Tourney outcome continues to baffle fans, staff

By Reginald Rogers
Paraglide

As reported in this column last week, this year’s college basketball championship tournament, affectionately known as March Madness, has presented some of the most unlikely scenarios as any tournament I’ve seen in recent years.

After the overall top-ranked Kansas Jayhawks were bounced, I was probably the only one in America who was not as surprised as the consensus.

Sure, the Jayhawks had two of the nation’s top players in guard Sherron Collins and center Cole Aldrich. But we’ve seen it all before. Think back to 1997, when the Jayhawks featured premier guard Jacque Vaughn, who literally destroyed defenses by scoring and distributing the ball to his teammates Paul Pierce and Scot Pollard for easy baskets.

In street basketball, a great pass is called a dime and both Jacque Vaughn and Sherron Collins could easily be called piggybanks, or better yet, casino slot machines. Whereas Collins has Aldrich, Vaughn had big center Raef LaFrentz, who featured many of the same attributes as Aldrich. LaFrentz was big, physical and a workhorse inside. But … just like this year’s Jayhawks, that team was bounced in the Sweet 16. Oh, as for Northern Iowa, they ran into the buzz saw that is the Michigan State Spartans.

Before last week, Kansas, along with the Syracuse Orange, Kentucky Wildcats and Durham’s Duke University Blue Devils were the top seeds in all four regional brackets. They were also the consensus picks to reach the Final Four. After Saturday night, only one team was left — Duke.
Syracuse also fell victim to a Cinderella team as the sharpshooting Xavier Musketeers knocked off the Big East Conference’s regular season champion behind the efforts of point guard Terrell Holloway and dangerous forward Jamaal Crawford, who’s claim to fame before the tournament was having been nearly the only player to dunk on superstar LeBron James.

Holloway and Crawford lead the Musketeers over Syracuse in one of the best displays of offensive firepower and defensive stopping power in recent history.

Xavier’s run ended when they met the Kansas State Wildcats in one of the best games of the tournament. In this double-overtime affair, each team traded baskets all the way down to the wire – twice, before the Wildcats squeezed out a victory to advance to the Elite 8.

Then, in their very next game, which took place Saturday, the men of Butler University in Indianapolis continued to write their Cinderella story by disposing of Kansas State to advance to its first-ever Final Four.

Butler’s story reminds me of the 1970s or 1980s movie, “The Warriors.” In the movie, a New York City street gang, found themselves battling every gang in the city in an effort to return to their home in the Bronx. Butler has battled and defeated all comers in an effort to return to Indianapolis for the National Championship’s Final Four.

Perhaps the tournament’s biggest surprise was the defeat of the young Kentucky Wildcats at the hands of the West Virginia Mountaineers. Kentucky’s Fab freshmen, John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins, Eric Bledsoe and Daniel Orton carried the nation’s best record into the tournament. Saturday against West Virginia and they dropped the ball – literally. The Cats committed multiple turnovers and appeared completely out-of-sync against a sharp-shooting, aggressive Mountaineer squad, which featured five starters from New York City. Kentucky’s exit left Duke as the tournament only No. 1 seed.

So when the smoke clears Monday night, I think we will can all drive up U.S. Highway 401 to watch the National Championship trophy make it’s seven-mile journey from Chapel Hill to its new home in Durham.

Unlike most Tar Heels fans, I will be cheering, not so much for Duke, but for the state of North Carolina and the Atlantic Coast Conference, because everybody knows: The road to the national championship travels along Tobacco Road. Good Luck Dukies.