From a drama standpoint, meanwhile, this has been a pretty awesome tourney through the first week, with six games going to OT and upsets all over the place. My $1,000,000,000 Bracket went by the wayside for me right about the time Aaron Craft decided to shout “Olé!” and step aside while the Dayton point guard bulled his way to the hoop for the winning bucket. And that was the first game of the tourney, so at least the suspense ended quickly.
The appeal of the NCAA tourney comes from the contrasts. In the NBA, teams are constructed in basically the same way, and the difference makers are often players who are anomalies who do things at their size that other people simply cannot do. And in the NBA, of course, you get to pick your players, whereas in college hoops, the players pick you, and coaches have to adjust yearly to what they have to work with. So in the NCAA's, you wind up seeing all sorts of weird teams with weird rosters playing all kinds of different styles. You'll have a team with a 6'8" center and four guards, or a team that shoots nothing but 3s, or some team like Princeton used to do that would run the clock down every possession. There will be games in the tourney between teams that want to score 100 and teams that want to score 50, and most every style and strategy is on display.
Now, if you're one of the minnows, just getting the chance to swim with the big fish is the prize in and of itself. The result of the game itself doesn't much matter. Most underdogs play nervous, shoot badly, and lose by double digits. That they made it to the tourney at all is what matters. Some will play well and put a scare in an opponent with a greater pedigree. And if the little guys do manage to spring the upset, win their first game and keep dancing a little longer, like Harvard and North Dakota State and Mercer (LOL Duke) did this year, they're playing with house money at that point.
Everyone like the underdogs and everyone loves the upsets. When there are few upsets, the tourney is, well, rather boring. Just a lot of bad basketball. And with a lot of crazy matchups and unknowns, the games get pretty intriguing. If the Final Four is a gourmet meal, then the first weekend is a food fight. The 5-12 line in the brackets is the usual upset hotspot, since #12 seeds are almost always good teams that are underrated who you've never heard of, and #5 teams are often overrated or on their way down, having played their way out of being a top 4 in the late stages of the season. Sure enough, the 12s went 3-1, and probably should've been 4-0 except N.C. State pulled off the biggest choke of the tourney yesterday by gagging a 14-pt. lead in the last 5:00 or so and losing to Saint Louis.
Biggest choke of the tourney up until the biggest choke of the tourney, which was tonight, when VCU did this:
Behold the 4-pt. play by Stephen F. Austin guard Desmond Haymon, with the Lumberjacks trailing by 4 and their amazing season almost certainly coming to an end. Hayman hits the 3, draws the foul, then went to the line and sank the free throw. Tie game and the 'Jacks go on to win 77:75 in OT.
Now, Stephen F. Austin winning isn't that much of a surprise. Stephen F. Austin is the classic NCAA #12 seed: they are a really good team from a school you've never heard of from a town you've never heard of and they play in a league you've never heard of. They've won 29 games in a row but haven't played anyone. They won 27 games last year, so they can obviously play, but this is the sort of team no big school wants to schedule because, even though they're good, the perception is that they're nobody, so they'll make you look really bad if they beat you on your home court, and they can't get any team of note to travel to Nacogdoches, Texas, to play them at their home court, so scheduling is almost impossible. And the 'Jacks are not only a really good team, but they also have some of that loosey goosey fun vibe that makes underdogs so appealing.
But the way they won is definitely a surprise, because this just might be the most preposterous ending of a basketball game I've seen in years. That ending was straight out of a rejected Hollywood script. You couldn't make this shit up.
First of all, notice how I said Desmond Haymon drew a foul. I didn't actually say that the VCU player, JeQuan Lewis, actually committed a foul. From the angle on the gif here, it looks like something of a snow job. Haymon definitely sells it and the referee doesn't have the best angle on the play. I say 'looks' because this angle isn't conclusive, either. When I saw it at full speed, the contact seemed a bit more legit.
That being said, it's a truly terrible play by Lewis, because selling the foul is precisely what you do in this situation if you're down 4 pts. I remember a guy trying this in a game once that I played in where we were up 4 and he took a 3-pointer and crashed in a heap – and since this was in an opposing gym, the home fans actually got upset, because he miraculously made the trey and the collective audience then sees him rolling around on the floor acting like he'd been shot and started booing that there was no foul. Nevermind that there wasn't one of our guys within 4 feet of him. The ref didn't fall for it and we won by a point.
But even though it's a terrible play by Lewis, the Rams from VCU were in full meltdown mode at that point in the game, as they missed four free throws in the last 30 seconds of the game. In both the case of VCU in this game and the N.C. State game I mentioned before, they played themselves into come from ahead losses. The foul-to-stop-the-clock-and-hope-they-miss strategy drives some people crazy, since it slows the game down so much – I happen to think the constant string of timeouts in the NBA to advance the ball to halfcourt is worse, myself – but teams wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Does it work often? Not really, but the low percentage play is still better than the zero percentage play.
The most astonishing finish in NCAA championship history, from 1983, happened in part because Houston was a lousy free throw shooting team. They bricked some free throws down the stretch, which allowed N.C. State to stay close and have a chance to win at the end. And N.C. State shouldn't have been there in the first place. They were dead to rights in a first round game vs. Pepperdine in that tourney, but the Waves' best free throw shooter, of all people, missed two free throws in the closing seconds and N.C. State was able to rally and win in 2OT. If the Pepperdine guy had just done what he'd done right 80% over the course of that season, that Cinderella story of a run by N.C. State never would've been written. (In this famous upset from 1981, the guy who misses the fatal free throw, Skip Dillard, was actually nicknamed 'Money' because he was almost automatic at the free throw line.)
Anyway, the VCU kid who committed the foul made the last bad play, but it was one in a series of errors, and VCU still had another 5 minutes of OT to rectify the error and win the game. That being said ... damn, that was a doozy. That one is going to be tough to live down. It is going to get replayed again and again and again. And again and again. And again.
And every year, the TV networks like to trot out March Madness miracles from years past like this and this and this (LOL Washington Huskies). If I was someone on the losing team, the last thing I'd want is to be reminded of it every single year. Those are the most heartbreaking moments in their lives as athletes. I've always believed that it's better to get blown out in a one-and-done game than to lose it at the end in a shocking fashion. If they're better than you and they kick your ass, fine.
Losing games you could've won, and maybe even should've won, just leaves a sense of unfinished business – you want to go back and redo it, do it right, but your don't have time. My senior season in high school ended with a loss in OT at the buzzer. I've probably run that finish back 1000 times in my head since then, and each time it's a little different – the shot spins out and its on to the next OT; or the shot is blocked and the horn sounds and its onto the next OT – but then you realize that it's surreal and you're just daydreaming. It's only a piece of fiction in your head.
And as was proven tonight by VCU, losing can sometimes be stranger than fiction.
