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One Shining (Annual) Moment

By C. Robert Dimitri | Posted Under Miscellaneous | Comments (11)

ncaa-bracket.jpg

We have reached this sports fan’s absolute favorite time of the year. Yes, it is NCAA basketball tournament time.

Like much of my sports fandom, it started with my father. I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, home of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. I spent the early years of my life in the heart of Atlantic Coast Conference basketball country, and Dad instilled my appreciation for the teams therein early. Although I moved away just before turning seven, the imprint had been made, and we continued to watch those ACC games from afar on ESPN.

Perhaps it is a bit of a cheat for me to support an entire conference, even if I do have a rooting order for the teams it includes. However, I would never attend a big Division I school, and I did not grow up in a big college town once in Texas. The 80s were an exciting time for the ACC and what became its arch-rival conference, the Big East, as exacerbated by the “ACC-Big East Challenge,” an early-season event (now defunct) pitting all the conferences’ teams against each other. I was so inspired that I eventually devoted my high school senior statistics project to the task of definitively proving the superiority of ACC basketball over the Big East, a task in which this former statistician succeeded in his not-so-humble opinion.

Yes, I am quite aware that this year’s tournament features a tournament-record eleven teams from the Big East. From top to bottom, it is beyond debate that this was the Big East’s year. It of course remains to be seen if a Big East representative will be cutting the nets down in Houston, Texas, this season, and that is one of the beauties of this basketball tournament.

What makes this the best sporting event around? That single-elimination unpredictability is the biggest plus. Higher seeds usually shake out of the shuffle by the end, but along the way those last-second buzzer-beater upsets that define March Madness do happen, and every once in a while Cinderella does advance all the way to the Final Four. It is not the best team on paper that necessarily wins; the team that happens to be the best for six consecutive games is the champion. The team needs only to seize opportunity. In any given game, a player can find “the zone” or a team can put together a barrage of shots from beyond the three-point arc, and these are the exceptional performances that can dash hopes, propel dreams, and defy expectations.

More than that, though, it is the players that compose these teams, from universities both prominent and obscure. NBA-bound superstars might drive the best teams, but each team consists mostly of players that will never have the chance to further a basketball career. They all convene for this one event that represents the end of this game that has represented years of passion and camaraderie. When such stakes are commanded by the most capricious bounce of a ball in the waning seconds of a one-point game, the highest drama can result.

That is not to say that the NCAA and its athletic programs represent the paragon of virtue and integrity in amateur athletics. We have more than enough rules violations over the years to illustrate otherwise, and even within the rules we have seen an increasing number of top underclassmen jump ship for the NBA such that the quality of Division I basketball seems watered down like never before to the point of viewer disillusionment. The level of competition and desire in the tournament, though, remains as great as ever.

There is extra resonance for me personally in the timing of the tournament as well. Back in the old days when I was an athlete, this basketball tournament coincided with the annual end of my own season. My own satisfaction and disappointment from those years past is inextricably tied to television images in post-meet restaurant backgrounds and radio broadcasts that accompanied the long drive home on night-shrouded Texas highways. Whether I won or lost, there was always a player, a team, or a particular game that had something in common. March saw the end for them, and March saw the end for me.

To borrow a motif from an earlier column that I wrote, if you had access to a time machine and wanted to witness the most egregious display of emotion ever exhibited in the life of usually reserved C. Robert Dimitri, you need only find him on the evening of March 28, 1992, when he went berserk in response to the conclusion of the greatest basketball game ever played. He ran laps around the house, as he yelled and banged on the walls. (His father was the only witness to this outburst.) That was the tournament at its best, and each year this tournament offers us countless other moments that are almost as gripping.

It all culminates in CBS’s “One Shining Moment” montage after the final game. Many people might find that song and the accompanying montage of emotive basketball players hokey beyond compare, but it never fails to send chills up my spine. Yes, I was the guy that angrily called his local CBS affiliate one year when they had cut off the broadcast prior to “One Shining Moment.” Then I was the guy that called them back the next year prior to the final game to be certain that they would not rob me of it again.

You probably care much more about putting together a successful bracket and winning a pool than hearing my ruminations on why I love college basketball. Hence, I offer this advice as someone who is probably in at least the ninety-fifth percentile of raw number of brackets completed for someone his age and may or may not (as far as the IRS is concerned) have seen some measure of success. This is a complete crapshoot, so enter as many different pools with as many different entries as you can afford. Conjure different permutations of the one and two seeds, and throw in a three or a four seed into one or two of your entries if one of those teams has a superstar that could potentially carry the load. As far as predictions go, that is the best you can do, and all the expert analysis in the world usually does not perform much better.

C. Robert Dimitri thinks that adding teams numbers 67 and 68 to this tournament as play-in 11 and 12 seeds is outright stupid and a bad direction for the tournament. It particularly looks bad in a year with an unprecedented number of teams with losses numbering in the teens.









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Comments

Vacation for the next two days is confirmed.
Bracket is completed.
ATM is emptied out.

I'm ready to watch basketball, drink beer, and play cards for the rest of the week.

Less than 24 hours left!

Posted by: Three-nineteen at March 16, 2011 12:40 PM

(Quick research since 2005:)

-- Only 11 out of 24 possible Final Four teams have been #1 seeds.

-- Only one year (2008) has more than two #1 seeds in the Final Four.

-- Fuck Duke.

-- You are more likely to see a 5 seed or higher in the Final Four, than you are to see a #3 or a #4.

-- Only the Big East has had more than 3 teams in the Sweet Sixteen, because the ACC is an overrated crap conference na-nana-poopoo.

-- Someone from the Horizon League has won at least one game every year.

-- Conversely, the MEAC has not won a game in this time period.

-- If you're watching a game, and Gus Johnson is announcing, stick around. Gus Johnson could make drying paint exciting. He shows more enthusiasm than your kids on Christmas, fat guys on Thanksgiving, and rednecks on the Fourth of Joo-lie combined.

-- The Pac-10 only sends 1 team to the Elite Eight (if any) in a given year. In 2005, it was Arizona, but only UCLA has made it that far since then.

-- I may or may not be playing against everything I've listed above in my Pajiba bracket to play the contrarian.

-- A #1 has won in 5 out of the 6 seasons. The season in which a #1 did not win (2006), none of them made it to the Final Four.

-- Apparently only the east coast shows up. Only UCLA has made it to the Championship Game in this period. The "next westest" team is Kansas.

-- The West Region is a death sentence. No National Champion has come out of this region since 2005.

-- Kemba Time!

Posted by: D-Day at March 16, 2011 12:55 PM

Rock Chalk Jayhawk Go KU!!!

Posted by: E-Money at March 16, 2011 1:35 PM

-- Fuck Duke.
Nah. I would consider giving Coach K a hummer though, and that's coming from a Tar Heel's kid.

I do so want to be a Big 12 loyalist, but I suspect that the Longhorns are going to unravel big time, and I don't know how well Kansas is going to hold it together either. I'm not holding my breath for Texas A&M as a seven seed, and I refuse to have an opinion on K-State.

On another note, I think the ESPN College Gameday crew went a bit over the top about the whole Colorado/Virginia Tech snub situation. I mean, to be that obnoxious about six teams that have about zero chance of getting past the round of 32 is a real dick move, though I have to admit that Dickie V's rant was good for a couple of laughs. I'd be more inclined about the Harvard snub, except that, even given their record, Harvard dresses an extremely young, very green team. No seniors, two juniors, and no one on that team was at all prepared to play even the relatively tame public school semi-streetballer kids from Oklahoma State yesterday.

Posted by: Jerry at March 16, 2011 1:37 PM

D-Day, you beat me to it. I just have two words: FUCK DUKE.

Posted by: Mel C. at March 16, 2011 2:01 PM

I hate that I used to love college basketball and now I hate it. I hate it because television has got ahold of it and throttled it. I hate that they can't play the last two minutes of most games in less than a half hour, because there's nothing more exciting than watching hacking fouls and free throws and coaches calling timeout every three seconds so we can watch them coach, even when they're 15 points behind with 30 seconds to go. I hate that there are, what, three losers-bracket tournaments going on simply to fill the gaping maw of television, which means teams spending more weeks out of class, when loss of classtime is cited as an excuse for not having a football playoff. hate that the NCAA has added teams to a tournament in which no one under a 10th seed or so stands even a remote chance of getting to the Final Four, much less winning, and the only reason for it I can come up with is that TV said so.

It still somehow manages to be a great tournament, but it also represents everything that's wrong with sports.

Posted by: , at March 16, 2011 3:01 PM

"He ran laps around the house, as he yelled and banged on the walls."

If you do anything of the kind this year, I'll probably dial 911.

Posted by: Angeleno Ewok at March 16, 2011 3:23 PM

Up front, I'm sorry to be "that guy" but did anyone else have the urge to vomit when ESPN did their Barack-Etology piece?? I'm no hater, I voted for the dude in the last cycle, but butter corn and chicken squash, does every fucking outlet in this country need to pony up and flat out admit whose political dick they're slobbering on?? W. was never granted such airtime on the waves of highlights and tongue in cheek references.

On top of that, why the hell is Obama agreeing to such an appearance? With everything going on in the country and in the world, THIS is time well spent? Sure, have your bracket filled out privately, amongst your staff but to have the time taken to create an ENTIRE bracket, BLOWN UP, with the title of PRESIDENTIAL BRACKET....fuck, I'm gonna vomit again. PR fail, ya'll. PR fail.

Posted by: Barnes78 at March 16, 2011 4:51 PM

"It is not the best team on paper that necessarily wins; the team that happens to be the best for six consecutive games is the champion"

so true...it also has a lot to do with who you play as much as how you play. Washington actually has one of the most talented teams in the field but plays in the same bracket as OSU, UNC, Syracuse, and Kentucky. meanwhile Butler could very well go back to the Final Four simply because the Southeast region is weaker than gas station coffee.

also, every year is supposed to be the Big East's year. last year they sent eight teams and almost all of them crapped out by the Sweet 16. if it wasn't for WVU upsetting Kentucky the conference would have been a hilarious disappointment altogether. the Big East hasn't had a team win it since, when, UConn in 2004?

another betting tip: no matter how bad Michigan State looks in a given year, Tom Izzo pulls magic out of his ass in the tournament. they were awful this year, but I can't not put them in the Sweet 16.

Posted by: ivn at March 16, 2011 4:58 PM

Fuck Duke?
Not even with Dan Fogler's dick.

Posted by: Jim Doggie at March 16, 2011 5:12 PM

This is the longest piece of smack talk I have ever seen. go figure its @ pajiba.

Posted by: JuiceinLA at March 16, 2011 5:48 PM