It ends so quickly. For all but one team, the NCAA Tournament each March is a cruel mixture of unrestrained joy and overwhelming sadness.
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There is no better drama this time of year than the NCAA Tournament, enough to warrant time on any big screen.
When I see this season’s Florida Gulf Coast basketball team, I see the Jacksonville basketball team of 1969-70. They even play in the same conference, something called the Atlantic Sun. Twenty bucks and the home edition of “Jeopardy!” if you can name all 10 members.
Finished products in the NBA Draft are like college basketball coaches who marry a Maxim swimsuit model, hold a percentage in a company that is sold for $100 million and lead a No. 15 seed into the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.
Pierre Jackson, formerly of Desert Pines High School, now of the Baylor Bears, won the Big 12 basketball scoring title this season with an average of 19.8 points per game.
In what likely was junior guard Jamaal Franklin’s final game at San Diego State, he became a forgotten footnote to the biggest story of the NCAA Tournament. Nothing beats a good underdog story, and this is a great one.
When I heard UCLA’s Shabazz Muhammad is a year older than his old man has been telling people, it didn’t come as a surprise: The first time I saw him play for Bishop Gorman, he looked like Grady from “Sanford and Son.”
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.
Dunks are more exciting than free throws, and that’s stating the obvious, but Doug McDermott is the type of player who excites bettors even though he’s not a big-time dunker.
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.