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The unpredictable month of March ended on a surprisingly predictable note this past weekend as both the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments ended up sending traditional high-seeded powerhouses to the Final Four.
For the first time ever, all four number-one seeds have reached the national spotlight of the Final Four. This may mean salvation for thousands of office-pool heroes as most brackets seemed shattered by a plethora of Cinderella stories just a week ago. Fans and analysts who picked “chalk,” the process of always picking the favorite, find themselves correct going into the national semifinals. In the final round-of-eight game, perennial powerhouse Kansas barely held off 10-seed Davidson College, ending the Wildcats’ bid for a George Mason-esque Final-Four run. The Jayhawks of KU, the top seed in the Midwest region, will join fellow regional favorites Memphis, North Carolina and UCLA in San Antonio to vie for national supremacy.
The women’s side wasn’t much different, as the tournament saw perennial powers go down early, and mid-major conference underdogs rise to the fore. When the smoke cleared, the last four teams standing were all either one or two-seeds. While not as completely predictable as the men’s Final Four, none of the schools left in the women’s bracket are strangers to national prominence. Tennessee, perhaps the most revered program in women’s college basketball, is headed to Tampa to compete for another national title. They will take on SEC power LSU in the national semi-final. LSU upset one-seed North Carolina in the round-of-eight, eliminating the last chance for a school to win national titles in both brackets this year.
On the other side of the bracket, Tennessee’s nemesis, UConn, snuck by conference rival Rutgers in yet another one of their epic duels – returning to the Final Four. Although many fans are already dreaming of yet another Tennessee-Connecticut brawl, both of those programs would be ill advised to look ahead to the title game as they will both face stiff competition in the national semi finals. If you can call a two-seed a dark horse, then Stanford University would be that horse. Stanford, the least heralded of the Final Four, brings a great shooting, fluidity, PAC-10 offense to the table and can run with anyone in the final two rounds. They have shown this by playing Connecticut extremely close at the beginning of the year and by knocking off 2006 champion Maryland, the one-seed in the Spokane region in order to punch their ticket to the Final Four.
The men’s side will offer a pair of offense vs. defense matchups as fast, high-scoring North Carolina and Memphis take on the rugged defenses of Kansas and UCLA. The women’s side should see scoring carnivals, as all four teams can shoot the ball well.
Although late March has traditionally been a time for exciting underdog stories, this year the Final Four in both tournaments are devoid of the Cinderellas but shouldn’t be lacking any excitement.
Bangor Daily News