UConn and Butler Turn in a Clunker Unworthy of an Epic March Madness

The 2011 NCAA Tournament will go down as the year of the Underdog. The year of Cinderella. The year of the upset. There was the No. 11 seed VCU and No. 8 seed Butler in the Final Four. Didn't the Bulldogs get the memo? They had their miracle run already.

All of the No. 1 seeds were eliminated before they could get to Houston.  Even UConn and Kentucky, as No. 3 and No. 4 seeds respectively, had a little bit of Cinderella to them.  March Madness lived up to every ounce of the buzzer-beating hype, which has become increasingly difficult to do.

Usually the bracket chaos starts to fizzle out by the Sweet 16 and the blue-bloods of the sport start to separate from the pack.  Not this year.  Kansas had a path to the Final Four that included no team higher than a No. 8 seed, but they could not clear that final double-digit seeded hurdle.  The hoops-loving world was treated to a beautiful thing for three weeks.

And then Monday night happened.  It is difficult to explain the championship game between Butler and UConn in other words.  It just happened.  The game was not played so much as it was survived.  Points were more difficult to come by than water in the Sahara.  It took Butler a buzzer beating three-pointer at the end of the first half just to break 20 points...and they were winning!

The joke at half time amongst the commentators became that the first team to score 50 points would win the game.  It turns out it was not a joke.  UConn was the first (and only) team to 50, and they won the contest.  Apparently that is all a team has to muster to win a national title these days.  Butler, on the other hand, was happy to get their point total out of the 30s, which it finally did.  Barely.

Everyone understood that if Butler was going to win, it was going to be an ugly game, and just about everyone outside of Connecticut wanted Butler to win.  However, to subject college basketball fans to that type of punishment and then not even have the decency to pull off "Hoosiers: The Sequel" was just cruel and unusual punishment.  Even worse, it was an unworthy performance by both sides to cap off an otherwise legendary March Madness.