Today, No Segue

The NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament is a bizarre animal.

There's the whole impact of the one-and-done philosophy - especially at Kentucky - and the over-saturation of the event by the media, which is willing to discuss to no end a player's length or anoint a coach as a certifiable genius - as if winning at Kentucky and Kansas is somehow difficult - and yet not ask a single question on subjects like, say, if the one-and-done mentality is in any way consistent with what college athletics are intended to be.

For that matter, TigerBlog has heard and read a great deal about the last NCAA championship game meeting between Bill Self (who comes across as a pretty down-to-Earth, normal guy) and John Calipari (who doesn't.) What he hasn't heard and read a great deal about is how Memphis (Calipari's old team) had to vacate that game, which wasn't a first for Calipari.

The only reference to any of it that TB has heard came when Calipari suggested that Duke and Carolina are also "one-and-done" teams and sort of wondered if they were bad for college basketball too. It reminded TB of when MotherBlog used to say "if everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?"

Oh, and then there's one of the parts of the tournament that TB loves. How many players on either team in the final can you name, and of that group, how many had you heard of two weeks ago?

For all that, though, the wildest part of the tournament is how it gets progressively duller.

The Selection Show is awesome. The first two rounds (not the play-in games, but the first two actual rounds) are even better.

The first Thursday and Friday of the NCAA tournament are two of the best five sports days of the year.

The next two rounds? They're okay, but not as good, especially when the darlings of Thursday and Friday hit the reality of Saturday/Sunday - see Norfolk State and Lehigh this year and Princeton in 1996.

The Sweet 16 games are good, and the regional finals to see who gets to the Final Four are pressure-packed.

And then the Final Four? Eh. The semifinals are hardly memorable, and even the memorable championship games are few and far between.

Nope. This is the rare athletic event where the beginning far eclipses the end.

TB is going to say that tonight's championship game will be forgotten as well, something to the tune of Kentucky 81, Kansas 63.

Beyond that, TigerBlog offers no actual segue from the NCAA basketball tournament to what had to be the best event of a pretty good weekend for Princeton athletics.

It wasn't the men's lacrosse game, a 13-2 domination of Brown that gave the Tigers their fourth straight win as they head to the Carrier Dome to take on Syracuse.

It wasn't in baseball, where the Tigers opened the Ivy League season by winning three of four at home against Dartmouth and Harvard. In what might be a first, all four Gehrig Division teams have winning records on the Monday after the first weekend, though Penn and Brown haven't played yet and Cornell and Dartmouth only got one game in.

It wasn't in softball, where Princeton swept Dartmouth to open its season Friday before being swept Saturday by Harvard.

It wasn't in rowing, where the season is finally starting to get into full swing.

Nor was it in tennis, where the men and women are 1-0 in the Ivy after defeating Penn.

Nope. It was in men's volleyball. Even in a loss.

Princeton took on Eastern power Penn State, a perennial threat to win the NCAA championship.

Penn State had beaten Princeton 3-0 for seven straight years before Friday night's epic in Dillon Gym, where the Tigers actually had eight match balls before falling 37-35 in the fourth game and then 15-12 in the fifth and deciding game.

As TB said last week after his experiences at Yale for men's lacrosse, the beauty of working in college athletics is that you never know when you're going to stumble across an event like the Princeton-Penn State volleyball match.

TB wasn't there, but he's been in Dillon Gym for volleyball enough to know that the place had to have been completely rocking.

It's what intercollegiate athletics is supposed to be all about. Not one-and-dones with coaches who are made out to be above mere mortals.

Oh wait. Was that a segue?