March Through Madness: An NCAA Tourney Blog : A Last Jump Into the Pool

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March Through Madness

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Mark Coatney

Devin Gordon

Mark Starr

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Though it's March Madness, We Know April is the Coolest Month

1:17 PM, April 1, 2008 | Comments (0)

March gets all the ink, and the fancy "Madness" nickname, but as a top-to-bottom sports fan, I'm finding myself much more partial to April. We get the Final Four and the national title game, then the Masters just a few days later. And wrapped all around...

The Ivies Muscle Up

4:12 PM, March 28, 2008 | Comments (0)

Teams to Root for--and Against

11:11 AM, March 27, 2008 | Comments (0)

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A Last Jump Into the Pool

Mark Starr

Who is good at picking these pools? Is there really a skill or perhaps an art? If so, it completely eludes me too. So I'd prefer to address the diversions first.

1) Devin is apparently amused by the image of my daughter wandering around the Namibian desert "blithely unaware" of how she is faring in her pool. (Pools and deserts don't seem a natural fit.) Anyway, for a young guy, that's such a retro notion. I'm absolutely sure that both the Namib and Kalahari deserts now come with wireless.

2) Devin also characterizes Stanford-Cornell as the "Nerd Bowl" and wonders which of my nerdy alma maters I will be rooting for. No contest. Cornell (and also Cornell against Harvard this weekend in hockey). It would mean so much more to Cornell, which is far more of a hockey school, to steal a win than for Stanford to disappoint with another second-round exit. Cornell hasn't been to the Dance since 1988 when it managed to lose to Arizona 90-50. I am told this game will be much closer and that Cornell has a couple really nice players including the son of Timberwolves coach Randy Wittman. Cornell basketball hasn't always been a wasteland. Here's one from my way-back file: My sophomore year, Cornell had a couple high-school All-Americans and a jumping-jack named Greg Morris who led the Ivy League in scoring. Over Christmas break, the team hit the road and scored a pair of monumental upsets: first it beat Kentucky in the opener of the Rupp Invitational, hastening the end of legendary coach Adolph Rupp's career; then it became the only team to beat Ohio State in Columbus that season. When the team returned to Ithaca for its Ivy League opener, against Brown or somebody like that, the school was all abuzz. Cornell lost the game and that was essentially all she wrote. But the hockey team, with Hall-of-Famer Ken Dryden in the nets, won the national championship that season, which was serious consolation for any hardcourt disappointment. (Greg, it's about 25 years since we lunched in New York. If you're reading this, give a shout out.)

3) I share Devin's trepidation about folks named "Psycho"--but probably for different reasons. "Psycho" was the scariest movie I ever saw. I can say that definitively because I was so scared by it--a 12-year-old who had no idea what he was going to see in the theater--that I vowed never to go to another scary movie again. And I didn't. Don't start parsing it. No, I never saw "Exorcist" or "Jaws" or "Silence of the Lambs" or any of the others. But many years later, when I was a foreign correspondent walking down some miserable, wartorn street, I puzzled to my photog companion about why I seemed less scared in what was a truly frightening place than I was in a movie theater. He responded by humming the music to "Jaws" and I was instantly terrified. That's how I discovered I was very sensitive to aural stimulation. It's my stimulation of choice at the Emperor's Club.

4) Okay, guess it's put up or shut up time, though I hate to commit before Coppin State plays. But here are my Final Four picks and they are what I actually picked or else I would have changed them so I wouldn't look so foolish by agreeing with Devin on three of them: Georgetown, North Carolina and UCLA. There's always a lot of talk about parity these days come NCAA tournament time, but I am not sure how much parity there really is this time around. The four number one seeds lost fewer games than any group of #1s--they were a combined 127-9--all the way back to the 1988 tournament.

UCLA seems to be the clear class of the West, with Drake my longshot special to stir it up. Hard not to like the way North Carolina plays and they are battle-tested. Since Coatney already told us "woe is Kansas", I had to find an alternative. Georgetown made it to the Final Four last year with a team that didn't shoot the ball as well and if Roy Hibbert can revive his interior game, they could be dangerous. Finally, if I'm any kind of man at all, I had to pick an outsider, a genuine longshot, for the Final Four. Memphis is clearly talented, but they play too many soft conference games to develop the mettle to make it to San Antonio. Of course, there never is a suitable explanation for the surprise team, like a George Mason, until you find out which team is the surprise and then you come up with the explanation to fit. ("They have a lot of upperclassmen who have played together" or whatever.) Devin picked Pittsburgh. I have actually picked Pittsburgh several times in past years, always impressed by their rugged play in the Big East tournament. But that always seems to be where they peak. So my pick: Michigan State. They've been a trick-or-treat team all year, but I happened to see them on a couple of treat occasions (particularly that last win over Indiana) and loved the tale, even if it is very young and raw. And I love the coach, Tom Izzo.

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