The first day turned out to be a little disappointing, from a fan's perspective. There were only two upsets by seed, and one of those was an 8-9 game. Other than that, the higher seed won all the games, and most of them weren't all that close.
CBS demonstrated a real gift for switching to a close game right before it became a blowout. They did this three times in rapid succession in the afternoon session, leaving Georgetown's thrashing of Belmont to look in on Old Dominion just as Butler started to pull away, then changing to Oral Roberts just as Washington State caught fire, and finally going to Penn when the Quakers had tied the game, only to see Texas A&M blow it open from there. Whee.
The one moderately surprising result of the day was Duke's loss to Virginia Commonwealth University, on a last-second jumper by Eric Maynor. Maynor, you might remember, is the VCU guard who single-handedly turrned around the game against George Mason for the CAA title with a couple of open-court steals, scoring something like nine points in thirty seconds. He played a brilliant game against Duke as well, dogging Greg Paulus all night, and scoring a bunch of key baskets down the stretch.
As hinted above, thise was only mildly surprising to me. CBS and ESPN were making it sound like a huge deal that Duke got upset, but the plain fact is that Duke just wasn't that good this year. They have a bunch of players who were highly regarded coming out of high school, but they haven't quite lived up to expectations, or clicked as a team. I thought Duke would probably win, just because they had such a significant size advantage over VCU, but the Rams did a great job of making it a guard-oriented game, and hit big shots when they needed to.
Mostly, though, it wa a fairly boring day, which I attribute to the fact that I stayed home to watch the games. Today, I have to go to a meeting at 1:00, which will eat most of the afternoon, so I expect a whole bunch of spectacular finishes and big upsets, just from the sheer perversity of the universe...
- Log in to post comments
And Dave Munger is 16 of 16! Damn good thing for him he doesn't teach at Salem College...
Did not see any games. Other than Duke doesn't sound like I missed much yesterday. The old sports bar where they had every game on different TVs is now gone. That was always fun to take an extended lunch, have a drink, some grub and watch the games with some friends. Oh well.