Tournament Thoughts - Late Thursday

Now that is how a #1 seed is supposed to play. Let the little guy hang in there then beat his ass. I actually saw one play where a Hilltopper took it to Anthony Davis and scored over him. Shortly after that, Kentucky went nuts.

Footnote to earlier game: Apparently Southern Mississippi band members chanted "where's your green card" at Kansas State's Angel Rodriguez. He's from Puerto Rico which is of course a US protectorate. But USM apologized and you can hear the chant faintly about 10 seconds into this video:

Great game between Wichita State and VCU. Always getthing those 12-5 upsets wrong. Usually when an upset pick is popular it does actually happen. I just thought the Shockers were underrated and underseeded.

There was an awesome sequence at the end of this game when the teams traded 3 3-pointers in a little over a minute.

Wichita State lost because they could not take and keep the lead. Having the lead completely changes strategy. When Garrett Stutz missed that layup and gave VCU the ball back with the lead, that's when their fate was sealed.

Shaka Smart really is awesome. He deserves a big time job. I'm just not sure if Illinois is the place. Reminds me of Dan Monson whom we saw earlier. Was awesome at Gonzaga, went to Minnesota couldn't turn it around, probably no fault of his own. Now Monson back at a mid-major and doing well.

A total no-show by West Virginia, what an embarrassment.

Robert Sacre could be this year's big guy who does well in the tournament, gets drafted high and is never heard from again. Previous winners are Patrick O'Bryant and Rafael Araujo.

Baylor got off to a slow start against South Dakota State then went on a huge run. But give the Jackrabbits credit. They fought back in the second half. They really gave Baylor all they could handle. And if they had been a little more careful with the ball at a few points of the game maybe they could have pulled off the huge upset. Maybe because of their great fan support.



Those Baylor uniforms are blinding. If you watch in vivid color and high definition they literally hurt your eyes.



UConn pulls off another no-show by a Big East team. They made a brief run at the end of the first half, but never got it under 6 points. I don't think this will be Calhoun's last game. He just won't quit. They are going to have to pull him out of there, probably in a body bag.

Amazing comeback by UNLV. But they fell short because they fell in love with the 3-point shot a little early.

Add the 11 over 6 upset to another thing I can never get right. I'm 1-4 in games involving those seeds so far. And I have USF over Temple and Texas over Cincinnati tomorrow.

Two of UNLV's best players (Mike Moser and Chace Stanback) came from the dysfunctional UCLA program. Both guys had bad games tonight (7-27 FG) and that really hurt UNLV. I thought they were an excellent team all season they just had a bad game at the wrong time.

And Colorado on the other hand is getting hot at the right time. They wouldn't have even been in the tournament if they hadn't won the Pac-12 Tournament and now they have an NCAA Tournament win to go along with it.

Easy victories for Indiana and Ohio State push the Big 10 to 3-0. They can easily go 6-0 with Michigan State, Michigan and Purdue (this will be the tough one) tomorrow. The Big Ten has years of coming up short, but this year it was probably the best conference in the country, so let's see if this success keeps up in round 2.

By the way, I will never call the round of 64 anything other than the first round until they expand to 96 or maybe even 128.