NCAA First Round Recap

I'm sure the pundit types will be salivating over the Tampa games. Two 12 and 13 seeds advanced. Outside of that tournament site, there weren't too many upsets. Day one took until Kansas State beat USC before a lower seed won, and 9 seed Texas A&M over 8 seed BYU was the only other (sorta) upset on Thursday. Actually, since I don't count 9s over 8s to be upsets, there was only one upset on Friday not in Tampa. That was 10 seeded Davidson over 7 seed Gonzaga. So, in two days, there were six true upsets. Two outside of Tampa. Of course, the city of Tampa had a wealth of upsets waiting to happen. The Buccaneers went 20 years without using up any.

With so few upsets, the South region had no lower seed advance to the second round. The East had 9 seed Arkansas. That doesn't mean it was easy for higher seeds. Duke needed to score with 13 seconds and sweat out a Belmont final possession to get their win. Tennessee was only up 2 with five minutes left. Xavier struggled the whole game with Georgia. Mississippi Valley almost scored 30 points against UCLA.

I think Joe Crawford may have made some money with his huge game against Marquette. Some were criticizing UK for not having more players contribute to the scoring. But when Crawford is shooting 60% from both the field and the three point line, do you really want Michael Porter taking a bunch of shots? And having Crawford score 35 points certainly helped UK make the loss respectable. Sadly for UK fans, Crawford is gone next year and their team has sunk to the level of being happy with a "respectable loss" in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

In a related note, Crawford outscored Mississippi Valley by six points. Just glancing down down a list of high scorers for games, he was one of eight players in the tournament to outscore Mississippi Valley. How did they not get put in the play-in game? Also, think about that performance when people say the tournament should be expanded to 128 teams. How many more crappy teams do we want sullying the tournament with their presence?

Another Kentucky team not only pulled off a big win, but had the best replay of the first round. Western Kentucky's Ty Rogers hits a 26 foot three pointer as the clock expires in overtime for the win. This was one of those games that make me consider skipping tournament pools every year. Since Western is a local team, I want them to do well, but their win blows up my bracket. So, as I'm sitting in the conference room at work watching the end of the game (and not doing any work), I'm torn about how I want it to end. Actually, I was just happy it went into overtime so I could stay in the conference room longer.

Speaking of work, NCAAsports.com had a great a great little device. Every game was shown online for free. No telling how much bandwidth I was siphoning off my employer's network flipping between different games while "working". It even had a neat little device called the "Boss Button" which pulled a phony spreadsheet when clicked (although I still prefer the old Alt-Tab combo to switch pages). Unfortunately one guy at work got in trouble because his manager didn't believe he was doing any work. Why would a janitor be working on a spreadsheet?

I'm feeling pretty good about UL's chances in the tournament because the Big East is kicking ass, and UL finished second there. The Big East has seven teams in the second round with the only team to lose being UConn who lost in overtime after losing star player AJ Price to a knee injury nine minutes in. Even better, the only other Big East team to even play a close game was Villanova over Clemson and Nova was a 12 seed.

What was with the three point shooting? I couldn't believe how many teams weren't hitting their threes, but kept jacking them up. Drake lost to Western in overtime on a WKU 3 pointer, but they wouldn't have been in that position if Klayton Corver hadn't kept launching 30 foot shots when his team only needed a two. Ditto for Oregon who missed 29 out of 38 threes.