When Does a Tournament Deserve Final Four?
If you want to pick a team as your own personal favorite for this weekend’s NCAA Final Four, you can put away your flow charts and scouting reports and Google searches. Pick Syracuse.
I have no particular feeling for Syracuse, but hunches and logic have long vanished from the scene of the over-hyped, overplayed NCAA basketball tournament as it wound its way to Houston over the last two weeks. Logic, to me, would say pick Villanova, which plays Oklahoma in Saturday’s 5 p.m. semifinal, although most folks plunking a few bucks down might argue that North Carolina is the clearcut favorite, as the Tar Heels go up against Syracuse in the 8:45 p.m. second semifinal.
I didn’t fill out a bracket sheet for the NCAA basketball tournament, and I usually don’t, although I enjoy watching certain select games. Sometimes three in a row. I was pulling hard for Wisconsin, and I was hoping a different Big Ten team might do it if the Badgers couldn’t. I earlier had wanted Yale to win, and then Wichita State, and later I thought it would be neat if the Oregon Ducks fowled up everybody’s theory and went all the way.
My reason for suggesting Syracuse is that I’ve always been fascinated by their nickname – Orange. And their uniforms flaunt the color impressively. Meanwhile, in the real world, I get to test drive new vehicles throughout the year, and last week I was driving a new Volkswagen CC sedan that was very impressive. It also was a very classy bluish silver color. This week, the fellow who drove a new vehicle to Duluth to swap with me presented me with a brand new Jeep Renegade – bright orange. In fact, it is a beautiful, penetrating orange color, rather than a trendy metallic or off-beat version of orange. Just, plain, orange.
I met the fellow for the car swap right after I got off the air from doing my daily KDAL radio talk-show, during which I had talked at some length about the four teams reaching the final four, including Syracuse, which had made an enormous comeback from a 54-39 deficit with 9:32 left to score 15 straight points and go on to claim a 68-62 triumph over Virginia at the Midwest Region final in Chicago. A few minutes later, here I was, climbing inside a Jeep Renegade that was so orange I declared it “Syracuse Orange.”
That’s enough logic for me.
Final, or Frozen, Four?
The NCAA basketball tournament is such an enormous venture that the nation’s governing body insists that everything else clear the decks and get out of its way. A few decades ago, when I wrote for the Minneapolis Tribune, our slick desk staff came up with the term “March Madness” to describe the often chaotic high school and college playoff and tournament season. And we routinely called every tournament, when it reached the semifinal stage, the “final four.”
Even then, those of us watching and writing about the hockey competition enjoyed covering the NCAA hockey “final four,” but suddenly one year, we were informed that we were no longer allowed to use that term, because it had been copyrighted by the NCAA to refer to the basketball tournament. Same with “March Madness.”
The arrogance of copyrighting normal words in our language bothered me, and I tried to get around it by using final four with lower-case letters. I mean, the four finalists in any tournament are, by definition, the final four, right? It didn’t work.
That set college hockey into a frenzy of creativity, and the powers-that-might-be came up “Frozen Four,” which works, actually. So now you get to differentiate between the Frozen Four and various league and women’s hockey tournaments which can range from Frozen Faceoff to Final Faceoff, to...who knows what all?
Women’s basketball, by the way, gets to share in using Final Four, and while the basketball tournament finishes with semifinals on this Saturday so they can wait and have the final on Monday, the women’s Final Four will be in Indianapolis and will send Syracuse against Washington, and Oregon State against Connecticut.
The elephant in the room, or gym, is UConn, which has won four straight NCAA women’s titles and something like 75 straight games. UConn simply doesn’t lose, and won its tournament games by an average of about 50 points. In the Bridgeport, Conn., Regional, UConn beat Mississippi Staste last Saturday 98-38. That’s a 60-point spread!
In Dallas, Oregon State surprised a powerful Baylor outfit, and at Lexington, Washington beat Stanford to gain the Final Four. At Sioux Falls, Syracuse beat Tennessee to advance. On Sunday, UConn plays Oregon State, and Syracuse plays Washington. We can pull for a giant upset. Me? I’m pulling for Syracuse! Think about it: Syracuse wasn’t expected to go anywhere, and the Syracuse Orange will play in both the men’s and women’s Final Fours.
UMD Softball Rolls
Skipping between days when UMD’s football team is off during spring practice, the UMD women’s softball team took over a corner of Malosky Stadium and opened its home season Tuesday afternoon by splitting with Moorhead State – or is it Minnesota State - Moorhead now?
UMD won the first game 4-1 and battled through the second before falline 5-4 in an extra inning in new coach Jen Walter’s home debut as UMD coach. Walter, of course, ran the St. Scholastica program to almost automatic league championships, just about a mile to the west of UMD.
The Bulldogs remain home for doubleheaders against Upper Iowa Saturday at 1 p.m., and Winona State Sunday at noon. We are hoping the weather forecast is a little milder than the return to winter that has been projected.
