Pitchin with Pritch: March Madness—it’s the best
The best time of the year is here. March Madness! The games began Friday and I am writing this on Saturday so don’t know what is going to happen from here on out.
But there was enough excitement early in the tournament to set the tone for the remainder of the tournament.
There were unexpected wins and it was easy to see that there are teams that you never hear much about until tournament time that are as athletic as the so-called Blue Bloods of the college game.
The Big 10 didn’t fare so well as Ohio State lost to Oral Roberts and Purdue lost to North Texas. Wisconsin fared better as they defeated North Carolina who probably in a normal year would not have made the tournament.
The Tarheels were 18-10 for the year and struggled most of the year.
One team from the Big 10 that I would have picked to get beat was Rutgers at 15-11 and they edge out Clemson by 4.
Saturday morning, I started by watching Georgetown and Colorado, which I thought would be a close game. It wasn’t as Colorado, who was averaging seven 3-pointers per game, already had seven in the first half.
Then the KU game started so I flipped over to that channel. They fell behind 10-2 right away so it was back to the Colorado game, where the Buffaloes were up by 27.
So, it was back to KU and Eastern Washington where KU had caught them and were leading by four.
So I had a decision to make—should I watch KU or go back over to Colorado.
That was a rhetorical question that I asked myself because nothing is probably going to interfere with me watching a KU game.
They had made a run and led Eastern Washington 26-19. That lead didn’t last long and KU was behind by eight at half time, 46-38. The Jayhawks did recover and got the win 93-84.
The Big 12 looked like a pretty good conference after the first round as they had six teams still in the tournament. Still a lot of basketball to be played and it should be exciting all the way to the finals.
Strange season
This season has been a strange one because of the Covid-19 problem.
It hit the early rounds as VCU was supposed to play Oregon. Apparently VCU didn’t even have enough players to start the game and had to withdraw from the tournament. As a result, Oregon advanced to the next round without playing.
The NCAA did not make this decision, according to information coming out of the different announcer’s programs in between games. The county where all the games are being played had their rules that were being followed.
That set of rules were also the reason that six of the officials slated to work the tournament got sent home. They had all gone to dinner together upon arriving at the site and one of them tested positive so all of them were kept out of the tournament.
In that group, two of them were officials from Nebraska—Kip Kissinger and John Higgins. I hope the rest of the tournament can get all the way to April 5 and the finals without Covid-19 causing problems.
Outstanding skills
One thing for sure is that all the teams that made it to the NCAA tournament have players with outstanding skills. Some teams just have a little more than others.
It is hard to go through the brackets and really grasp the fact that Blue Blood teams like Kentucky and Duke are not in the tournament. You just sort of expect them to be there every year.
It is kind of like having a football team that won nine games a year forever and then it was decided to change that coach and bingo, you don’t have to put up with winning 9 games a year.
Not sure that is what was supposed to happen and I would bet that Duke and Kentucky will recover and be back next year.