South Carolina is America’s newest sports darlings
It’s amazing how quickly things happen and how perceptions can change on the outcome of a ball game. For instance, in one fell swoop, South Carolina became the favorite team of more than one-half of America by simply defeating the hated, arrogant, snooty, overbearing Blue Devils of Duke and their ferret-like coach, Mike Krzyzewski.
The mighty Gamecocks from Columbia, guided this year by one Frank Martin, he who is short of NCAA pedigree but long on coaching skill, matched the Darth Vader leader of the Devils move for move and answered every Duke challenge with vengeance and fearsome efficiency and derring-do.
Poof, Professor Martin did most folks a favor. Yes, America, enjoy this moment, because Duke has an even better class of recruits coming in next year than they did when they brought in its No. 1-ranked class this year, and Mike Krzyzewski doesn’t stay down long and comes back with a mighty sword and a long memory.
In order to continue as America’s darlings, the Gamecocks must now take care of the almost equally despicable Baylor Bears, who are despicable not because of anything that happened on the hardwood, but off the football field. Baylor’s football program is accused, as you probably know, with 52 alleged rapes over a four-year period. The round ball guys aren’t really guilty of anything but association.
So March Madness has really been mad as both top-seeded Villanova and No. 2-seeded Louisville have also been dispatched, and that is what makes this whole thing fun and worthwhile.
Other stuff
Big time schools that have never reached the Final Four include Alabama, Tennessee, Gonzaga, Vanderbilt, Arizona State and BYU. … Top coaches to never make the Final Four include former Temple coach John Chaney and former Maryland coach Lefty Driesell. … The schools that have reached the Final Four most often are Kansas (28), North Carolina (27) and Arizona (25). …
In case you wondered, ex-president Barack Obama, in his annual March Madness bracket, picked North Carolina to defeat Duke in the finals, and UConn to defeat Notre Dame in the women’s finals. …
from B1
West Virginia player Tarik Phillips got into a verbal confrontation with the Notre Dame band. … Some folks just gotta show their ignorance. A confederate flag was flown in an adjacent lot to the Greensville, South Carolina, basketball venue. … Michigan coach John Beilein has already earned more than $100,000 in bonus money during his Wolverines’ run through the Big Ten tourney and their wins in the NCAAs. contract past 2017-18, a date the school and the coach had mutually agreed upon for him to leave. … Indiana fired coach Tom Crean; Oklahoma State’s Brad Underwood resigned to take the Illinois job. Underwood had been at OSU for less than 12 months. North Carolina, Colorado, Boston College, Western Michigan Maryland.… Alabama
Jalen Hurts CBS Sports says five Cinderella college football teams next season might be Syracuse, Kansas State, South Florida, Mississippi State and BYU. (I agree. That would be Cinderella.) … The only teams to win both a bowl game and a game in March Madness this time around were Florida, Florida State, Southern Cal, Baylor, Wisconsin and, yes, Northwestern. … The mystery of Tom Brady’s missing Super Bowl jersey has been solved. The FBI says they recovered the jersey from this year as well as one from 2015. The jerseys were in the possession of a member of the international media. The jerseys were in Mexico. … Former Florida
star defensive back Myron begins his medical residency in July at Harvard in neurosurgery.