today.
Wear it, please. Wear that piece of nylon with the basketballs on it. And I am even a Jayhawk fan, but in respectful support of mid-major b-ball, please wear it. I have never heard Jayhawk fans talk more adamantly than now... we need to "dispose of the 10 seed Cinderella." But still have spent moments reflecting on the pace master, the guy who has the most unique feeling for the college game, Steph Curry... who we have to have patience with, and lock-down mentality, to beat... But yes, wear the darn tie. I know it'll be right.
I know, I know. This is a dangerous line I'm walking with the tie, but the postseason is all about danger, looming heartbreak, sudden death. It's win or go home for not only the Davidson players, coaches and staff, but for their fans too. It's win or go home for all the Charlotte media who sit here in the vast media room at Ford Field, biting their nails and whispering about individual matchups. It's win or go home for everybody in America who loves Cinderella -- if Davidson loses tonight to create a who-cares Final Four made up entirely of one-seeds, it's on to baseball season.
And, of course, it's win or go home for Bally and I. At this moment, we don't know which highway we're taking on our way out of Detroit tonight: I-75 south or the Canadian 401 east.
]]> "Just Balls" could very well have been drained all of its magic on Friday night, I realize that. But in order to bolster its power, I will be wearing it with a dark green pinpoint oxford shirt to commemorate Kryptonite, the verdant hue that George Mason wore all the way to the Tournament's last weekend two years ago. The past and present will converge to create what we hope is a continued future. Bright orange on green... it's going to be the worst clothing combination since the University of Miami decided to dress up like fruit, but I don't care.Because sometimes forward progress just can't be pretty. As longtime friend of the site Michael Litos wrote in today:
Don't mess with karma. Wear the damn tie.
There's no way to search for this that I know of, but Bob McKillop might have been the first head coach in the history of the NCAA Tournament to invoke soccer.
"I'm in the quest for the perfect game, the perfect performance, the perfect season," said McKillop in Saturday's press conference. "And we certainly haven't reached that point yet. I think the Brazilian soccer team, they called it 'The Beautiful Game.' That's what our system is about, the quest for that."
Which logically led to this thought... what if the Davidson players were Brazilians? Thanks to BrazilName, we can find out what each of the Wildcats would be if they were green and yellow (the national team, not George Mason) and not red and black.
Jason Richards: Jasa
Stephen Curry: Stephundo
Max Paulhus Gosselin: Felix Mardo
Andrew Lovedale: Andrimo
Thomas Sander: Thomao
Brendan McKillop: McKillcos
Aaron Bond: Beca
Boris Meno: Meneca Pau
Can Civi: Civinhosa
Mike Schmitt: Schminhosa
Will Archambault: Archambainho
Stephen Rossiter: Rossiteiro
Bryant Barr: Bryildo
Dan Nelms: Neta Santos
Ben Allison: Bildo
Curry's story is legendary now, being passed over by everybody and given a demeaning walk-on offer by Virginia Tech, where his NBA sharpshooter dad built his legend.
But these past few days have been a fantastic opportunity to find out how the rest of this magical team was built -- my esteemed colleague Pat Forde was able to get in a lot of great details in his story yesterday. With the much looser constraints of a notebook entry on a mid-major weblog, let's hear some of the stories of the other Wildcats' roads to campus.
Starting PG Jason Richards: "[McKillop] came to an open gym at my high school [in Illinois]. We were playing a pick-up game, and he didn't say anything to me, he just sat in the corner taking notes for an hour and a half. After practice he came up to me, shook my hand and smiled and said a few sentences to me, then he left. I didn't know what to think. After I committed, he sent me a three-page e-mail of the notes he took that day. The positives of my game, the things that needed to be worked on, and from that point on I knew he was a great coach and that he'd definitely help me out in my career."
McKillop on sophomore big Andrew Lovedale: "The first time I saw Andrew Lovedale, he was sweeping the court at the Amaechi Basketball Centre in Manchester, England. That was part of my evaluation, to see the way he handled things other than basketball." [Press question: How could you see it sweeping the floor, though?] "You could just see the genuine care that he had, that he took his job seriously. In order to earn money, he was sweeping the floor in the center and coaching young kids."
Lovedale: "I grew up in Nigeria and went to school in England... my skills were raw... I wanted to play and learn basketball and I was in London but wasn't comfortable there. So I told my brother I did not want to learn in London and wanted to go somewhere else. I happened to go to school in Manchester, and I wanted to take some of the load off my family with expenses so I talked to the guy at the academy about letting me work."
McKillop: "Look here, you've got a guy from Nigeria, a guy from the rich suburbs of Barrington, Illinois, you got the son of a cheesemaker from Montreal, Canada [Max Paulhus Gosselin]. We have some diversity and we get along and work as a team. There must be something there. I think it's balance."
I would pay to watch this movie: a philosopher-coach wandering the world, assembling a rag-tag basketball team that goes on to strike deep into the NCAA Tournament. Part Ocean's Eleven (the original), part Blues Brothers, and part Major League.
With some awesome slow-motion cheesemaking scenes.
There's been considerable and interesting chatter about Curry and ego these past few days, in the press room and on the interwebs. A lot of it focused on his shoe quote ("I can do all things"), and I made my best effort to seek clarification yesterday in my interview with the man yesterday for the Worldwide Leader. Since then, it's been a considerable and interesting discussion of Curry and God.
We don't talk much about religion or politics on this site, or my own personal faith and beliefs, because there's no real need to engage in anything that distracts from the three things that The Mid-Majority has been about since 2004 -- truth, justice and college basketball. We've learned the hard way (repeatedly) that any sort of moral stand on anything brings in a wave of angry blah-blah-blah and a whole lot of negative energy. So we generally stick to our day topics, for our own safety.
But the way Curry handles himself and his convictions is too fascinating to pass up. One of the primary factors that has made 21st Century American sports so divisive has been the injection of in-your-face Christianity. (That's the subject of the most engaging chapter of Will Leitch's book, by the way.) God this, Lord and savior that. I just want to thank God for letting us beat Chicago. It was funny enough for The Onion eight years ago, and just plain tiresome now. God, God, God.
I was having breakfast this week in Bowling Green with Mr. Bracket Board, Western Kentucky professor Cortney Basham. I was telling him all about the scene last Sunday in Birmingham on Easter Sunday afternoon, an overtime game between Tennessee and Butler in the Round of 32. On one side of the impossibly loud BJCC Center, the bright orange of UT, the blue (and Dawg Pound tie-dyes) or Butler on the other. In both sections, many people could be seen with folded hands, gazing up to the high ceiling and presumably beyond.
"I wonder how God decides in situations like that," I said. "Is it like ESPN SportsNation, where the majority team's percentage scrolls by on the screen?"
"If only it was that simple," he answered.
Getting God on your side in matters of human vs. human competition is complicated, and quite simply impossible. It's also selfish.
Stephen Curry is the polar opposite of all this. He won't talk about God unless you specifically ask him, and sometimes you have to knock a few times before he'll answer. His shoe quote, Phillipians 4:13, in its full form, is one of the most simple, brilliant and beautiful statements of faith ever written, and it can be easily retrofit to fit any belief system there is.
Why is Curry so calm in the face of all this pressure, all these tens of thousands? Because he sees himself as a conduit, not a battery. He doesn't store up God Credits for explosive performances later, like I collect fake metaphysical hit points in my silly tie. He stays grounded because he believes that the divine flows through him, not into him. He's the kind of human being any religion would be proud to have as a representative.
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When ESPN.com brought me on in the summer of 2005, my good friend Sarah bought me a Ralph Marlin "Just Balls" tie. It was one of those nice timely things that good friends do -- they buy you things having to do with what you're celebrating just as you're celebrating them. Little did I know that it would be a key instrument in bringing down arrogant, overbloated power conference teams in the NCAA Tournament.
I adopted the practice of wearing a shirt and tie to every game that year (inspired by my new colleague Andy Katz), and wore the gift tie to my first game as a representative of the Worldwide Leader, a game on November 19 between Vermont and Harvard. It is certainly a little awkward wearing a tie with basketballs all over it to a basketball game, in all honesty. It's something that you'd expect some eccentric alumnus to do, someone who hasn't been to a basketball game at his school in five years. Or maybe Dickie V, if he was more like Don Cherry. Wearing a "Just Balls" tie is not something you do if you're trying to be anything resembling cool. After all, they make a clip-on version as well.
I don't remember wearing the "Just Balls" at all that 2005-06 regular season, not until March. I broke out the tie out again at the NCAA tournament in Dayton, and it hung around my neck for four games during the first round on Saint Patrick's Day 2006. One of those games was No. 11 George Mason's stunning 75-65 upset of Michigan State, a six-seed that had gone to the Final Four a year earlier. As I was standing in the Patriots locker room collecting quotes for a story, the winning coach interrupted my question.
"That's some tie you got there, Kyle," said Jim Larranaga, inspecting the thing.
"Thanks, coach," I replied.
]]> Two days later, I wore the tie to the second round. George Mason clinched a spot in the Sweet 16, with a 65-60 win over North Carolina, the previous year's National Champions. It was the first inkling that the tie was some sort of talisman, so I strapped it on when I moved on along with Mason to the Washington, D.C. regional. That game was the "Mid-Major Super Bowl" between GMU and Wichita State for a shot at the Elite Eight. After Mason won, I was sent home and ESPN's sole credential was passed along to Mr. Katz. Nobody expected Mason to beat mighty Connecticut, and I watched the game from my couch in Rhode Island. The tie was rolled up in my pocket.We all know what happened next, and I was reactivated. On the day of the Final Four games, I walked around Indianapolis, wearing the "Just Balls" tie with a crisp white shirt. With time to kill, I walked over to the NCAA museum, which at the time was still coming together and not quite worth the $7 entry fee. As an added attraction, however, they had a member of basketball's royal family -- the grandson of the inventor of the game.
Ian Naismith was at a table out front, signing his recently-released book. There weren't very many people stopping by -- the Naismith surname doesn't have the same Q rating as Jordan or James these days -- so I walked up, introduced myself with a handshake, and asked him to sign my media credential.
"Forget that," he said. "I want to sign that tie."
And he did -- with indelible black Sharpie. The "Just Balls" tie had transcended its cheesiness and had become one with the very history of the game. Walking back to the giant RCA Dome, I felt its warm orange glow.
I had "MUP" status for the Final Four, which is short for "media, upstairs." Folks with MUP credentials have no access to the floor area an hour before the game, but have to retreat up the elevators to the high skyboxes to watch the game unfold like ants on a matchbox. This was too great a distance for the magic to work... and Mason fell by 15. My season was over.
Sure, I had doubts about the tie after that. And it's not like I'm superstitious or anything, even though I carry a 1987 Minnesota Twins Homer Hanky in my pocket when I watch the team play, and freeze a little plate of water and put my New York Rangers action figure on it before playoff games. I tried to recharge it with mid-major mojo in the early 2006-07 season, wearing it to the season-opener between Bucknell and Albany and the Sweet 16 rematch between Mason and Wichita. I also wore it to Hinkle Fieldhouse for the Southern Illinois-Butler BracketBuster (longtime friend of the site Brandon Loy has photographic proof). By March, there was plenty of power in the tie, and it helped propel Southern Illinois through the Columbus pod, as the Salukis destroyed Virginia Tech by 15 to make the Sweet 16.
I was very careful with the tie this season, not using it for any regular-season mid-on-major matchups. I only wore it on high-profile mid-versus-mid occasions, like the SIU-Butler rematch and the Davidson-Winthrop Buster game. I stormed three floors with it on, as the excitement of UMBC, Siena and Temple fans rubbed off on the tie.
But last weekend in Birmingham, for whatever reason, I decided not to wear the tie. Or maybe I simply forgot to. As Butler fell away in overtime of the Round of 32 to the streetball All-Stars of Tennessee, just four feet from the edge of the court, I looked down at my standard red and silver noose and cursed myself for what I didn't do. In such a close loss, the "Just Balls" tie could have given the Bulldogs the little bit extra they needed to get over the top. It was the one time that I messed up, and I apologize to every Butler fan everywhere.
On Friday night, the tie was ready. Seated directly behind the Davidson bench (10 feet in front of LeBron's chair), the tie was present and prominent, and made several nationally televised appearances over the course of the evening. And after a rough and tumble first half that ended in a 36-all stalemate between Davidson and Wisconsin, I knew what I had to do. During halftime, I did something that was daring, powerful, and unprecedented.
I walked up to the Davidson bench, bent down, and touched the tie to it.
The effects were, in a word, explosive. OK, two words: "Just Balls." The Wildcats outscored the Badgers 37-20 in the second half, held Wisconsin to 24 percent shooting from there on out. LeBron James, standing directly in the Tie Zone, screamed out oh shit as Stephen Curry hit a running baseline layup. A 10 had beaten a three, and my chest was melting from the sheer force of my Ralph Marlin tie. Because the force, it's got a lot of power. And it makes me feel like... It makes me feel like... Oooh!
But now I am in a full-on quandary, and need your help. Do I keep on with the force? Do I stop until I get enough? More to the point, do I wear the tie on Sunday? Will its immense power backfire (perhaps...), or is its strength simply sapped for the season (more likely)? I'm fully aware that the Naismith connection could give aid to Kansas, since The Inventor was also one of the founding fathers of Jayhawk basketball. There's also the key consideration that my wearing a goofy orange basketball tie might cause further embarrassment.
This decision is completely out of my hands; I'm leaving it up to you, dear readers. Write in with the form, remember to include a valid e-mail address so it'll get through. Give me the pros or cons of wearing the "Just Balls" to the game tomorrow. I will ponder and consider your opinions with the utmost respect, each letter will carry the relative weight of 15 message board posts.
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DETROIT -- The alarm clock went off this morning, like it normally does... but we're still trying to figure out when, exactly, we fell asleep. Around 6 p.m. yesterday? That timeframe makes more sense than what we were hallucinating about. Davidson? A No. 10 seed? Slaughtering the Big Ten champs in Big Ten country? By 17 points? Sweet dreams are made of this!
There was that sophomore in red who outscored the entire Wisconsin team in the second half (22-20), but he wasn't the only player out on the court last night. Some of the supporting numbers were really astounding -- take, for example, point guard Jason Richards' perfect 13:0 assist-to-turnover ratio (a figure Bob McKillop made sure to repeat at least six times on postgame interviews). Or the perfect 5-for-5 shooting by Nigerian junior Andrew Lovedale, who's gone from third on the forward depth chart at the beginning of the season to unsung hero (let's fix that: Andrew Lovedale is 6-8/His two-point dunk-shots are rea-lly great).
And there were the efforts that didn't get on the stat sheet, but were important nonetheless. Lovedale, Thomas Sander and Boris Meno sacrificed their bodies for the cause, making the lane a gauntlet for the Wisconsin offense. They were so effective that Bo Ryan spent much of the first half whining on the sideline about all the fouls the officials weren't calling. Davidson, double-champions of a league the ACC and SEC fans down south call the "So-What" Conference, beating up the big boys down low. Imagine that!
While we get ready for the in-between day interviews, let's empty out the rest of the notebook from last night.
]]>As you've heard by now, or saw on TV, LeBron James was seated behind the Davidson bench. He was placed in a seating corridor between the press and the general public. Everybody else in that row had the dark blue "AA" all-access tag supplied by the NCAA and distributed by the colleges to their guests... but he didn't need one of those. He was wearing several gigantic gold chains around his neck, which were just about all the ID LeBron James needs.
He was a guest of the school -- as the story goes, he wanted to come see Stephen Curry play, and Davidson was happy to oblige. Several boxes of red t-shirts that echoed Nike's "Witness" campaign were sent to the Davidson hotel and distributed (Nike furnishes the team's uniforms, so this wasn't a 1992 Dream Team brand clash), and LeBron and his posse got their choice seats.
So there was LeBron in Pistons territory (wearing a T-shirt that may or may not have contained a marijuana reference), oohing and aahing when Curry made spectacular plays. The best moment was at 9:07 of the second half, when Davidson head coach Bob McKillop spelled No. 30 after a turnover and foul, putting Bryant Barr backc in the game.
"Put him back in, coach!" LeBron bellowed.
Two minutes later, McKillop relented and let LeBron see some more pure basketball joy. LeBron didn't stay long, though.
At around the six minute mark, with Davidson up by 19, the NBA star and the LeBrontorauge got up to leave. As he rose, so did the entire endline section, holding their cell phones aloft. There were literally thousands of people standing up, either giving LeBron a standing O or taking his picture. Curry didn't score another basket, and five minutes later he got his own standing ovation, taking a seat as the Davidson deep-bench got to experience the feeling of being on the floor at the end of a Sweet 16 win.
A lot of people have compared (and are going to be comparing for months on end) the 2006 George Mason run with Davidson 2008. A fair enough topic for sports-talk radio, I'd suppose, and "the next George Mason/Davidson" is the shorthand we'll be dealing in for the next few years, whether we like it or not. And there are plenty of similarities, sure. Both of these schools have fielded teams that have no business being on the court with teams with seven, eight, nine times the financial resources.
Both GMU and Davidson have silver-haired and tongued head coaches that any basketball-loving college kid would love to have as a pair of grandfathers. And there are basketball family trees in common, as Jim Larranaga got his collegiate start as an assistant at DC. The two schools they coach at are tucked away in the suburbs and exurbs of major American NBA cities (Washington and Charlotte, respectively) -- close enough to major media markets, but far away enough to conduct day-to-day business in a hype-free bubble.
Personally, I've had the honor and privilege to witness both runs up close, and the two experiences have been radically different. George Mason 2006 was adrenaline, motivational tools, excitement, Kryptonite. Davidson 2008 is, well, a bunch of guys who show up to the gym every day and just so happen to play basketball really well. When the players left the floor on Friday night, there was no wild dancing that would show up on a
The only way any school this size can excel in the land of giants is unselfishness, something both the two squads in question had in amazing amounts. The general public never really figured out George Mason, and I'm willing to wager that most casual fans couldn't name a single player from that team two years later. It was a club with five double-figure scorers who each shot for a solid percentage, and they shared the ball as well as any team in the nation. On any given night, nobody knew who the step-up guy with the big-time performance was going to be.
That, obviously, is not an issue with Davidson 2008. Every single person in the country knows who Steph Curry is now. He's a clear focal point, and fits perfectly with the way most Americans consume sports. "Which team won?" is often less of a important question than "Who was the star? Which jersey should I buy?" The red one, with the 30 on the back.
But when you talk to Curry after a game and ask him to describe what a stat-stuffing performance felt like in the first person, he'll generally deflect a lot of the praise to the teammates who got him the ball and got him open. And he'll respond clinically and technically about the art of shooting a basketball. Sometimes over the past two years, I've felt as if I've been interviewing an architect or an accountant -- "what makes you so good at filing 1065 extensions?" The man is an expert at what he does, and he'd still be an expert if nobody was watching him practice his craft on national television.
It's been noted in the past few days that on his shoes are written the words, "I can do all things." But it's on the bottom of his shoes, a reminder to himself of his abilities. It's the difference between braggadocio and ultimate confidence. In stark contrast to a Michael Flowers, he won't tell you what he's going to do beforehand like a pro wrestling star, he just goes out and does it. Afterwards, he'll pay proper respect to the fallen opposition, and move on to the next challenge.
We haven't had a breakout basketball star like Curry in a generation, and he's helping undo the damage that the past 20 years have done to the idea of basketball stardom. There are kids out there who are now 10, 11 years old, spending this afternoon in driveways copying the fallaway 3-pointer that gave Davidson that early lead at 13 minutes of the first half. Here's hoping that they'll keep emulating him, carrying themselves with perfect humility.
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One of the great things about the day before an NCAA subregional, regional or Final Four is that the public can come and watch the teams practice for free! This is enormous Ford Field in Detroit, which is normally used for American-style football. The stadium will have 72,000 available seats for this weekend -- for basketball! You can't tell from this shot, but the Davidson Wildcats are out there on the floor. Can you find Bally in this picture?
]]> Oh, there he is. It's easy to get lost in such a ginormous building.
These padded-back chairs were added on the endlines on two risers, and will cost people $150 per session.
This here is what will be the Davidson section. If you're a student there, you won't have to pay nearly as much. Thanks to the board of trustees, you can get in for free!
As we're sure you know, Detroit will be the site of next year's Final Four. The NCAA is experimenting with a new floor layout for this regional and the one at Reliant Stadium in Houston (the site of the 2010 Final Four) -- the playing surface is raised several feet off the ground like a stage. Here, Bally sits behind one of the two benches and demonstrates how he'll be able to see the floor at exactly eye level.
There's a set of stairs next to each bench. The head coaches will have the option whether to stand on the higher level during the game, or stand in the pit with his players. When Davidson head coach Bob McKillop was asked which level he'd stand on during the game, he answered, "I'm delighted that CBS has two-and-a-half minute timeouts because it's going to take me that long to get down from the court, down the steps and kneel in front of our bench. So I'll probably be up on the main court during the game."
There are also a set of stairs on each baseline so that photographers and stuff can get up and down. (That's Kansas out there practicing. Boo!)
Here's one of the official coach stools. Bally's just trying it out.
Getting around in such a huge building is really difficult, and there are color-coded arrows all over the floors so that folks can get to where they're going. When you have short legs like Bally, however, it can be exhausting as well as confusing.
There's a giant bracket here too, just like at Birmingham and all other NCAA sites. Here's the Midwest region, a reminder of how far we've come with this thing in just under two weeks.
One of our favorite parts of any NCAA event is the media hospitality. On today's menu: salad and cookies!
There are also the ubiquitous NCAA/Dasani cups, which you have to keep your beverages in if you want to even think about going out onto the floor. This backstage water cooler is filled with a local vendor's water, however (which, by the way, tastes a lot better).
There's a lot of cheese popcorn to eat in between meals if you're so inclined. This is one of Bally's favorite snacks, mostly because it's the only one that is as iridescent orange as he is. It's also the perfect snack for kicking back and watching exciting NCAA basketball from the other regional sites. Enjoy the games!
There are 16 teams left to fight over the National Championship, each with just four more wins to go to achieve the ultimate prize. Strangely enough, they spent widely disparate amounts of money to get here.
As my new friend TuckyBill likes to say, "mid-major" is just another name for "more bang for your buck." Our two remaining candidates were out-dollared in every possible way, but they're right here alongside the big spenders from the power conferences. Will deeper pockets finally defeat Davidson's and Western Kentucky's dreams? In our third installment of this particular feature, we show exactly the kind of spending power these two are going up against.
As with the other two grids, data is culled from the Office of Postsecondary Education's Equity in Athletics report, using 2006-07 information (the latest available).
]]> Differences in Overall Athletic Expenses$72,774,942 - [3] Wisconsin ($81,401,728) vs. [10] Davidson ($8,626,786)
$44,100,958 - [1] UCLA ($61,309,668) vs. [12] Western Kentucky ($17,208,710)
$41,054,952 - [2] Tennessee ($92,557,528) vs. [3] Louisville ($51,502,576)
$40,578,788 - [5] Michigan State ($69,914,584) vs. [1] Memphis ($29,335,796)
$36,297,174 - [1] Kansas ($58,046,960) vs. [12] Villanova ($21,749,786)
$31,283,561 - [7] West Virginia ($42,720,692) vs. [3] Xavier ($11,437,131)
$28,458,072 - [1] North Carolina ($58,188,500) vs. [4] Washington State ($29,730,428)
$25,479,344 - [2] Texas ($89,313,536) vs. [3] Stanford ($63,834,192)
Differences in Men's Basketball Budgets
$5,677,190 - [2] Texas ($6,594,163) vs. [3] Stanford ($916,973)
$5,384,192 - [5] Michigan State ($6,407,390) vs. [1] Memphis ($1,023,198)
$4,170,413 - [3] Wisconsin ($5,315,234) vs. [10] Davidson ($1,144,821)
$3,573,866 - [1] UCLA ($5,262,775) vs. [12] Western Kentucky ($1,688,909)
$3,281,393 - [1] North Carolina ($5,632,518) vs. [4] Washington State ($2,351,125)
$2,470,757 - [3] Louisville ($6,082,104) vs. [2] Tennessee ($3,611,347)
$2,364,112 - [3] Xavier ($3,154,106) vs. [7] West Virginia ($789,994)
$1,967,465 - [1] Kansas ($6,170,233) vs. [12] Villanova ($4,202,768)
Bowling Green has been painted Big Red ever since the home team clinched its first Sweet 16 berth in 15 years last weekend. After the jump, more pictures of the scene in B.G. as Western Kentucky University prepares for Thursday's No. 12 vs. No. 1 matchup against UCLA.
]]> In front of the arena that bears his name, Edgar Allen Diddle forever waves his signature red towel (dyed so that missing ones could be easily identified as stolen elsewhere) that has become the school's logo. Diddle coached at Western for 42 years. Hey, there's Bally!
If you need a history lesson on the importance of that red towel, there's a full explanation nearby.
Across the way in the student union, the university bookstore window was all painted up for the occasion.
The initial order of 500 commemorative Sweet 16 T-shirts were snapped up in less than an hour, and the shipment promised here (of 750) disappeared just as quickly on Wednesday morning, leaving an empty blanket-draped table in the front of the university bookstore.
"Remember in the Eighties, all the craziness over the Cabbage Patch dolls?" said a bookstore worker on Wednesday, recalling the madness. "It was like that. I came out of the back room with a handful of shirts, and I thought someone was going to punch me in the face. 'Large.' Okay, here... 'I need four.' Okay, don't hurt me..."
If you can't get your hands on a Sweet 16 T, however, there's plenty of Big Red dolls available.
Like the bookstore, a downtown bank got into the window-painting act too.
As you travel around town, you'll find Hilltopper spirit everywhere.
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And like anything else in life, Western in the Sweet 16 is a great opportunity to sell cars. (What are they going to do with all those basketballs?)
Finally, orange blob meets red blob. This is Bally, the mascot of this site, with Big Red, much more well-known symbol of Western Kentucky University. This was taken at the home of longtime friend of the site Cortney Basham, a WKU professor and proprietor of the long-running and excellent Bracket Board and WNKY's in-depth Hilltopper Blog.
Bowling Green
At 2:45 p.m. Central Time on Tuesday, the message came in, with a time stamp that indicated it had been left an hour earlier.
"The plane leaves around 3 p.m.," the sports information director said. "We'll see you down there at the airport."
I'd have received the call on time if I'd been anywhere else. Bowling Green, Kentucky is one of the few places in America where my phone doesn't work correctly, a time-warping non-Verizon vortex where every call is a roamer and new voicemails don't show up on the readout.
But there I was on the campus of Western Kentucky University, in the direct shadow of the roundhouse called E.A. Diddle Arena. Two days earlier, the Hilltoppers had clinched a spot in the Sweet 16 with a win over San Diego; hundreds and hundreds of fans had greeted them on Sunday night at the Bowling Green/Warren County Regional Airport. I was in town to cover the sendoff to the West Regional in Phoenix, which was rumored to be an even bigger deal.
]]> There had been talk of a one o'clock alumni celebration at the airport, but that was scrapped when the cheerleaders and band couldn't be coordinated. I called as many locals as I could (at roaming rates), and nobody knew anything. So I sat in the student union, in front of a bookstore where a shipment of Sweet 16 t-shirts had sold out in less than an hour that morning, wondering where the party was at.Good thing I checked the voicemail when I did. I jumped back in the car, took three wrong turns, got stuck behind a school bus full of kids, was bottlenecked in traffic on Bowling Green's main drag, and made it to the one-gate regional airport at 3:30 p.m. The small parking lot was nearly empty. An AirTran jet sat alone 50 feet from the terminal, engines idling, but there was nobody in sight save for a few airport empoyees on the tarmac. Whatever sendoff celebration there was, if any, I had clearly missed it.
Bowling Green is a town anchored by the three primary life necessities: fast cars, underwear and basketball. It's the home of GM's Corvette assembly plant, the world headquarters of Fruit of the Loom (locals just call it "Fruit"), and represented by the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers, the eighth-winningest college hoops program of all time. That's all pretty much anybody needs to live, if you ask me.
I remember the first time I came to town, over three years ago. It was something I called the Red State Basketball Goodwill Tour, and I drove into a downtown dotted with churches, murals and tiny stores with striped canopies early one February morning. I pulled over to the side of Main Avenue and called my wife.
"You've got to see this town," I said, nearly moved to tears. "It's such an amazing place."
And the locals were just as amazing. There in the first year of The Mid-Majority, I was offered dinners, places to sleep and free auto tuneups once I arrived. It was a town that seemed to take its name literally, bowling folks over with kindness.
I wanted to give back somehow. The next season, I made plans to spend as much time as possible in Bowling Green, planning to write my first basketball book about a program with a history full of fascinating characters like the red towel-waving coach Diddle. It was a legacy replete with great and talented players, and marked by a death-struggle for respect against the two major Commonwealth sports powerhouses in Lexington and Louisville. It was also a story that included a lot of consistent winning, over 1,500 victories in total. I did a month's worth of research over the summer of 2006, built a rough 21-chapter outline. I even had some productive contact with agents, based mostly on my ESPN.com affiliation.
But when you scratch past the shiny surface of Southern hospitality, sometimes you end up with a losing ticket. I built my 2006-07 schedule to include four WKU home games and a total of two weeks in town, so as to make connections and do interviews. But every time I came back to Bowling Green, the warmth I had received at the start had turned cold.
Finally, in January of last year, after a Hilltoppers home game, a longtime and now-retired program insider halted a small-talk conversation between us, and let an outsider from up north know where things stood.
"You're not going to get much cooperation from us," he said flatly. "When that book gets written, it's going to be by one of us."
And that was that.
I went inside the tiny terminal, pushing open the automatic door, finding silence and emptiness inside. But just beyond the gate doors were five people in matching black jackets.
"Did the Toppers leave already?" I asked them.
"That's them right there," an older man said, pointing to the AirTran plane. "We can't leave until they do."
These were the contracted TSA-approved screeners, in from Louisville to check all of the team's luggage before boarding. They were also in charge of the final head count.
"The guy with two heads threw us off," deadpanned one of the screeners. "Oops, I don't think we're supposed to tell you about him. He's their secret weapon against UCLA."
There had been a bunch of folks there, they told me, but they'd all left at 3:00 when the team boarded the plane. So, without a story, I went outside the gate and stood there watching the plane as it sat idling. With the masses gone, it was just me and a man in a wheelchair, who was holding his Diddle-inspired red towel aloft in the wind that the charter jet was causing. One of the airport workers opened the metal gate and motioned for us to come through, allowing us to stand directly on the tarmac.
But then, the engines were cut off, and the roar was reduced to a slow whine and then a loud thud. Was something wrong with the plane? Would Western Kentucky make it out to Phoenix for its date with destiny?
"There was a yellow light on the dash," the tarmac tech explained. "We think the door was unlatched."
The workers rolled the stairway back out to the aircraft, properly closed the door. After ten minutes of inactivity, the engines sparked and whirred again. A local TV news crew had shown up to get a few pictures for the five o'clock news (or a motionless AirTran plane) and quickly left, and soon it was just the two of us observers again. The other waved his red towel like a maniac as the plane eased into a turn, then made its way down the narrow asphalt path. I didn't have one of my own, but I made a few mime towel-waving motions, just in case they were watching.
Once the plane finally took off (at 4 p.m., an hour after it was supposed to) and made its quick ascent to the west, my new friend introduced himself. James Russell is a lifelong Topper fan, a master wheelchair pool player, a member of the credentialed press as a writer for WKU Insider. He's also a self-described WKU fan legend.
"I'm TuckyBill on the boards," he said. "Everybody knows me."
For the next two hours at a nearby Red Lobster, TuckyBill regaled me with stories about the program and its history. He told me about the Sixties and Seventies, when E.A. Diddle and Johnny Oldham took the Hilltoppers to Tournament after Tournament, back when people could smoke in the arena (it got extra smoky in the last minutes of close games, he said, with everybody puffing extra hard from the stress). He told me about how much Diddle and Adolph Rupp hated each other, how they'd angle for recruits and try to undermine the other in the eyes of the NCAA.
"If you're going to write that book, I've gotta give you all the dirt I can," he said.
And who knows? Maybe the book is still a possibility. I'll call it Topper Confidential: The Unauthorized History of Western Kentucky Basketball.
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Birmingham
This month has its place in the weather calendar, a rock-solid role. March thaw helps keep April showers warm, and as long as everything happens in the right order, May flowers won't be DOA. March basketball, however, is as unpredictable as global warming. You don't know who's going to win, where the path will lead, or how long it will last before you get sent home.
I left Rhode Island on March 13, the middle of Championship Fortnight, and haven't been back since. I didn't rent a car, since nobody could have guessed how long I'd be out for, or where I'd be going. So I drove the family sedan down to Atlantic City that Wednesday morning, just in time for a noon tip, and spent four days at the Atlantic 14 tournament. I had a routine, parking in the Caesar's lot by day, and disappearing out of town when the action was over.
On Selection Sunday, I packed up and headed west towards Dayton for my annual trip to the Play-In Game. That annual evening of 65 fates, I sat in a Bread Restaurant in Western Pennsylvania, the bracket matchups dribbling into my web browser in plain text, in silence. Without waiting for the full bracket, I excitedly fired off an e-mail.
Birmingham. That was the hot one. I could feel it.
]]> In retrospect, I wish I could send a message back to that slightly younger self... Tampa, you idiot, Tampa! But it doesn't work like that. I had no idea that I'd be walking into chalk, the lowest-attended subregional of the eight as well as the only one where the higher seeds won all six games. Or that one of the best games at the Tournament so far, the Butler-Tennessee Easter Sunday second-rounder, would end in overtime heartbreak.Me, I thought that there would be magic there, a mid-major matchup as well as three teams that we've covered all season with opportunities to power through to the second round. But if an outbreak of pure magic could be predicted, however, it wouldn't be.
Two days in Dayton were cold and drizzly, exactly the sort of post-nasal drippiness that might as well have been left in February. But eight hours of hilly highway later, and I was in someone else's sweet home, the place where stars fell, a city that was sung about by singers from Leadbelly to Harry Belafonte to Randy Newman.
Birmingham was warm, sunny, dry and dusty. It's the nexus of Interstates 65 and 20, with a flattened pair of spurs that complete a loop around the city and closely resemble a football on the map. This is SEC country, Roll Tide soo-ee country, but on this weekend it was one of the eight capitals of hoops.
And it's also one of the few cities where the Flying J (the Mid-Majority's version of the Days Inn) is on a street with a number on it, not miles out on the Interstate. It's conveniently located just four miles from the arena.
And this J was a lot like the others -- a spacious Country Harvest buffet restaurant, a lounge with work desks, faux-antiques for sale in the store shop, and free showers with my loyalty card. This one, however, had an old black man in a "I [heart] Jesus" ballcap who was sleeping in front of the TV all four days I went for my 5 a.m. shower, and lots of crimson Alabama sweatshirts for sale.
So once again, I drove into the parking lot beneath the glowing sign with the yellow, orange and red stripes, and made myself at home. Sweet home, this time.
Just after midnight Central time on Friday, after the first round quadruple-header, I left BJCC Arena and came back out to the car. When I started it up, the red battery light on the console started flashing.
At first, I thought it was some sort of metaphor. As teams we've been keeping track of all year in this space -- like American and Saint Joseph's and Boise State -- were summarily eliminated, the 2007-08 season was running down and dying before our eyes. We were down to our last few volts.
Anybody who's ever owned a foreign car, however, knows that that's the least helpful indicator on the dash. Because while you're trying to figure out what the light means, your alternator is dying a quick death. Nothing says "borrowed time" quite like running an entire car on battery power alone, without the appropriate magnets and coils necessary to recharge it as you drive.
Not that this was a surprise; at over 110,000 miles, the car was still on its first alternator, and it was its time to die. So I drove it back to the J -- slowly -- then shut off all the electronics, and waited until the next morning. Once the sun rose on Saturday, I babied it back to the arena for those 4.5 miles in time for work, and listened as journalists complained about the bad restaurants in downtown Birmingham as I tried to knock out a column. Then I made sure to leave again before the sun set, so that I didn't have to burn the lights.
I repeated the process on second-round Sunday, but because the games ended after dark, I stayed in the left lane and kept the blinkers on to compensate for the rapidly dimming headlights. I felt as dangerously exposed out there on the road as if I'd been riding a bicycle.
But even though the car could have completely died at any moment, leaving no opportunity for flashers or blinkers or heat, there wasn't much panic. March basketball trains a person that the road could end suddenly and without warning, that it could all be over without even moment's notice. You keep moving forward, simply because you still have the opportunity to do so.
At 5:30 a.m. Monday morning, at the crack of dawn before the city rush hour, I rolled the car down Interstate 65 to the closest all-purpose auto shop, eight miles away on the south of town. Once the shop opened at seven, I sat in the waiting room with a pile of old Sports Illustrateds and waited for a diagnosis I already knew.
I jumped up when the mechanic approached.
"Why don't you have a seat?" he asked politely in a thick, slow Alabama.
"That's okay," I offered. "What's the story?"
"No, seriously, you'll want to be sitting down for this," he said. "Trust me."
Four hours and $441 later, I was back on the road north on I-65, headed in an arrow-straight line for Bowling Green, back up through Ohio, and on to Detroit. Western Kentucky had survived to the Sweet 16 with two wins, and I'd be able to see them as they left for the Phoenix regional. Later, on to the Midwest Regional to watch Davidson try to slay more Goliaths.
And who could have predicted any of that kind of magic 10 days ago? Probably a good thing I didn't spring for that rental car.
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If you've been reading this site with any sort of regularity this year, you know about my Face Off with one Mr. Steve Welmer, the most-travelled official in Division I. And all the e-mails have been really great, people are really getting into it. This is one part Amazing Race, another part Cannonball Run and yet another part Basketball Darwinism. It's a battle to answer the musical question: who can call or cover more basketball games in a single season?
Mr. Welmer is the Iron Man of basketball officials. He racks up gigantic per-game paychecks and strings together Ripken-like streaks of 16 consecutive days calling games during the regular season. I am a jerk who drives tens of thousands of miles around the country, sleeps in the car, and covers college basketball for a couple of national media outlets. I'm also definitely a decidedly unranked underdog against anybody who say this:
"Arguably, there probably may never be a guy like me that is able to get a schedule that big," Welmer said. "I take pride in that because I guess that’s the American way on everything. I guess it’s kind of the male ego thing."
Well, put this in your male ego thing, Steve... after being down as many as 14 games five weeks ago, Whelliston has caught, overtaken and surpassed Welmer -- in the third, second and first person. The furious rally was not quite unlike Davidson's comeback against mighty Georgetown on Sunday, as I got hot like Curry and exploded for 22 games during Championship Fortnight. When I dropped seven during the first week of the NCAA Tournament, Welmer didn't have an answer.
]]> And he really didn't. Welmer has not worked a Division I game since last Wednesday, when he called an NIT first-rounder in Florida. Check the chart -- he's nowhere to be found in the NCAA Tournament so far, and my pair of games on Sunday gave me a two-game cushion heading into the regionals. Even if he shows up for more, I'll be piling on this weekend in Detroit; I'll finish with at least 117 this year, which will be a site record.But I'm not going to claim victory yet. Remember what happened to Drake on Friday, making that huge comeback only to be Ty Rogers-ed in the end. And for all I know, Steve may just have a really bad cold or something. Or he may be on his deathbed. Or, more likely, just kept off the NCAA's list because he called too many games this year. Anybody know the story? My peeps at Officiating.com (where I have a secret posting account), perhaps? I want to make sure I win this fair and square.
Actually... hell with that, I'm going to gloat. Feel the heat of my devastating diss track.
I see you, Welmer, you're runnin' up and down the floor,
You can't step to my heavy-hittin' word-flo,
You sit all cozy at the Holiday Inn,
I'm at the Flying J sharpenin' my pen,
That's right, fool, you heard what I said,
I'm drivin' 600 while you're nappin' in your rented bed,
I go to more games, I'm stronger, faster,
Bow to the Whelli... for I am your masta...
Two brave, fighting groups of men... two long dormant small-college basketball legacies reborn... two tourney champions turned Sweet survivors. The Sun Belt and the SoCon, two leagues the general public can't tell apart from each other, are sending representatives to the NCAA Regionals. Hoo-zah!
Courtney Lee and Stephen Curry... what can we say? Or rather, what can we say that hasn't been regurgitated before in a long series of heroic odes, in these pages and elsewhere? Two young men with champions' hearts, two red-clad stars of Hoops Nation... two people who are extremely good at playing basketball. Both will showcase their respective awesomenesses later this week, for all of the country's VHF-watching audience to see.
Lee, nothing short of 29 points and best-player-on-the-floor status for his role in keeping San Diego at bay in a wire-to-wire Topper victory, making sure No. 13 did not overcome No. 12 in the City of Upsets. Curry, nothing but pure basketball magic. After being shackled with two fouls in the first half, he leapt off the bench with 25 second-half points (to close with his jersey number) and pulled the Wildcats from a 17-point deficit. We're not going to make any sort of religious parallels to anything on this Easter, the most holy of days... but gosh-darned if we're not biting our tongue.
]]> As for us, we continue on... the movement will not be stopped. We will be traveling to Bowling Green to take part in the celebrations and heroes' sendoff, and then we're on to Detroit to cover the Midwest Regional. There'll be plenty of thoughts, observations, pictures and Bally sightings during this week. It'll be a celebration of all things underdog, and we're grateful to the Toppers and Cats for the opportunity to keep going with this.And as is longstanding Mid-Majority tradition, we will celebrate our Super Sweet pair by giving them the entire header on the site on every page. Just as we did with the UWM-Majority (2005), GMU-Majority (2006) and Dawg-Majority last year, Western Kentucky will carry the banner from now until the end of Tuesday. We'll switch to Davidson then.
(12) WESTERN KENTUCKY 72, (13) SAN DIEGO 63
WESTERN KENTUCKY 29-6 (16-2) -- J. Wallace 5-8 0-0 12; C. Lee 9-15 7-8 29; T. Brazelton 6-15 1-4 15; T. Rogers 1-3 3-3 5; J. Evans 3-7 3-4 9; A. Slaughter 1-1 2-2 4; B. Siakam 3-3 0-0 6; O. Mendez-Valdez 1-3 0-0 2; D. Magley 0-1 0-0 0; S. Pettigrew 1-4 0-0 2. Totals 25-52 16-21 72.
SAN DIEGO 22-14 (11-3) -- B. Johnson 4-15 3-8 13; D. Jackson 3-6 1-2 7; R. Jones 4-6 3-6 11; G. Pomare 7-10 6-8 20; T. Johnson 2-7 2-2 7; D. Ginty 1-3 0-0 3; C. Houston 0-0 2-2 2; C. Lewis 0-0 0-0 0. Totals 21-47 17-28 63.
Three-point goals: WKU 6-16 (T. Rogers 0-2; C. Lee 4-5; O. Mendez-Valdez 0-2; T. Brazelton 2-6; J. Evans 0-1), USD 4-15 (D. Jackson 0-1; B. Johnson 2-8; T. Johnson 1-4; D. Ginty 1-2); Rebounds: WKU 27 (J. Evans 7), USD 26 (G. Pomare 9); Assists: WKU 11 (T. Brazelton 5), USD 11 (B. Johnson 4); Total Fouls -- WKU 19, USD 20; Fouled Out: WKU-None; USD-D. Jackson.
(10) DAVIDSON 74, (2) GEORGETOWN 70
DAVIDSON 28-6 (20-0) -- J. Richards 5-13 9-10 20; S. Curry 8-21 9-10 30; M. Paulhus Gosselin 1-3 2-2 4; A. Lovedale 5-10 1-3 11; T. Sander 3-3 2-3 8; S. Rossiter 0-0 0-0 0; B. Meno 0-2 1-2 1; W. Archambault 0-4 0-0 0; B. Barr 0-1 0-0 0. Totals 22-57 24-30 74.
GEORGETOWN 28-6 (15-3) -- J. Wallace 5-8 0-0 12; D. Summers 4-8 0-0 10; J. Sapp 5-6 0-0 14; A. Freeman 2-2 3-4 9; P. Ewing 1-4 0-2 2; C. Wright 4-6 1-2 9; V. Macklin 2-4 4-8 8; R. Hibbert 3-3 0-1 6; J. Rivers 0-0 0-0 0; T. Crawford 0-0 0-0 0. Totals 26-41 8-17 70.
Three-point goals: DAV 6-26 (J. Richards 1-6; W. Archambault 0-4; B. Barr 0-1; S. Curry 5-15), GU 10-18 (J. Wallace 2-4; J. Sapp 4-5; D. Summers 2-4; P. Ewing 0-2; C. Wright 0-1; A. Freeman 2-2); Rebounds: DAV 23 (T. Sander 6), GU 26 (J. Sapp 4); Assists: DAV 10 (S. Curry 5), GU 11 (C. Wright 3); Total Fouls -- DAV 20, GU 27; Fouled Out: DAV-T. Sander; GU-R. Hibbert.
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Back by popular demand, it's another chart of who's got money and who doesn't. Basing your prognostications on athletic budgets isn't a perfect method -- you would have gone 24-8 in the first round, which seems about average for all those suffering from Tampa Madness (you would have had WKU over Drake, though).
But now we're on to the second round, where big time players make big time plays, and recruiting them generally takes big time money. First, each matchup ranked on the basis of overall athletic budgets, then by the government-mandated report of specific men's basketball expenses.
For those of you just joining us, data is culled from the Office of Postsecondary Education's Equity in Athletics report, using 2006-07 information (the latest available).
]]> Differences in Overall Athletic Expenses$82,321,690 - [2] Tennessee ($92,557,528) vs. [7] Butler ($10,235,838)
$42,885,269 - [6] Purdue ($54,322,400) vs. [3] Xavier ($11,437,131)
$42,031,172 - [3] Stanford ($63,834,192) vs. [6] Marquette ($21,803,020)
$41,783,728 - [3] Wisconsin ($81,401,728) vs. [11] Kansas State ($39,618,000)
$40,093,800 - [2] Texas ($89,313,536) vs. [7] Miami (Fla.) ($49,219,736)
$32,880,442 - [1] Kansas ($58,046,960) vs. [8] UNLV ($25,166,518)
$32,449,000 - [5] Michigan State ($69,914,584) vs. [4] Pittsburgh ($37,465,584)
$27,675,684 - [5] Notre Dame ($57,406,112) vs. [4] Washington State ($29,730,428)
$18,732,148 - [2] Georgetown ($27,358,934) vs. [10] Davidson ($8,626,786)
$17,763,744 - [6] Oklahoma ($69,266,320) vs. [3] Louisville ($51,502,576)
$13,413,436 - [12] Villanova ($21,749,786) vs. [13] Siena ($8,336,350)
$8,103,980 - [9] Texas A&M ($69,413,648) vs. [1] UCLA ($61,309,668)
$3,500,538 - [1] Memphis ($29,335,796) vs. [8] Mississippi State ($25,835,258)
$4,670,572 - [2] Duke ($47,391,264) vs. [7] West Virginia ($42,720,692)
$2,089,625 - [12] Western Kentucky ($17,208,710) vs. [13] San Diego ($15,119,085)
$1,901,984 - [9] Arkansas ($60,090,484) vs. [1] North Carolina ($58,188,500)
Differences in Men's Basketball Budgets
$7,220,072 - [2] Duke ($8,010,066) vs. [7] West Virginia ($789,994)
$7,076,218 - [6] Marquette ($7,993,191) vs. [3] Stanford ($916,973)
$3,108,583 - [1] Kansas ($6,170,233) vs. [8] UNLV ($3,061,650)
$2,531,464 - [12] Villanova ($4,202,768) vs. [13] Siena ($1,671,304)
$2,147,359 - [2] Tennessee ($3,611,347) vs. [7] Butler ($1,463,988)
$2,007,658 - [5] Michigan State ($6,407,390) vs. [4] Pittsburgh ($4,399,732)
$1,850,138 - [3] Louisville ($6,082,104) vs. [6] Oklahoma ($4,231,966)
$1,778,140 - [2] Texas ($6,594,163) vs. [7] Miami (Fla.) ($4,816,023)
$1,201,727 - [8] Mississippi State ($2,224,925) vs. [1] Memphis ($1,023,198)
$1,162,042 - [3] Wisconsin ($5,315,234) vs. [11] Kansas State ($4,153,192)
$995,966 - [9] Texas A&M ($6,258,741) vs. [1] UCLA ($5,262,775)
$887,384 - [2] Georgetown ($2,032,205) vs. [10] Davidson ($1,144,821)
$845,474 - [5] Notre Dame ($3,196,599) vs. [4] Washington State ($2,351,125)
$530,591 - [6] Purdue ($3,684,697) vs. [3] Xavier ($3,154,106)
$378,996 - [9] Arkansas ($6,011,514) vs. [1] North Carolina ($5,632,518)
$361,156 - [13] San Diego ($2,050,065) vs. [12] Western Kentucky ($1,688,909)
O Saints, you screaming yellow zonkers of a team. We've had our rough spots, y'all and I -- there's ancient history and we did have to report what we saw last month. But we've never hesitated to say nice things about you, we've ranked you, and then we stormed your court. And now we celebrate your finest hour.
We saw it coming, the nation saw it coming, everybody knew that this had the opportunity to turn into a track meet. You, Super Saints, are perfectly capable of that kind of stuff. What we didn't expect was that you'd run your overrated, overhyped SEC competition off the floor... The 83-62 final was the second-largest margin of victory ever for a No. 14 over a No. 3. The 21-point margin was two short of the 78-55 spread in 1985, when Navy destroyed Louisiana State in Dayton.
Next, it's Villanova. Much like that other teenage riot on Sunday, it's a No. 12 vs. No. 13. But your opponent will be a sad-sack .500 Big East team, one of that conference's weakest offenses, that surfed on the miniscus of the bubble all February. You'll be able to run on these guys too, so rest those legs up. They're even less threatening than Vandy on the boards, and they sure like to foul a lot. So will we see you in the Sweet 16? Should we start checking flights to Detroit? We're getting ahead of ourselves. Men of the green and gold, hearts that are brave and bold... Fight, fight, fight with all of your might! You can win if you will fight, fight, fight!
]]> (13) SIENA 83, (4) VANDERBILT 62VANDERBILT 26-8 (10-6) -- R. Ferguson 9-12 0-0 21; S. Foster 6-14 0-0 13; A. Gordon 2-8 0-0 6; R. Neltner 4-6 2-2 10; A. Ogilvy 7-15 4-8 18; J. Beal 0-4 0-0 0; A. Walker 0-3 0-0 0; K. Bell 2-4 0-0 5; J. Graham 3-3 0-0 6; D. McClellan 0-0 2-2 2; A. Metcalfe 1-2 0-0 2; G. Drake 0-1 0-0 0; E. Cole 0-1 0-0 0; J. Duffy 0-0 0-0 0. Totals 25-61 8-12 62.
SIENA 23-10 (13-5) -- R. Moore 3-8 4-4 11; K. Hasbrouck 9-14 10-10 30; J. Duell 0-5 0-0 0; E. Ubiles 4-8 3-4 11; A. Franklin 3-4 4-5 10; T. Fisher 6-6 1-2 19; R. Rossiter 1-1 0-0 2; C. Magee 0-0 0-0 0; C. De La Rosa 0-0 0-0 0; C. Jackson 0-0 0-0 0. Totals 26-46 22-25 83.
Three-point goals: VANDY 4-20 (S. Foster 1-5; A. Gordon 2-7; G. Drake 0-1; J. Beal 0-3; K. Bell 1-3; E. Cole 0-1), SIENA 9-20 (J. Duell 0-3; T. Fisher 6-6; K. Hasbrouck 2-5; R. Moore 1-4; E. Ubiles 0-2); Rebounds: VANDY 29 (S. Foster 6), SIENA 27 (R. Moore 6); Assists: VANDY 12 (J. Beal 5), SIENA 16 (R. Moore 6); Total Fouls -- VANDY 19, SIENA 11; Fouled Out: VANDY-None; SIENA-None.
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