Saturday, March 29, 2008

Go Davidson WILDCATS

Davidson is a small college right here in in Mecklenburg County. And at this moment their men's basketball team is the cinderalla story of the nation after pulling off three consecutive "upsets" to make it to the Elite Eight. Seeded #10 in their region (which means the tournament committee considered them to be somewhere between the 37th and 40th best team in the tournament), they beat #7 Gonzaga, #2 Georgetown, and #3 Wisconsin. Calling all band wagon jumpers!

So am I the only person (who doesn't live in Davidson) who is not surprised by Wildcats' performance in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament? They entered the tournament on a 22-game winning streak (now up to 25 straight) - best in the nation. And their average margin of victory is by 20 points per game - best in the nation. And their losses this season were mostly to elite teams like UNC, Duke, and UCLA. The question shouldn't be how are they playing so well in the tournant, but how did everybody, including the tournament committee, so vastly under estimate Davidson's ability? You'd at least think that Davidson would be well known here in Charlotte's back yard but the truth is most Charlotteans had no idea either. Even though there are no ACC teams here in Charlotte, ACC basketball is still the only thing that matters here in college sports. They don't get no respect.

Did I pick Davidson to go to the Elite Eight in my brackets? Well no, but that doesn't mean I'm surprised either. I knew they'd steamroll Gonzaga. And I was confident they'd beat the over-rated Wisconsin Badgers, once they got to that stage. But I admit that I chose Georgetown in the second round. I thought that it would be a good game but I still tought Georgetown would have enough to get by. So who do I pick in tomorrow night's matchup against the #1 seed Kansas Jayhawks? If I had money riding on it I'd honestly have to put it on Kansas. Kansas is a great team so I can't say I expect Davidson to win, but it still wouldn't shock me either if they became the first ever #10 seed to reach the Final Four. I'll be rooting for them, and I can honestly say that I didn't just jump on the band wagon this week.
But here's the kicker on Davidson getting no respect, and the main reason I decided to post on this topic today. This morning I was watching The Early Show on CBS. This is the national morning show on the very same network that carries all of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Yet four differnt times their co-anchor (I think it was Chris Wragge) called them the Davidson FLYERS. The Davidson WILDCATS have been all over the news, they played on their network, and CBS even did live national cut-ins during The Early Show from the Davidson campus a few days ago. CBS should know Davidson's team name is the Wildcats. Wow, how embarrising! And I kept watching for a while to see if they would correct themselves and they never did. How could they possibly look more dumb? Well try this... the wrong team name by which CBS called the Davidson team just happened to be the "Flyers". Why is that so funny? Because the Flyers is the team name of Dayton, which just happens to be the very next school name when you look at a list of all Division I schools in alphabetical order. Ha!

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Sunday, March 11, 2007

Going To The Dance

It's March Madness time again, and yes I will be filling in my brackets soon. I certainly don't claim to be a college hoops expert but I have won a big money pool before.

Every selection Sunday you hear the complaints about bubble teams not making the tournament and debate on which teams shouldn't have gotten bids. You can always debate whether Syracuse should have gotten a bid in place of Arkansas, but what bugs me are complaints that automatic bids given to mid-major tournament champions take away at-large bids from "more deserving" schools. For instance, schools like Jackson State who won the SWAC title and Delaware State who won MEAC are clearly inferior to teams that didn't make the tournament like Syracuse, Drexel, West Virginia, or Kansas State. But so what? March Madness shouldn't just be about the best 65 teams outright. If the tournament is supposed to represent the entire NCAA then they're doing it right to have every conference tournament champion make the national tournament whether they're ranked in the top-65 or not. With less than a dozen teams making the tournament only because of an automatic bid, the top 50 teams in the nation still get to go dancing - more than enough to allow all of the best teams in.

Speaking of 65 teams, the play-in game is BS. The NCAA refuses to call it a play-in game but what else could you call an extra round that all of the other 63 teams get to skip. Not only is that not fair but it's an insult to Delaware State and Jackson State who won their conference tournaments to earn their automatic bid. If you must have a play-in game, why not respect the teams that won their conference tournaments, and force Stanford (11) to play Old Dominion (12) for the right to move on to the real first round and face #1 seed Kansas.

P.S. Shout out to my peeps in the Logger Nation

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