There's the real tournament and, far
more important, there is the private tournament-—namely, each of our
pools. And since the latter is far more important, let's start there. I
profited from one lesson I have learned through the years, but suffered
grievously from another I haven't quite mastered. My winning strategy
was not to get excited about any underdog that got hot in its
conference tournament. That enabled me to dispatch Georgia in the first
round and, more important, to stay away from the fashionable Pittsburgh
pick. Pittsburgh is a perennial finalist and frequent winner in the Big
East tournament, but it apparently leaves its game in Madison Square
Garden come the Big Dance. Having been burned by Pittsburgh in the
past, I vowed never again, enabling me to nail their usual one-and-out.
The lesson I haven't mastered is to
eschew sentiment, even noble sentiment. I managed to be remarkably
unsentimental when it came to my own alma mater; I have Stanford going
out to Texas in the next round. But while my gut wanted to pick
Wisconsin coming out of the MIdwest to the Final Four, my heart
steered me to Georgetown, where my best buddies are administrators with
longstanding ties to the basketball program. I didn't want to root
against them and their team, even though I had serious misgivings about
Roy Hibbert's capacity to come up big in critical moments. Still, I
never would have foreseen how it actually happened—that Georgetown,
with its defensive prowess, would let a team like Davidson crawl back
from so far down and then stand around and watch as they ran over them.
Despite my considerable regret, you've got to like sweet-faced,
sweet-shooting Stephen Curry as the player of the tournament so far.
After a slow start, this tournament has
been decidedly "A" quality through the weekend. We've had the requisite
upsets with five lower seeds (three of them from the double-digit
seeds), four overtime games and some spectacular game-winners at the
buzzer (San Diego, Stanford and Western Kentucky the most memorable.)
Of the 16 remaining teams, only four have been on cruise control—North
Carolina, Kansas, Louisville, Washington St.—and three of the most
popular picks for winning it all—UCLA, Tennessee and Memphis—barely
survived the weekend.
CBS' commitment to stick with the
closest games is a winner for fans, but, as a result, I have seen very
little of the two teams, Kansas and North Carolina, that might be the
top two picks if folks were starting anew. Still, I caught enough of
North Carolina running Arkansas ragged to have no regrets about going
with UNC for the title. I have UCLA as my other finalist and they
appear to have a relatively easy path to San Antonio. But after
watching Texas A&M give them fits, UCLA better find somebody else
besides Love and Collison who can actually put the ball in the net.
Memphis, Tennessee, Louisville and Texas
all impressed me with their athleticism, but, still, I can't get overly
excited about teams that can't make their free throws (15-32, 19-29,
5-15 and 12-21 respectively). Three of them were lucky to survive;
Georgetown, 8-17 from the line, didn't. The appalling bottom line on
yesterday: only 4 teams of the 16 teams that played shot at least 75%
from the free throw line and Louisville, remarkably, shot .529 from the
three-point line and .333 from the stripe.
