When he reached the stage, supported along the ballroom path to such an exclusive group by a walker, Jerry Tarkanian was helped up a few stairs to basketball immortality.
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It is March 24, and from mid-November until now, Mountain West basketball teams have played nearly 300 games. They have been ranked, defeated quality opponents, earned good enough results to have entered the NCAA Tournament with the nation’s No. 1 Ratings Percentage Index of all conferences.
I suppose there is a silver lining for UNLV basketball today, hidden somewhere in the mess of yet another opening-game loss in the NCAA Tournament.
If anything, the shove exposed the urgency that has attached itself to Mike Montgomery’s legacy. Perhaps it was for motivation’s sake, of driving his best player to greater heights. Perhaps it came from that cavernous place that said the moment was big, the game was bigger, and not many of either are left in his coaching career.
The Mountain West stuck out its chest a little farther Sunday when five of its nine basketball teams were selected to the NCAA Tournament, but that’s already old news. What matters now is how each performs when the madness begins.
It was a little past 3 p.m. Sunday when Bryant Gumbel’s brother announced that seventh-seeded San Diego State would play 10th-seeded Oklahoma in the NCAA Tournament in Philadelphia on Friday.
This is what happened at some point in a conference room Sunday that housed the NCAA Tournament selection committee in Indianapolis: UNLV was placed in the bracket as a No. 5 seed and Cal was placed opposite it as a No. 12, and a red flag appeared on the movie theater-size projection screen displaying the matchup.