March Through Madness: An NCAA Tourney Blog : Notes on the NCAA D-III Champion Bears of Wash. U

Newsweek - National News, World News, Health, Technology, Entertainment and more... | Newsweek.com

March Through Madness

RSS

Authors

Mark Coatney

Devin Gordon

Mark Starr

Featured Postings

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

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

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 (1)

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Notes on the NCAA D-III Champion Bears of Wash. U

Sarah Kliff

I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis about a year ago and, while we boast an admirable ranking in the U.S. News & World Report, sports aren’t exactly our thing. More bluntly: we have never won a men’s national title. In any sport. Ever.

Well, until this weekend. On Saturday, I experienced what may be the only moment of sports glory for my alma mater when the Washington University Bears won the NCAA D-III Championship with a 90-68 victory over the Amherst Lord Jeffs.

Didn’t know there was a basketball championship this weekend? No clue who the Wash. U. Bears are or what a Lord Jeff is? It’s cool—I’m still trying to sort out the Lord Jeff thing. But if you missed the championship match, it’s pretty hard to blame you—it was barely televised. You’ll probably only read about the results in a few select publications: Wash. U.’s student newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and a handful of niche D-III publications, like D3hoops.com, among them.

Welcome to life in D-III, a giant grab bag of teams from the nation's small colleges—more than 400, making it the largest NCAA division—who just had an incredibly exciting basketball season that you never heard of. If you want to talk about upsets, dramas and dreams that drive the narratives of college sports, D-III is your division this year. And the Wash. U. Bears are your Cinderella team.

If you forgot to fill out your D-III bracket this year and missed the play-by-play, here’s the quick recap of the Bears’ rise to glory: It starts with your standard mix of teams. And the Bears are not your likely favorite in that mix—they have a middling record of four months ago, they largely get written off back in December when All-American point guard Sean Wallis breaks his leg. They go into the Big—or at least Medium-sized—Dance ranked 11th. But in the final four they pull off an epic upset. First, they take down the top-ranked team, Hope College—the Bears were down by one point at the half but came back for a 89-74 victory. And then in the finals, they pummel the defending champion, No. 3-ranked Amherst, by more than 20 points. Among the crowd that does keep D-III brackets, I’m pretty sure no one was banking on a Bears victory.

Largely because this is the first time Wash. U. has won anything in the realm of men’s national titles (although, to the Lady Bears credit, they have a very strong record in volleyball). We come from the University Athletics Association, a sports conference we lovingly refer to as the “Nerdy Nine” because Emory, University of Chicago and Brandeis are among its ranks. And it was considered a “huge success” by the dean of students when 108 fans decided to board a bus to watch the game in person. If 108 Duke fans showed up to a game—well, you get the picture.

I’m sure it will be a pretty big deal when UCLA or North Carolina whoever comes out victorious over in the D-I side wins the championship. Chances are the tale of the Wash. U. Bears will probably not be immortalized in the lore of college basketball. But for now at least, we finally have a victory to celebrate—one that’s not related to our U.S. News ranking. Go Bears!

Featured, The Men

Permalink: http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/madness/archive/2008/03/24/notes-on-the-ncaa-d-iii-champion-bears-of-wash-u.aspx

Type Size

Social Networks

Permalink: http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/madness/archive/2008/03/24/notes-on-the-ncaa-d-iii-champion-bears-of-wash-u.aspx

TrackBack URL: http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/madness/trackback.aspx?PostID=273179