March Madness 2026, Part Two
Hear it here!
Cinderella must have gone on vacation when the first week of March Madness came around.
There always seems to be a small school coming out of a small conference somewhere who shocks one of the biggies and the followers of the NCAA basketball championship get on the bus to root for more of the same.
Sometimes the underdog wins again before he goes back to where he came from, sooner or later the bubble bursts. That’s one of the charms of March Madness.
But the best we got was High Point knocking off Wisconsin. I didn’t really call that upset a Cinderella story because the Badgers from the Big Ten were no major force to begin with. I guess seeing Virginia Commonwealth eliminate North Carolina had more significance due to Carolina’s history, but VCU went out in their next game.
The one story that held on to the Sweet 16 was Texas, a school that had to win an extra game just to make the field of 64. With victories over BYU and Gonzaga, the Longhorns earned a spot against sleeper Purdue this week. But you have to laugh if you consider success by Texas in any sport a big surprise. And I realize by the time you’re reading or hearing this; you know the result. I would be surprised if it weren’t the Big Ten Boilermakers.
I’ve never solely judged the emergence of a Cinderella team based on their seeding. To those who may not be aware, each of the four regions, East, South, Midwest, and West rate their teams 1 through 16. They call them seeds. I am impressed when a 16 or 15 defeats a 1 or 2, but I’ve been told that often seeds are not as precise and exact as fans believe. A 4th seed or 5th seed, as well as 8 and 9 can easily be interchanged. So can some others.
One of the most shocking games involved the tournament’s overall number one seed Duke, against Siena College from Loudonville, NY. Siena nearly ousted the vaunted Blue Devils which would have made it a tale for the ages. The iron-man effort by head coach Gerry McNamara, using his five starters for the entire 40 minutes, resulted in a 71-65 final score with Duke surviving. Barely. Consider that Duke’s enrollment is six times as big as Siena’s.
I had to chuckle, because last week I suggested my alma mater, Syracuse, in search of a new head hoop coach, go outside the family and the central NY area to start anew.
Little did I know that McNamara, a long-time favorite of fans of the Orange, with his brilliant point-guard play and electric enthusiasm and personality was auditioning for the ‘Cuse job and knocking it out of the park.
There isn’t a soul who lives and dies with Orange hoops who isn’t doing hoops knowing G-Mac will officially become the man any minute. Not that he needed it, but when Duke head coach Jon Scheyer said on TV that ‘ G-Mac out-coached me’, that was the icing on the cake.
I don’t usually listen to the experts who give their solemn opinions on who looks good and who doesn’t as March Madness moves along, but sometimes you can’t escape it. Some of those visionaries deflated Duke because they had an unexpected tight game.
One thing I’ve seen in my decades of covering and observing the games people play in all of the sports is that sometimes the best thing a team can do is winning a game when they are off their game.
Teams that win when they’re not playing well tell me their next outing will be huge. If you know a team is good, you’re in trouble if you face them when they’ve come off a clunker that resulted in a win.
Right now I’m going to hear about momentum. Something I feel is highly overrated. What is momentum really?
Is it automatic that teams that run off long winning streaks with impressive play just go out there and let it happen? I believe they simply play their best game to game, taking each one by itself, and fail to have off-nights. They play to their utmost until they don’t. It’s never automatic. Consider your own golf game, or tennis match or look at the sport of professional golf, for instance. Do you know for sure how you’re going to play?
Does any pro golfer know for sure how he’s going to perform? The level is so much higher when you consider professionals, but we’re no different in our own little world. You’ve got to go out there and do it. There are no guarantees.
As we drift back to March Madness (why, did we move away from it?) three of the four #1 seeds, and they were unquestionably the legitimate top powers advanced to the second week.
Duke, Michigan, Arizona all advanced to this week’s Sweet 16. Florida didn’t make it. Iowa beat them.
Houston, which got consideration as a top seed is still alive and in reality, replaces the Gators.
Since we’ll all know the result by Sunday night, no sense in any prognostications. But my feeling has been that the true powers are the true powers, and it would be a surprise to see any other breakthrough going into the Final Four.
In any event, March Madness has not disappointed. It never does.
G-Mac the player
G-Mac the Coach
