Print   Recommend

You know that shot. If you're a fan of college basketball, you remember Drew catching a full-court bomb deflected to him by a teammate, launching a three with his feet a full two-feet behind the three-point line, and the ensuing explosion when it went in. It's one of those moments that burns itself into your memory via its sheer improbability -- the shot was impossible, Ole Miss was a prohibitive favorite, his father was the coach, for god's sake.

In fact, Bryce Drew's shot was one of those moments that make the NCAA tournament a unique and special thing in the American sports pantheon. Everyone loves March Madness, even people who choose their brackets based on team mascots, and it's because every year you get at least one rags-to-riches story of little guys from a small school beating the odds.

This NCAA tournament had none of that. Even the two 12 seeds who won did so mostly comfortably: Manhattan walked all over a listless Florida team and Providence never got within four points of Pacific. There were some tight games, but chalk ruled the day.

And no offense to chalk, but that's not why we watch the NCAA tournament. We watch the NCAA tournament to see 5-6 guards named Scooter run around hugging their coach, their teammates, the referees, and fans in the front row before finally collapsing into a pile of bodies at center court.

Had the committee fixed something that wasn't broken? By slotting higher seeds close to home, they had removed the solitary advantage the Valparaisos of the world had, the neutral crowd rabidly in favor of the underdog. Wake Forest squeaked by Virginia Commonwealth in Raleigh and Cincinnati did likewise against East Carolina in Columbus. Mid-majors from alphabet soup conferences already start two Scooters, now they had to do so in front of a hostile crowd, and they just couldn't pull it off.

CBS talking heads actually began to support this theory on the air, wondering aloud whether the high-seeds-play-close-to-home principle had destroyed the ability of underdogs to compete. The NCAA tournament had abandoned us. Or maybe we had abandoned it. That old magic was gone.

Gone until the second round, that is. Alabama started it all off by making an incredible 16-0 run to knock out No. 1 Stanford. Ronny Turiaf got in to foul trouble and No. 2 Gonzaga got smashed by Nevada. Lionel Chalmers went 11-for-13 and Xavier blew the doors off No. 2 Mississippi State. Vanderbilt stormed back from a 10-point deficit with two minutes remaining to stun No. 3 NC State. And then the final, beautiful capper: UAB's Mo Finley accepted a kick-out from a teammate, faked his way past a defender, and Bryce-Drewed No. 1 Kentucky with a 15-foot jumper.

False alarm, folks. Everything's just fine. We missed you, NCAA tournament. We're glad you're back. We'll never check out that NBA game again, we swear.

Of course, the tournament was never in danger of turning into an upset-free snoozefest, because of the NCAA tournament's hidden secret: it's not an upset to have a bunch of upsets. It's just probability. What are the chances of a higher-seed winning in an NCAA tournament game, on average? Seventy percent? Eighty?

Even if the lower-seeded team is that much of an underdog, over the course of a 63-game tournament, you can expect 12 or 13 games to be upsets. The only upset of the first-round was the lack of upsets.

As a group, you can expect some of the little guys to beat the big guys, which we all know when we fill out our BYU-in-the-Final-Four bracket, but forget in the sunny aftermath of a massive David and Goliath battle.

Don't lose that cognitive dissonance, though, or else you'll never look at Scooter the same way.

Have something to say? Visit the message boards and discuss this article. Comments? Agree? Disagree? Send in your feedback about this article.