Mixed day in Buckeye-land

As the Ohio State hoopsters prepare to start their expected deep NCAA Tournament run this afternoon, the football team suffers another setback as the five-game suspensions of the five players involved in Tattoogate are upheld by the NCAA, and Jim Tressel volunteers to sit out the same five games as punishment for knowing about their transgressions and not reporting them.

I've already expressed in this space what I think about the rule that ensnared the players, which is basically that they didn't hurt anybody, so what's the big deal. But the rules are in place, and Jim Tressel, who is supposed to be this great integrity guy, knows what they are, or at the very least SHOULD know what they are. On the one hand, I find it hard to fault him for not wanting his players to be punished for not hurting anyone; on the other hand, he knows darn well he and they are all subject to NCAA rules.

Of course, his volunteering to sit out five games doesn't mean he'll serve a five-game suspension and then show up for the Nebraska game in week six. The NCAA is still investigating, and could make his punishment more severe. All this over a few tattoos and trinkets. Crazy.

In other doings:

* The basketball Buckeyes haven't broken any NCAA rules lately, so long as anyone's aware, and are about three hours from starting play as the top overall seed in the Big Dance, against 16-seed Texas-San Antonio. They will of course cruise through this first-round matchup; the next 16 seed that beats a 1 will be the first ever, and these Buckeyes aren't going to lose to some pipsqueak upstart in their home state. That said, there are some potholes waiting for them in the later rounds. Likely opponents within the East Regional include Kentucky, Syracuse and North Carolina, all of which have won national titles in the last 15 years (albeit with different players than they currently have).

* Akron, the college I'm currently attending, is almost certainly about to be eliminated by Notre Dame, but it's nice to see a Northeast Ohio school in the tourney. It looked earlier in the season like Cleveland State might be the real deal, but they foundered right around the time I transferred from Cleveland State to Akron. Hmmm ... (By the way, don't ask me to name any players on either team. I don't want to embarrass you.)

* The Cavaliers won Wednesday night in Sacramento. That's the good news. Hey, there's been precious little of that for this team this year, so we might as well savor it. ... But the bad news is, they followed that up with a never-competitive, absolutely shameful 41-point loss in Portland. They were losing at various points by scores of 24-2, 35-6, 56-18, 74-33 ... you get the idea. It was only because the last three-eighths of the game were considered garbage time that the Blazers didn't double our score for the game. Had they kept their proverbial foot on our throat, it would have been even uglier. This is one of the worst teams in Cavaliers history, and that's not a small feat.

* The Indians' regular season starts in exactly two weeks, and while there's little reason to think they will contend this season, there are reasons to watch. I'm particularly excited about young catcher Carlos Santana, who was just mentioned on ESPN's SweetSpot blog as a potential breakout player for 2011. Some things I didn't know before I read that: Santana walked more than he struck out last year, between Columbus and Cleveland; and his combined AAA-MLB on-base percentage was .529. That's right, .529! Do you have any idea how good that is? Well, I'll tell you. The only players ever to post better OBPs over a full major-league season are named Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Barry Bonds. Obviously Santana's feat is not in the same league as theirs (both literally and figuratively), but still, this is a special player. And he's not a corner outfielder, as all three of those men were. He's a catcher! A catcher who can get on base with great regularity is a rare find indeed. Joe Mauer's about the only one I can think of, among current major leaguers, and even Mauer doesn't walk that much.

An instant classic in Indianapolis

That national championship game last night was one for the ages. I'm still a little bit disappointed that Butler didn't win — they came oh, so close — but the Bulldogs have absolutely no reason to hang their heads.

Lots of people have written lots of words about what a great game this was, and I'm not likely to top them just dashing off some thoughts on my lunch break. But I can't help wondering what would have happened if Gordon Hayward's six-foot jumper would have gone in with five seconds left. Duke would have had five seconds to run a play, and obviously might still have won it, but it would have been an exciting sequence.

And just imagine the celebration by the Butler players if Hayward's half-court shot had gone in at the buzzer. The Duke players would have collapsed in agony. This might have been the greatest championship game in recent memory, but that would have made it one of the greatest sporting events I ever saw in my life, right up there with the Miracle on Ice in 1980, which I don't even remember that well because I was only eight years old.

It wasn't to be. Give the Blue Devils credit, they got it done. Whether tiny Butler University truly had the second-best men's basketball team in the land this year is open to debate, but they certainly were the second-best team over the last month. And they were just inches from being the very best.

Congratulations, Butler. I know you didn't win the title, but you sure gave us some great memories.

George Mason, part two? Not really

We'll start today's post with a response to a previous post, regarding Butler's upset of Syracuse, from Of Fair Hooker's most frequent responder, Jeff Brown:

Mullett, as I'm sure you've heard by now, the Butler Bulldogs won their regional final game as well and are hosting the Final Four next weekend.

This team is a very, very good team.

They're much better, in my view, than George Mason, the other mid-major that went to the Final Four in 2006.

They actually have a chance to win the national title, whereas George Mason had zero chance.

I'm not saying that they will win the title, but I would not be the least bit surprised, not after seeing 3 of their first 4 tourney games thus far.

Of course, the Bulldogs are not technically hosting the Final Four, but Jeff is right in that it will be right in their back yard. Butler plays its home games at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, but the Final Four will be played at Lucas Oil Stadium, the year-and-a-half-old home of the Colts. The two arenas are six miles apart. So yes, it will basically be a home game (or two).

Let's take a look at that George Mason team from 2006. The Patriots entered the NCAA Tournament at 25-7, playing in the Colonial Athletic Association, and were an 11-seed. They had failed to win their conference tournament, but received one of the last few at-large bids to that year's Madness. Give them credit for their Tourney run — they beat 6-seed Michigan State, then 3-seed North Carolina, then 7-seed Wichita State before improbably knocking off top-seed Connecticut in a thrilling overtime regional final. Most observers agreed that Connecticut would beat George Mason at least nine times out of 10, but this happened to be that one time out of 10. The Patriots then fell to eventual national champion Florida in the Final Four, losing by 15 in a game that was never particularly competitive.

These Butler Bulldogs are a different story entirely. They entered the tournament at 28-4, playing in the Horizon League — admittedly, roughly comparable to the CAA in terms of quality. Butler won its conference tournament, mauling Wright State by 25 in the final. The Bulldogs started relatively slowly, but haven't lost a game since December 22, when a loss at Alabama-Birmingham dropped them to 8-4. It's worth noting that that loss to UAB was their only loss to a team that didn't qualify for March Madness; the others were to Minnesota, Clemson and Georgetown.

Since then, they have rattled off 24 straight victories. They came into the Big Dance as the 5-seed. They easily defeated 12-seed UTEP, then had a surprisingly tough game against 13-seed Murray State before righting the ship to beat top-seed Syracuse in the regional semifinal, followed by Saturday's seven-point defeat of 2-seed Kansas State. Their next game is against fellow 5-seed Michigan State, who won an instant classic yesterday against Tennessee. I think Butler will beat the Spartans — in which case they'll face off against the Duke-West Virginia winner for the title. That Duke-West Virginia game will be a battle (which I predict West Virginia will win), and the winner of that game should be the favorite in the National Championship game. But the Bulldogs have already proven, by beating Syracuse and Kansas State, that they can play against anybody.

No mid-major has won it all since 1990, when Jerry Tarkanian's UNLV Runnin' Rebels beat Duke by 30 in the title game. Most people who are old enough to remember that don't really think of that Larry Johnson-Anderson Hunt UNLV squad as a mid-major — they were in fact a 1-seed in that tournament — but they did come from the Mountain West. So it's been 20 years since it's happened. Will we see it this year? Probably not, but that's what I'm rooting for.

Another one-seed bites the dust

Oh, my goodness, did you see that Butler-Syracuse game last night? The fifth-seeded Butler Bulldogs of the tiny Horizon League (which includes Cleveland State, in case you didn't know) dominated top seed Syracuse in the first half, but the Orange came out swinging after the break and finally took a 40-39 lead on Wes Johnson's three-pointer with 13:29 to go. But there was no quit in the mighty Bulldogs.

From that point on, it was a heavyweight prize fight, with each fighter taking the other's best punches and coming back for more. Butler came back to take a five-point lead on Gordon Hayward's trey with 9:41 left, but Syracuse tied it a little over a minute later, and it was a see-saw battle after that. Kris Joseph's dunk with 5:23 remaining gave Syracuse its biggest lead of the night, after which neither team scored for 2:10 of game time. Butler's Ronald Nored broke the proverbial silence with a three-pointer at the 3:13 mark, and the Bulldogs were off to the races.

In Butler's next five possessions, Matt Howard scored on a layup after blocking a shot at the other end, Willie Veasley hit a three-pointer and a two-point tip-in, and Hayward made one of two free throws. During the same stretch, the Orange turned the ball over once, committed an offensive foul, and missed three shots, each of which was rebounded by Butler. Scoop Jardine finally hit a meaningless layup with 34 seconds left, but by that point, the Dogs had built a seven-point lead, and it would have taken a minor miracle for the favorites to prevail.

There was no minor miracle for the Syracuse Orange, but Willie Veasley seemed to have divine intervention on his side. That three-pointer he hit to put his team up four bounced high off the rim, caromed off the backboard about two or three feet away from the hoop, then fell through the hoop. And the tip-in that followed it was crazy too. I have no idea where it came from, and I saw it happen. In any case, whether they have God on their side or not, the Butler Bulldogs have reached the Elite Eight for the first time in history.

That wasn't the only exciting game of the night, though it was the only one I saw personally. Kansas State knocked off Xavier in a double-overtime thriller that ended way past my bedtime. The other two games were snoozers, with double-digit seeds falling to big favorites — two-seed West Virginia beat 11-seed Washington by 13, and one-seed Kentucky (which has to be considered the top choice to win it all after Kansas got eliminated) topped 12-seed Cornell by 17.

The Buckeyes play in St. Louis tonight against Tennessee, who they knocked out of the tournament last year. Ohio State is of course the top remaining seed in its bracket, due to Northern Iowa's upset of Kansas last weekend. The aforementioned NIU Panthers will follow against Michigan State, playing without Kalin Lucas. Those should both be interesting games. In Houston, Saint Mary's — the only remaining double-digit seed in the tournament — will likely see its Cinderella run end against Baylor, and Purdue — playing without Robbie Hummel — is probably going to see its dream end against top-seeded Duke. But this is March Madness, ladies and gentlemen. You just never know.

Let's hear it for the Bobcats!

As a graduate of Miami University, I'm legally obligated to have mixed feelings about the Ohio Bobcats' mauling of Georgetown in what is undoubtedly the biggest upset of the NCAA Tournament so far. But the Miami-Ohio rivalry is far from Ohio State-Michigan, and any time a Mid-American Conference school pulls off a March Madness victory, it's good for the whole league. So I say, go get 'em, 'Cats.

The boys from Athens had already turned in one of the more improbable March runs I've seen in a long time, just by winning the MAC Tournament at the Gund Arena last weekend. They were just 17-14 going into the conference tourney, including a 7-9 record within the MAC, making them the 9-seed for the little dance. They needed overtime just to get past Ball State in the first round. Then they upset top-seeded Kent State, followed by my alma mater, before beating Akron in overtime to win the conference title. That alone was unlikely enough.

But to beat 3-seed Georgetown by 14 points in the NCAAs? Who could possibly have predicted that? The Hoyas came in at 23-10, playing in the much-tougher Big East, having lost their conference championship by just two points to West Virginia. How could they lose to a 21-14 team from the lowly MAC? ... That, my friends, is why we love March Madness so much.

The state's other two schools open play today. Xavier plays Minnesota at 12:25, and Ohio State faces California-Santa Barbara at about 9:35. The Buckeyes are a decent bet to go a long way in this tournament — but of course, that's what they said about Georgetown.

Go Memphis!

I don't have any particular affinity for John Calipari and the Memphis Tigers, nor do I have any particular animosity for them. I do have a little bit of a soft spot for them because they don't play in one of the Big Six conferences, and because they've never won a national title. The Kansas Jayhawks have taken two, most recently in 1988. So in the absence of any other rooting interest, I'd probably be pulling for the Tigers tonight anyway. But if they should happen to win tonight's game, they'll win me $145 in one of the NCAA Tournament pools I entered this year.

Why did I pick Memphis? I just took a look at their record and schedule, and felt they were as good as anybody. I knew most of the national prognosticators were picking North Carolina, some were saying it would be UCLA, and a few were thinking Kansas, but very few were talking seriously about Memphis. Like most tourney pools, this one is heavily weighted toward the late games, and tonight's title game is worth 15 points (compared to 10 in the semifinals, 7 in the Elite Eight, and so on). Knowing that in a tournament pool with 44 participants, it was unlikely that I'd be able to stay ahead all the way through, I thought I'd take the unpopular pick and give myself a chance to leapfrog over some others if it should happen that way. And that's just the situation I've set up for myself. I'm currently in 8th place, 12 points behind the leader. But nobody ahead of me has picked Memphis.

I've entered at least one tournament pool every year since about 1990, and I've won them twice before. I was in college when I won in 1992, in a pool run by a couple of guys living in my dorm, but I never got the money because the morons told people they could pay later, and nobody paid. A co-worker and I were running our own pool in the late '90s, and I won that one in '99, when Connecticut defeated Duke in the title game. I used the same sort of logic in that one as I did this year, which was that everybody else would be picking Duke, so I made the less-popular pick. That strategy almost backfired then, because I was actually leading going into the title game and would have had it clinched early if I'd picked Duke. But Rip Hamilton and Jake Voskuhl's Huskies pulled it out for me.

I'm feeling pretty good going into tonight's game -- Memphis is a 2-point favorite in Vegas -- but Kansas is a darned good team. We'll see.

Madness indeed

I apologize for the recent scarceness of my posts; I've been struggling with a nasty cold and just don't have much energy for anything. But it's the weekend, and I think I've got enough starch to sit in a chair and type for a little while.

Anyway, after a relatively staid first day of the NCAA Tournament (Duke's last-minute squeaker notwithstanding), things got absolutely insane on Friday. The best moment was Ty Rogers hitting a three as time expired in overtime to lift 12-seed Western Kentucky to a 101-99 win over 5-seed Drake. WKU's Tyrone Brazelton made it possible by drawing the defense to him, then kicking it out to Rogers. It was a brilliant moment. Bob Knight, who I must admit really knows his basketball, called it maybe the most impressive thing he's seen in college basketball all season.

But that was far from the only big upset on Friday. There was 13-seed Siena's surprisingly easy 83-62 win over 4-seed Vanderbilt, 12-seed Villanova's come-from-behind 75-69 victory against Clemson, and in another thriller, 13-seed San Diego's 70-69 overtime upset of 4-seed Connecticut.

If Duke had fallen to Belmont on Thursday, that would have been probably the biggest upset in tournament history, but San Diego's win was the biggest of this year's event. The UConn Huskies are one of the top eight or ten programs in the country, and have won two national championships in the last decade. The San Diego Toreros came in having never won an NCAA Tournament game, and only even making the tourney three times. As the Associated Press story on the game reports, the opening jump ball for the game featured 6'6" Rob Jones for USD vs. 7'3" Hasheem Thabeet for Connecticut. Jones didn't even bother to jump, because he knew he couldn't get it. It was the same match-up on the overtime tip, but this time, Jones was charged up and full of adrenaline after 40 minutes of basketball -- and Thabeet still won the tip, but barely. That's a neat microcosm of the game, and it would have been perfect if Jones had beaten Thabeet for the OT tipoff. De'Jon Jackson was the hero for the Toreros, hitting a long jumper with 1.2 seconds left in overtime, and then intercepting UConn's inbound pass.

Of course, as a Northeast Ohioan, I was disappointed at Kent State's performance Thursday against UNLV. They wound up making it respectable at the end, losing 71-58, but that was after scoring just TEN POINTS in the first half. The Golden Flashes turned the ball over 17 times in the first half, and missed a whole lot of shots. They played worse than I would have thought them capable of playing. Lifted from the AP's story:

"The first half of basketball was just so unlike how we played all year," Kent State coach Jim Christian said. "We just came out and played with no confidence and just made silly mistake after silly mistake."

Kent played a whole lot better in the second half, and actually outscored the Runnin' Rebels 48-40 after the intermission, but they just had too big a hole to climb out of.

One Ohio team remains after the first round, and it's the Xavier Musketeers, who rallied to overcome a second-half deficit and eliminate Georgia on Thursday. I suppose I'll root for them, even though Xavier's a Cincinnati school. I also generally root for Big Ten schools that aren't in Ann Arbor, and Wisconsin's got a chance to go deep. But whatever happens, I'm sure we've got a few fantastic finishes left to enjoy.

Today in sports history -- Loyola Marymount

Twenty years ago today, Loyola Marymount and Wyoming played what was at that time the highest-scoring game in NCAA Tournament history, barring overtime. Paul Westhead's young Loyola Marymount team, led by USC transfers and high-school teammates Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, won that game 119-115. LMU had played literally dozens of high-scoring games that year, due to Westhead's unorthodox run-and-gun style. The defensive philosophy was, hey, if your guy gets past you for an easy basket, don't worry about it, just beat him down the floor to the offensive end. With the players they had, it worked pretty well; but Westhead tried to put in the same system with the Denver Nuggets, and discovered that mediocre talent won't win games with that system (nor, one assumes, with any other). In 1990-91, the Nuggets scored 119 points a game -- and allowed 131.

Anyway, those '88 Loyola Marymount Lions went just as far as the round of 32, losing in the second round to North Carolina by a final score of 123-97. LMU got back to the tourney in '89, but lost in the first round to Arkansas, 120-101. And in 1990, the Lions made the run that got Kimble onto the cover of Sports Illustrated.

During a West Coast Conference tournament game that year, would-be future NBA star Hank Gathers collapsed and died on the court due to a heart condition. The first signs of trouble had appeared in December 1989, when Gathers collapsed during a game and was found to have an abnormal heartbeat that was exacerbated by intense physical activity -- which any college basketball game is, but especially so with the style that Loyola Marymount was playing. LMU doctors felt the beta blockers he was taking were affecting his play, and cut back on his dosage. He was not seeing any doctors that were not in the employ of Loyola Marymount University.

On March 4, 1990, during the WCC tournament, Gathers scored on an alley-oop dunk against Portland, putting heavily favored Loyola Marymount up 25-13. As he tried to go back down the court to the defensive end, he crumpled to the floor, and never got up. He was pronounced dead on arrival at an area hospital.

The conference tournament was canceled, and LMU was pronounced the conference champion based on its regular-season championship. The surviving Lions dedicated any and all NCAA Tournament games they would play to Gathers, and were given an 11 seed. In tribute to Gathers, a lefty, Kimble shot all his free throws left-handed in the tourney, and made most of them. Perhaps inspired by their fallen teammate, they proceeded to make one of the most memorable runs ever through the tournament. They beat New Mexico State 111-92 in the first round before setting a new tournament record in the second round against Michigan, in a 149-115 game. It was the most points ever scored by one team in an NCAA tournament game, as well as the most points ever scored by both teams -- and Michigan tied Wyoming's two-year-old record for most points scored by the losing team in a regulation game. Incredibly, the Lions then beat Alabama just 62-60 in the Sweet Sixteen, before falling 131-101 to eventual national champion UNLV.

Spring Insanity

It's March Madness time, ladies and gentlemen. I've already filled out my bracket for one tournament pool I've been invited to participate in, and I won't tell you who I picked to win it, but I'll tell you it almost rhymes with "stem fist."

Naturally, I'm disappointed that Ohio State didn't get in, after those big wins over Purdue and Michigan State. But the Buckeyes didn't get very far in the Big Ten tourney, falling to those same Spartans in the quarterfinals. I noticed in the last couple of days that ESPN's Joe Lunardi had OSU in his "last four in" for a while, and then on Sunday, after the Georgia Bulldogs pulled the SEC tournament title out of their collective posterior, the Bucks had moved to "last four out." I think it kind of stinks, but there are only 65 spots, so every time somebody gets one, somebody else has to lose one. And every team, Ohio State included, had a chance to earn an automatic bid by winning their conference tournament.

Florida also missed the cut, which means it's the first time since 1980 that both NCAA Tournament title game participants got shut out of the tourney entirely the following year. That was the year after Michigan State and Indiana State met up in an epic final, and respective stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird went pro.

Ohio State's not the only Ohio school to be snubbed. Dayton went 21-10 despite some injuries, and beat Pittsburgh and Louisville. The Flyers finished with the nation's 32nd-best RPI. They got hosed.

Anyway, with no Ohio State in the field, I'm pulling for Kent State (which got a 9 seed) and whatever underdogs might happen to emerge. It should prove interesting.