Tournament Thoughts

TigerBlog says this every year, so why should this year be any different.


The NCAA men's basketball tournament is a unique event in that it starts out great and then gets less and less interesting with each passing round. There are few days in the sports calendar like what will happen Thursday and Friday, with 32 games each day and, presumably, some major upsets here and there.


By the weekend, there'll be 16 left. The excitement for next weekend won't be as great. The Final Four is all hype and yeah, it's okay to watch, but it's much more fun to see which teams and which players that nobody has ever heard of will make their history, the kind that has made its way into the highest levels of Princeton athletic lore.


There was the day in Providence 30 years ago this past Sunday, when Princeton lost to Georgetown 50-49 in the opening round. The Tigers were seemingly a hopelessly overmatched No. 16 seed against a mighty No. 1, and they were representing a league that had lost its last three NCAA games by an average of 40 points. Not a total. An average.


What happened at the end is familiar to all Princeton fans. The Tigers had two shots in the last six seconds, by Bob Scrabis and Kit Mueller, with a chance to win it, and Alonzo Mourning blocked both. Or were they fouls?


"I'll take that up with God when I get there," Pete Carril said famously after the game.


Then there was 1996, five days after Carril announced his retirement after 29 seasons following Princeton's overtime win over Penn in the Ivy League playoff game. This time, in Indianapolis, Princeton did win the game, defeating defending NCAA champion UCLA 43-41 in the opening round for Carril's 514th and final win at Princeton.


At one point during that game, Princeton trailed 41-34 before scoring the final nine of the game. Also at one point of the women's basketball team's Ivy League tournament final against Penn Sunday afternoon, Princeton trailed 41-34.


TigerBlog took that as a good sign.


Princeton, of course, came back to win it, turning that 41-34 deficit into a 65-54 win. If you don't want to do the math, that meant Princeton outscored Penn 31-13 (and it took TB a long time to do that because for some reason it seemed really confusing).

Princeton plays in the NCAA tournament Saturday at 11 am, in Raleigh, the same site as last year. This time it's a different opponent, as the 11th-seeded Tigers take on No. 6 Kentucky.

Here are some Princeton women's basketball facts heading into the tournament that you would have heard if you listened to the weekly "Court Report" podcast:

* Princeton is in the NCAA tournament for the eighth time in 10 years, something that's never happened in Ivy women's basketball before. In men's basketball, only Penn has done it, going nine times in the 11 years between 1970 and 1980.

* This is the 27th NCAA tournament appearance for an Ivy League women's basketball team, and Courtney Banghart has been part of 12 of those. That's extraordinary. This is Courtney's eighth trip as the head coach at Princeton, and she also went twice as an assistant coach at Dartmouth and a player at Dartmouth.

* Courtney is the only person ever to go to the NCAA tournament as both a player and head coach in the Ivy League (Princeton men's head coach Mitch Henderson is among a small group who has done so on the men's side). She's also, TB is pretty sure, the only one to do so on either side as a player, assistant coach and head coach.

* Bella Alarie has scored 505 points this season, which leaves her 27 points away from tying Meg Cowher's single-season program record for points - despite missing nine games. If Alarie had played those nine games and scored even half her 23.0 average for the 22 games she did play, she'd have 608 points - and that's just averaging half as many.

If you want, you can listen to the entire podcast HERE.

So that's Princeton-Kentucky Saturday at 11, on ESPN2 (depending where you live).

And enjoy the men's games today and tomorrow, since those are by far the two best days of the tournament. After that, it'll progressively less exciting, all the way to when Duke wins it all.