Alex Harkaway
For the Review
This March I prepared the way I do every year. I filled out brackets. I entered pools. I read up on all the potential Cinderella stories I could find. I skipped class to watch CBS. But what did all that turn out to be for? A handful of predictable blowouts orchestrated by elite, top-seeded teams.
This was not the NCAA tournament I spent all year craving. The 12 highest-seeded teams in the tournament combined to go 24-0 in the first two rounds. All four number-one seeds advanced at least to the elite, and all eight elite teams were from one of the six power conferences (ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-10, SEC). What happened to competitive balance? To make matters worse, the furthest advancing team outside of the power conferences, Memphis, just lost highly-respected head coach John Calipari to Kentucky, one of college basketball’s most prestigious programs. Though this was a bad year for the underdogs, it was even worse last year when all four number-one seeds made it to the final four. In the long history of the tournament, that had yet to occur.
Where was a Davidson this year? Or a George Mason? Unheard of schools shocking the world is what March Madness is supposed to be all about. The thought of watching kids with no hype from conferences with no airtime taking it to the big, bad powerhouses of college hoops is what made me highlight mid-to-late March on my calendar every year. Now it seems the tournament has lost that which made it so great.
Next year I won’t be filling out a bracket, and I will be going to all of my March classes. March Madness is dead to me. From here on out, I’ll be looking forward to the B.C.S.