In the past, the tournaments that are "March Madness" have been a bit difficult to follow because there are just so many teams involved. The masses normally end up only watching the games of either their team or the big 8 or something like that, but the most exciting tournaments in the past have been ones where a team that was under-ranked would make it a lot further in the tournament than people thought they would.
One of my earliest memories of this happening was when Gonzaga was a relatively unknown school and they ended up making it to the final four, I forget what year that was but it was something like 1996.
This year, all of the number 1 seeds made it through to the final-4 which I guess was kind of expected. Or is it?
While one would assume that most of the time the number 1 seeds would make it through to the end, believe it or not all of the number 1 teams making it through to the final-four. In fact, it has only ever happened one other time in history and that was in 2008. Ironically, the same venue in San Antonio was where that showdown happened as well.
I can't possibly follow all of the NCAA basketball teams and I don't even try. I will glance at the national rankings every now and then but I don't often even watch an entire game because I grew up in football country where basketball was just something that we kind of passed the time with waiting for October to roll around.
Looking at the entire bracket, there was only a handful of surprise losses and perhaps these weren't really a surprise after all because it is quite common for some teams to end up being ranked higher than they actually deserve due to being in certain conferences.
Ol' Miss making it past UNC was expected but them defeating Iowa State was not. The fact that they basically dominated the game was very unexpected. They gave Michigan State a run for the money as well in the sweet-16 game as the Spartans won that game by a mere 3 points.
I think the closest thing we had to a "Cinderella story" this time around was Arkansas defeating Kansas in the opener, and then defeating number 2 ranked St. Johns in the very next game. In their next game they were narrowly defeated by Texas Tech who was a heavy favorite just like every game Arkansas was in leading up to that game. As far as the rest of the tournament was concerned, McNeese (who?) defeating Clemson was unexpected but then they got trounced in the very next game.
So in the final we have Duke, which is always expected, then we have Auburn, Florida, and Houston.
The thing here is that Duke has absolutely dominated all of their games with there never seeming as though the opposition even had a chance against them. They won their great-8 game by 20 points and really, that doesn't happen very often. Only one team game them a little bit of trouble and that was Arizona. But when you watch that game you can see that Duke let off the gas towards the end because they no longer needed more points. I believe they could have won by a lot more
So while it would be exciting if someone would give Duke a good game, I honestly don't really see that happening. I believe they are just a lot better than anyone else in the tournamenet.
What do you think?