Hoosiers II - The Unhappy Ending

There are teams that TigerBlog roots for, and there are teams that TigerBlog roots against. And then there are the two teams that TigerBlog really, really roots against.

One of those two is the New York Yankees. The other is the Duke men's basketball team.

Of course, both are the current champion of their universes. Just as was the case in 2000-01, TB had to sit through a Yankees' World Series championship in the fall and then a Duke NCAA men's championship in the spring.

Last night's 61-59 Duke win over Butler was a great game. TigerBlog assumed it was going to be a blowout, and he kept switching over to one of his favorite movies, "Broadcast News," on a different channel. The game was so compelling, TB gave up on the movie after the scene where Aaron tells Jane that Tom is the devil, which is one of the 10 best scenes TB has ever seen in a movie.

As for the game, it was one in which neither team ever led by more than six and one in which Butler's Gordon Hayward came within millimeters of hitting a championship-winning shot from midcourt near the sideline.

By now, you've seen the shot and the replay, probably many times. Had Hayward's shot gone in, it would have been without question the single greatest play in sports history. As in, all-time, ever.

Now, perhaps the cynical side of TigerBlog wants to point out that to win the title, Duke had to defeat Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Cal (24-11), Purdue (minus its best player) and Baylor (finished four games back in the Big 12 regular-season) to get to the Final Four. Once there, the Devils beat West Virginia and Butler; had seeds held, that would have been Kentucky and either Kansas or Syracuse.

Still, a win is a win, and Duke and Butler certainly played a great, entertaining final, certainly more entertaining than last year's, when North Carolina blew out Michigan State before the first media timeout, and certainly more entertaining than tonight's women's final figures to be as UConn looks to be so much better than the field, in this case Stanford.

As an aside, perhaps UConn should play a combined team of the best players from the rest of women's basketball to see if it would be close.

Getting back to Butler's run to the championship game, consider that the school is a strong academic institution with an undergraduate population of just under 4,000.

The Bulldogs play in the Horizon League, a league in which TB dares you to name the second-place finisher or at least half of its 10 members without looking. And yet, despite that, and a coach who looks he should be the team manager, Butler managed to put together a team that went 33-5 and defeated Syracuse and Kansas State in the regional and then Michigan State in the Final Four before nearly knocking off Duke to win it all.

Does that give hope to an Ivy League school - say, the one in Central New Jersey, for starters - that it might someday be able to match that performance? The thing about basketball is that it doesn't take 20 players to be great. If a team could get a Hayward and build around him, that's a great start.

If you could get a Ryan Wittman-Louis Dale-Jeff Foote combination and have them play together for four years, as Cornell did, that's the way to get it done. Cornell, obviously, reached the Sweet 16 this year.

Princeton in 1997-98 had the pieces in place for a deep run in the tournament, only to run into the wrong team (Michigan State, with four starters who would start and win the NCAA final two years later) in the second round.

It takes luck, yes. You need the right guys to fall through the cracks to your team. Realistically, Duke could have recruited anyone it wanted on Butler's team and didn't.

Still, in basketball, you can win with a 6-5 forward who scores but doesn't attract offers from power conferences because he doesn't have the right body type or a 6-0 point guard (say, a Mitch Henderson type) who is fast and can pass and grows up in the heart of Big 10 country, only to have nobody notice him.

If nothing else, Butler's run has to give hope to non-power conference schools, just as George Mason did several years ago in reaching the Final Four from the CAA. It's not going to happen often, but it is going to happen. And why not another strong academic school with a young coach who put together a few strong classes consecutively and had them play together from Day 1? Why not Princeton? Is it realistic? Do the odds favor Princeton or any other Ivy or Patriot or Summit or MAAC or Southern or any other similar conference? Not in the least.

But they didn't favor Butler either, and look how that turned out? Why not hope?

Of course, had Butler won, it would have set off an endless number of "Hoosiers" comparisons. For those who've never seen "Hoosiers," please leave work right now and go watch it. And if you have seen it, maybe you should go watch it again.

The Final Four began when Princeton Director of Athletics Gary Walters emailed TB a picture of Walters and Bobby Plump (the picture above). For those who don't know, Plump was the hero of Milan High's 1952 Indiana state championship, and he was the inspiration for the Jimmy Chitwood character in "Hoosiers."

Walters, as a former chair of the men's basketball committee, goes every year to the Final Four. This year, he met up with Plump, who is also a Butler graduate.

A few days later, Plump's alma mater almost pulled off the same kind of miracle has his high school team had done.

Call it "Hoosiers II," only this one - like the World Series last fall- had an unhappy ending for TigerBlog.