By Edgar Rivas, Jr. –
“Dipsy-doo dunkeroo slam-jam-bam, baby!” says Dick Vitale, college basketball’s Don King. March Madness, a 64-team playoff event, can be viewed as college basketball’s heavyweight bout. The one-and-done NCAA Tournament is equivalent to February’s Super Bowl, June’s NBA Finals, or October’s World Series.
The appetizer to the NCAA Tournament is the conference tournament. The winners of the conference tournament earn an automatic bid to March Madness. In our New Jersey Athletic Conference (NJAC), William Paterson won the conference tournament by defeating Richard Stockton 67-63. They earned an automatic bid the 2012 NCAA Div. III Tournament.
Our very own Gothic Knights men’s basketball team, who were ranked #5 in the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Tournament, made it to the quarterfinals but eventually lost to Mount Saint Mary’s 73-62.
The NCAA Tournament never fails to live up to the March Madness moniker. In the 1982 championship, Michael Jordan made the game-winning shot vs. the Patrick Ewing-led Georgetown in a game that included eventual NBA legends.
Who can forget Duke’s Christian Laettner’s last second shot off a Grant Hill full court pass vs. Kentucky? The shot haymaker Kentucky’s title chances and left coach Rick Pitino in distraught.
As much as the game-winners are great, the upsets anchor the madness of March. In 2007, Virginia Commonwealth, the #11 seed, upset #1 Duke and sent the tournament-favored Blue Devils packing back to Durham earlier than expected.
Who remembers when Northern Iowa shocked Kansas in 2010? Ali Farokhmanesh made a very crucial 3-pointer in the second round of the tournament.
The media coverage has been also a thing to watch. In its history, CBS was the only network that covered these games. Nowadays, TNT, TBS, and TruTV have joined the ride. Jim Nantz, Verne Lundquist, Ian Eagle, and Marv Albert are the few names that have the great privilege to call these amazing games.
One phenomenon of this tournament is the bracket. Who doesn’t go to their nearest store and buy the local newspaper just to cut out the bracket from the Sports section or print out the bracket from the computer?
The fill-in-of-the-brackets are as huge as fantasy sports. A fan would scratch his/her head in deciding who to pick for each game to avoid any bracket-buster, a term used when a team who isn’t expected to go anywhere actually goes somewhere in the tournament or for upsets.
As this tournament comes to an end, take a look back at the game-winners, upsets, and wire-for-wire games and ask yourself if you felt the March Madness or not. It’s awesome, baby, with a capital A!
