This year’s bracket making a racket
It’s midweek and I haven’t quite let go of last weekend, but I don’t think we’re done being amazed by this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.
My bracket needs a prescription for Accutane, but seven of my eight Elite Eight teams are still alive and four of them are playing Thursday night.
All four No. 1 seeds survived what USA TODAY’s Nicole Auerbach rightly suggested was the best first weekend ever for America’s best sporting event. Still, 4,5,6, 7, 10 and 11 seeds are in the mix on Friday night.
Whether you’re in a $10,000 winner-takes-all pool or part of a refrigerator rumble, take a look at your bombed-out brackets and tell me you don’t want this weekend to be just as insanely destructive.
You probably played it safe like I did and picked favorites, and what did it get you? Halfway through the first weekend I stopped putting blood-red crosses through those losers and gave in to a pleasure purer than chalk.
It started early on the first day with Little Rock rolling out their Trojan Horse for the heavily favored Purdue Boilermakers. And then the Ivy league throwbacks of Yale back-cutting the Baylor Human Highlighters out of the gym.
And the upsets went into Friday, with Middle Tennessee State playing a perfect game to beat Michigan State. And Stephen F. Austin led, apparently, by an actual working lumberjack, taking down West Virginia.
And if you haven’t seen Paul Jesperson’s half-court bank shot for Northern Iowa to gut Texas you probably do not live anywhere near Texas, like I do, or Iowa.
Down went Wichita State, a team that had to play its way into the tournament, Yale and Little Rock on Saturday. Stephen F. Austin’s new national hero, full-bearded Thomas Walkup, was no Paul Bunyan on Sunday. Middle Tennessee State and Hawaii had nothing left.
Northern Iowa did, or at least it seemed that way leading huge favorite Texas A&M by 12 with 33 seconds left in the second half. Space limitations for the Voices column prevent me from telling you all the crazy things that eventually led to one of the most epic collapses in tournament history.
I didn’t see it happen in real time because I was watching Wisconsin play Xavier. Now, I could have made this whole column about this game, but that isn’t a Wisconsin thing to do. Suffice to say, when my Badgers are on, we don’t toggle between games.
If someone in the professional basketball analysis class picked Wisconsin, I wasn’t made aware of it. And late in the second half, with the Musketeers up by nine, it looked like they were earning their pay.
Because this isn’t a sports column, let me skip the particulars to a play that has gotten lost in a blizzard of tweets, Instagrams and cellphone video loops: Badger Zak Showalter drawing an offensive foul, the most underrated play in college basketball, and giving the ball back to Wisconsin with 4.3 seconds left.
Without that charge I wouldn’t be on my computer right now looking for just one more angle showing Bronson Koenig ’s coffin corner game winner.
Turns out there was one big upset left. Who knew when I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s I would be going to a basketball school?
During the game, network cameras had been cutting to actor Bill Murray, whose son, Luke Murray, is an assistant coach for Xavier. Murray’s blank look, compounded by the big X on his baseball cap, was an instant tournament moment.
Wisconsin fans had an instant moment of their own. Everyone in Wisconsin can recite Murray’s pep talk for rescuing their captured Army unit from his movie, Stripes.
“C’mon, it’s Czechoslovakia,” he tells Harold Ramis. “We zip in, we pick ’ em up, we zip right out again. We’re not going to Moscow. It’s Czechoslovakia. It’s like going into Wisconsin.”
While he stood watching Koenig get mobbed, Murray might have been recalling Ramis’ reply:
“Well, I got the (expletive) kicked out of me in Wisconsin once. Forget it!”
I don’t think we’re done being amazed by this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.