Buffalo’s Connecticut comeback.
Orlando’s unthinkable ending for T.J. Warren and Mark Gottfried.
Spokane’s spectacular display by North Dakota State, felling Lon Kruger’s lads.
Three cities in three different corners of the United States.
Three overtimes.
Three tales of human emotions, swinging wildly before resting on opposite sides of the line between victory and defeat.
The basketball wasn’t brilliant, mind you. It wasn’t what you’d show to your kids at a coaching clinic. It wasn’t anything you’d frame at a museum.
But it was magic. It was March. It was more memorable than most of what you’re going to see during a calendar year of sports in this country. (We’ll leave the World Cup or Premier League Football in a different category.)
How to sift through it all? A few common threads form the proper starting point.
A few characteristics define the NCAA tournament for fans because they surface to some extent in just about every edition of the Big Dance, year after year. The most endearing trait of all is when the no-name bench player, pressed into service out of desperation or a coach’s intent to shake his team into action, finds a few thunderbolts and forges a moment he’ll remember for the rest of his life. Tim Henderson of Louisville created just such a moment in last year’s Final Four, but it’s rare to see someone emerge on the third weekend of the Dance. It’s more common to witness these fairy-tale stories on the first weekend of this eternally remarkable tournament.
It’s preposterous, really — preposterously beautiful and charming, which is why our hearts are captured at a deep level.
Come on, now — in Buffalo, no one ever could have expected Connecticut freshman center Amida Brimah to get a stickback bucket-and-foul off a missed layup by Shabazz Napier (as though you’d expect Napier to miss a late-game layup, right?), enabling the Huskies to somehow take Saint Joseph’s into overtime and then steal a win from the Hawks. Brimah had been averaging 4.3 points per game, and he had been hitting only 57 percent of his foul shots. His “and-one” free throw to tie the game looked strikingly comfortable. Without that play, Connecticut doesn’t win a game in which Saint Joe’s controlled the action for almost all 40 regulation minutes.
In Orlando, no one could have expected North Carolina State’s T.J. Warren — one of the elite shotmakers in the sport — to miss 8 of 14 foul shots. No one could have imagined that N.C. State, which really looked like the 5 seed and not the 12 in its game against Saint Louis, would gack away an 11-point lead in the final three minutes, plus a six-point lead in the final 57 seconds.
Yet, the comeback-cum-collapse happened, and it wouldn’t have been possible without some hidden faces popping out of the chaos and clutter for the Billikens. Jake Barnett scored only 6 points on Thursday night and hit only two shots. One of them, though, was a three that sliced a five-point N.C. State lead to two (68-66) with 46 seconds left, intensifying the game pressure that eventually overwhelmed the nervous Wolfpack at the foul line.
In overtime, with two of Saint Louis’ starters having fouled out, other players — Austin McBroom (2 points), Tanner Lancona (a key late foul shot), and John Manning (2 points) — all contributed to a shorthanded team, playing superb defense against an opponent loaded with offensive weapons. SLU has looked like a spent team the past three weeks, and it frankly looked wiped out for the first 39 minutes of this game.
The Billikens and their anonymous role players never stopped trying, though, and when N.C. State left the door open for them, the SLU crew walked right through.
In Spokane, a North Dakota State freshman named Carlin Dupree — having sat on the bench for over 43 minutes — brought a paltry 3-points-per-game scoring average and a 58-percent free-throw shooting clip into the final two minutes of overtime in an NCAA tournament game. Dupree, acting as though he’d been playing squarely in the spotlight for 10 years, popped in two foul shots and added a tough field goal make against good Oklahoma defense to knock out a 5 seed from the conference viewed by most hoopheads as the best in college basketball this season.
These stories make the month of March for the casual fan who can’t watch college hoops all the time, but who turns on the television at this time of year, expecting to be romanced by sports. March Madness, through the prism of these kinds of human stories, usually manages to be a satisfying lover, and that’s why its relationship with the sports-fan public is so strong.
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Yet…
… this is only one part of a much larger theater of events. While the human-interest stories capture the heart, there is the cold and unforgiving side of a cutthroat profession. Coaches who lose in this cauldron of expectation and longing are subjected to withering scrutiny, even though the reality of this tournament is that kids do strange things in the heat of the moment.
You can legitimately point out that the losses North Carolina State and Oklahoma suffered on Thursday night were and are fairly typical kinds of losses for Mark Gottfried and Lon Kruger. It is in fact true that neither man has consistently been able to bottle up a winning March formula, though they’ve both had their moments, Gottfried in an Elite Eight and Kruger in one most improbable Final Four at Florida in 1994.
It’s also true that Gottfried unquestionably committed coaching malpractice of the worst order when he left T.J. Warren in to give a fifth (disqualifying) foul late in overtime against Saint Louis, an act for which he should receive a fair degree of criticism.
Yet, in the end, what really cost N.C. State and Oklahoma? Foul shots. Both sides missed multiple charity pitches in the last 50 seconds of regulation, N.C. State to a much larger degree. Moreover, both the Wolfpack and Sooners got quality shots at the end of regulation in tied games.
Gottfried will come under more criticism because he has presided over more of these kinds of losses (not necessarily losses filled with free throw failures, but losses marked by late-game meltdowns). Kruger might get a little more slack because he’s led five schools to NCAA tourneys, more than any other coach in Division I history. Yet, you know that both men will be fiercely questioned by their respective fan bases. Will specific, granular critiques be merited? Surely. Will the larger conclusions (“He can’t win in March, the bum”) be fair?
On balance, probably not.
The young-man magic over here, the coaching criticism firestorms over there… all in one wildly colorful and clamorous bundle we call March Madness.
It was the best of times for some. It was the worst of times for others.
It was a tale of three cities that went into overtime on the first remarkable night of an already-memorable NCAA tournament.
