March Through Madness: An NCAA Tourney Blog : At Last, One Great Game

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Mark Starr

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Though it's March Madness, We Know April is the Coolest Month

1:17 PM, April 1, 2008 | Comments (1)

March gets all the ink, and the fancy "Madness" nickname, but as a top-to-bottom sports fan, I'm finding myself much more partial to April. We get the Final Four and the national title game, then the Masters just a few days later. And wrapped all around...

The Ivies Muscle Up

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Teams to Root for--and Against

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At Last, One Great Game

Mark Starr

When you don't, as I didn't, have a horse in the race, the game itself--good or bad--becomes the only concern. And last night's NCAA basketball final was everything a fan could have hoped for. Kudos to both Kansas and Memphis for a spirited, stylish sprint of a game, good enough to virtually erase the memory of what had been a disappointing, often sluggish tournament.

But I give every bit as much credit to the referees, who managed one of the toughest tricks in officiating: to sit on their whistles and let the kids play without ever letting the physical play get out of hand. There were only 35 fouls whistled, a number of those deliberate fouls by Kansas in the end game, and 34 free throws taken in a game with an extra period. Thus the refs, as much as the players, contributed to the breakneck pace of the play.

I had been thinking about end-game situations since the previous evening's women's semi-finals, when, with 7.1 seconds remaining, Tennessee raced the length of the court to score the game-winner and squeak by LSU 47-46. (Tennessee will play Stanford for the title tonight). There was no surprise in their last-second approach. Tennessee got the ball in the hands of its superstar Candace Parker who raced the length of the court with only the meagrest harassment. Only when Parker reached the baseline did every LSU player jump out at her, leaving a Tennessee player all alone under the basket. Parker found her with a perfect pass and, even after she blew the layup, another Volunteer was there to rebound and put the ball up and in with less than a second left in the game.

It was hardly an unfamiliar ending in tournament basketball--with prominent memories of Danny Ainge and Tyus Edney racing end-to-end in the final seconds and scoring winning buckets for Brigham Young and UCLA respectively. I always wonder in such games how, particularly when a team has struggled to score all night long as Tennessee had, can they possibly get two unmolested layups in the final seconds. And this was after LSU coach Van Chancellor had a timeout to set up his defense. It seemed obvious to me that Parker should have been double-teamed in the backcourt and forced to give up the ball, requiring her less skilled teammates to execute perfectly in the final seconds. The result might have been the same, but it would have certainly come harder.

So I was already obsessing about end-games when we had another classic situation in the men's final. (A pause here to note my one and only prescient comment before the tournament: that Memphis didn't shoot free throws well enough to win this tournament.) A team, in this case Kansas, needs a three-pointer to tie in the final seconds and send the game into overtime. I've come to believe that, at least in the college ranks (and maybe even in the pros), the trailing team should never get to take that shot unmolested. The defenders should be out on the three-point line ready to foul--even if that means allowing a player to get to the line for three free throws and a chance to tie the game. I am convinced that most college players have a far better chance of hitting the three-pointer in rhythm than they do of making three consecutive free throws with the game on the line.

The Men, The Women, Final Four

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