Big Red Thoughts

As TigerBlog was driving to North Carolina a week ago, he heard an interview on one of the sports talk radio stations with Dan Guerrero, the chair of the NCAA men's basketball committee.

The interviewer asked Guerrero a pretty interesting question: Does the committee want the top seeds to win each game as a validation of the selection process?

It's a great question, especially in the face of what happened in Week 1 of the NCAA tournament.

In the East, you have the 1, 2, 11 and 12 seeds remaining. In the South, it's 1, 3, 4, 10.

In the Midwest? Well, how about 2, 5, 6 and 9? In the West, it's the 1, 2, 5 and 6.

In the first two weekends, double digit seeds won 11 games.

Is this a sign that the committee made some errors, or is it more a sign that after a few really strong teams, the next 40 or so were a toss-up? Or is that selection criteria tie the committee's hands?

Not that TB would ever suck up to anyone, but when Princeton AD Gary Walters was committee chair, the Final Four was three one seeds and a two seed. The final eight had four one seeds, three two seeds and one three seed.

Of course, in these parts today, the main story is about the lowest seed remaining, the 12th-seeded Cornell Big Red.

Cornell coach Steve Donahue's postgame press conference yesterday was on ESPNEWS, and he talked about how great his team's execution was. It was an understatement.

Cornell was awesome in its two games, dispatching Temple and Wisconsin, two teams who spent essentially the entire season in the Top 25. Wisconsin is a Big 10 school that also owned a win over Duke; Temple was the Atlantic 10 regular season and tournament champion.

In 80 minutes between those two games, Cornell had the lead for 77 minutes, and neither game was ever really in doubt. How much did Cornell dominate these games? CBS went away from both because they were such blowouts.

Cornell's team, the first Ivy team to win two games in the tournament since Princeton in 1983 and the first Ivy team to reach the Sweet 16 since Penn in 1979, is proof that Ivy basketball teams can be successful if they have the following things happen:
1) find three stud players who slip through the cracks
2) have those players play together for four years
3) can shoot from the outside

TigerBlog isn't sure how Ryan Wittman wasn't playing for Wisconsin in yesterday's game, rather than Cornell. Or if not Wisconsin, then another Big 10 team. He's a big kid who can shoot with anyone whose father was a national champion as a player at Indiana and a coach in the NBA when the son was being recruited. How did he not get noticed?

Louis Dale? Jeff Foote? There are a lot of BCS conference schools who wish they could have a do-over on those guys. In other words, you don't need 25 stars to be good in basketball; your program can be built around three, if it's the right three.

After Cornell's win over Temple, TigerBlog was talking with M.A. Mehta of the Star-Ledger, who was Manish Mehta when he worked here at HQ 15 years or so ago. M.A. asked where Cornell ranked among Ivy men's basketball teams of the last 20 years.

TB, at the time, said third, behind Penn's 1993-95 Jerome Allen-Matt Maloney teams and Princeton's 1996-98 teams, a group that should be more than familiar to Tiger fans. Those three are the only Ivy League teams since 1983 to win in the NCAA tournament, something Princeton did in two different years (1996 and 1998) and which Cornell has now done twice in one year.

And now, three Princeton-centric thoughts, two of which TigerBlog admits are complete sour grapes:

1) Watching Cornell's men's team win two games this year after getting handled easily in the tournament the last two years made TB think of Princeton's women's NCAA game against St. John's. Perhaps, for a young Princeton team, that was the first step that Cornell took two years ago.

2) Princeton's 1998 team was the No. 5 seed, and the Tigers took out UNLV relatively easily in the first game (though not like Cornell did). The No. 4 seed that Cornell played yesterday wasn't quite on the same level as the No. 4 seed Princeton had to play. That No. 4 seed, Michigan State, started four players who would start together as the Spartans won the national championship two years later. If Princeton could have played a normal No. 4, it would have been a Sweet 16 team as well. Sour grapes No. 1.

3) Of the three teams that TB cited above, two of them (not Princeton) benefited tremendously, enormously, wouldn't-have-gotten-there-without-out-it-ly (not a word, but you get the point) without a key transfer (Penn's Matt Maloney, Cornell's Foote). Yes, TB is going to hear about Sean Jackson, but he wasn't on the 1996-98 team. Sour grapes No. 2.

Anyway, looking at it now, it doesn't matter who was the best of the three groups.

Cornell's team is in the Sweet 16, something the other two didn't accomplish, and the way they got there was beyond impressive.

Princeton fans should root for the Big Red Thursday night against Kentucky.