March Madness is dead. The National Basketball Association killed it.-á
I don't mean to be a pessimist but the landscape is forever changed.-á
What has made past tournaments more an out-of-body religious experience than merely 40 minutes of college basketball? It's the element of surprise, notably missing during that past three weeks. The lowest-seeded team in the Sweet 16 this year was No. 7-seeded University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
Three of the four regional final match ups this year featured the top two seeds. The one that didn't featured the tournament's No. 1 overall seed, the University of Florida. Its opponent, third-seeded University of Oregon, was fresh off a Pac-10 Tournament championship.
Chalk has taken the place of Cinderella. Parity has been crinkled up and thrown out the window. And it's not good for the game.
Seeing the higher-seeded teams winning almost exclusively isn't fun to watch.-áIt doesn't provide a fairy tale ending.
The NBA's decision to keep high school players from jumping to the pros was a good move itself. The problem is these players, rerouted to the college game for at least one year, chose to grace only the elitist programs with their skill.-á
This benefits teams like Ohio State University (Greg Oden), the University of Texas (Kevin Durant) and the University of North Carolina (Brandon Wright and Tywon Lawson). It will continue next year when O.J. Mayo attends the University of Southern California and consensus top high school senior Kevin Love heads for UCLA.
The group that loses out in the pecking order - other than the fans - is the mid-major Cinderella. Butler University or Southern Illinois University don't fall in this group. Both programs made Sweet 16 appearances this year and were legit high-level ball clubs. Mid-major Cinderellas are teams like the 2006 Bradley University squad, which came out of nowhere to beat Kansas University and Pittsburgh University in three days, earning a trip to the Sweet 16.-á
Every piece I've seen on this matter has labeled the NBA's decision "a good thing for college basketball." The numbers clearly suggest otherwise.-á
Of the 32 first round games, 24 were decided by double digits and 11 of those had a final point spread of at least 20. The final average margin of victory in the 63 contests - not counting the play-in game - was slightly above 12 points.-áCompare that to the 9.75 average in last year's tournament -¡-¡- which showcased only two 20-point blowouts in the first round - and don't try to tell me this year was better.
Unfortunately, there appears to be no easy answer to this quandary. You can't tell the NBA not to do what's best for its league. Also, it's wrong for power programs to stay away from the Greg Odens and Kevin Durants of the high school basketball world.
So we're stuck in the current situation with no end in sight. The madness of March has been shot by a sanity tranquilizer. You can still fill out your brackets next year. Just put down the pencil or pen and use chalk instead.
Write to Ryan at rtwood@bsu.edu
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