Some Thoughts on the NCAA Tournament

In my opinion, the greatest show on earth for any sports fan is the NCAA basketball tournament.

It brings together much that is good about college sports, and its sudden death format provides for a ton of excitement and a great deal of joy, or disappointment, for alumni, students, fans, and pool players. Men and women who wouldn't know the difference between a basketball and a grapefruit are entering tournament pools all over the world and the talk on Thursday to Sunday invariably revolves around the latest and greatest upset(s).

This year has been no different. Watching the games as religiously as I do, a few thoughts have come to mind:

I love Duke and the aura of the program, but how many games will Coach K be out-coached in until the fans critique his performance?

He has built a tremendous program (within the rules, I might add) but a near loss to Belmont this year and an actual loss to VCU last year, as well as this year's second round loss to West Virginia should make fans sit up and take note. How many high school All Americans can Duke amass before they make it back to the Sweet Sixteen?

He is sheltered from any criticism because of the tremendous job he has done at Duke for so long, but he shouldn't be absolved of responsibility for failing to have his teams properly prepared.

UCLA has, for so long, been the model of college basketball, and have done it with the West Coast flavour of finesse and the dubious reputation of being a tad soft.

Well, not this team!

They can thug you in the street as good as any Philadelphia Flyer hockey team and still possess enough finesse to beat up on other Pac-10 opponents that remain at the soft end of the scale.

Kevin Love is a joy to watch at the college effort and his maturity may be enough to take the Bruins to the title. I'm not convinced that he will be a star at the next level, but he certainly has grasped the college game. His two baskets in the last seven minutes of the game Saturday night against Texas A&M were sufficient evidence to me that the guy is a winner.

Anything can happen in college basketball and one bad game or one lucky shot can spell doom for any team. At this point, I like UCLA's chances of going all the way. A date with North Carolina will be tougher than any college football game we've seen for the past few years.

Those of us who live in Toronto had the pleasure of watching Del Curry ply his trade for the Raptors. An incredible shooter with one of the quickest releases I have ever seen, he was as reliable and professional a pro basketball player as you can ever hope to see.

Now, the player making the biggest splash in the tourney is Del's kid, Stephen Curry, who has simply been incredible in leading Davidson to the the Sweet Sixteen.

If there's a better shooter in the college game than Curry, I haven't seen him. As a matter of fact, if there's been a better shooter in the college game over the past 20 years, I'm not sure I have seen him.

While his press clippings may be almost as big as Lebron's, I wasn't too impressed all year with the play of OJ Mayo. I'm still not sure what position he plays because he's not a true point guard or a two. When the Trojans won big it was because of the effort of Davon Jefferson as much as Mayo.

If I were Mayo, I'd stick around at least one more year to hone my game, but with the kind of money he might get as a late lottery pick there's not much chance of that. He could be surprised by his late pick in the draft because his success in the NBA, in my opinion, is still very much up in the air.

Ben Howland left Pitt and may be a top five coach in college basketball, but I love the job that Jamie Dixon has done at Pitt and believe that he is, and will remain, one of the top coaches in the college game.

I think it's time for Jim Boeheim to scrap his vaunted zone defense and teach the dapper dandies how to defend one-on-one. Syracuse has as much talent as you can have on a college team and it is amazing that they failed, again, to even reach the tournament.

Yes, the injuries to Rautins and Devendorf were catastrophic, but a great Hall of Fame coach should have been able to nurse the remaining stars to the tourney. Both Boeheim and Calhoun may be getting a little long in the tooth, as their teams have underachieved for two years now.

Keep your hat on folks. There are still two more weeks to go and the excitement is sure to be there.