Baseball has the World Series, Football the Superbowl, individual sports like Tennis and Golf, have four “majors” a year, NCAA has the Football and Basketball (“March Madness”) Championships, etc. And this weekend, we’re talking about March Madness started about a week before this publishing.
As Oklahomans, we’re sad that neither of the men’s teams made it to the party… but Oklahoma Lady Sooners made it, won their first game and lost on Monday to Indiana on the second round. The game seemed close with about 2 ½ minutes to go, but Indiana got hot the last 180 seconds and with 21.4 second to go, you knew it’d be a miracle if Oklahoma won. Nevertheless, happy to have seen them in the main event.
All #1 seeds survived the first two games in men’s and women’s and are in the “Sweet 16”, nevertheless, there were a lot of surprises that “messed” up many brackets. In short, after the first full round, there were no perfect brackets out of the more than 31,000,000 submitted to the NCAA!
The surprises of the first round in men were: #3 Kentucky lost to #14 Oakland; #12 Grand Canyon eliminated #5 Saint Mary’s; #13 Yale eliminated #4 Auburn; James Madison #12 beat #5 Wisconsin; North Carolina State #11 continued it’s hot play after beating North Carolina to get in the tournament and beat #6 Texas Tech; #11 Oregon beat #6 South Carolina.
After the first night, when about only one third of the games were played, only 2,100 brackets remained. After the second night, only 1,000. And after the third night, only 23. The next day, only one! According to the NCAA website, an entry named “MedalStick 84’s Picks 7” was the last one standing with only one game remaining, but had No. 9 TCU advancing to the second round. So, after the first round, no perfect entries were left, which means that all the “experts” were not experts at all. The women’s tournament followed the same fate.
One time they asked the legendary Ben Hogan, winner of 65 tournaments and nine majors, and then retired from competitive golf, about his opinion on who would win the U.S. Open that particular Sunday in 1973, at Oakmont C.C.; he answered, “I have no clue, that’s why they’re playing”. Well, no one could have been more correct than him, Johnny Miller shot a course and U.S. Open record of 63 to come back from six shots behind, passing the likes of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Tom Weiskopf among others and winning the U.S. Open in surprising fashion.
“March Madness” is exactly that. You don’t know who will have the will to reach deep in order to win. Talent counts, but heart counts as well, and many times much more than talent. No wonder why these three weeks are called “madness”...... I can hear someone saying, “if only so and so had made that extra point, my team would have gone to the next round instead of losing in over time!” Remember Loyola a few years ago, when seeded 11th in their bracket
