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Funky four Oddest of outcomes makes for heckuva Final Four
Posted: Tuesday March 28, 2000 02:20 PM
By Stewart Mandel, CNNSI.com As CBS execs gather to commence a long week of intense prayer, let it be known that the rest of us find this year's mind-numbing Final Four field to be filled with possibilities. What other year would produce such inane memos flying out of our research department as:
Wisconsin, it turns out, is the sixth to do it. Somewhere, Ron Dayne and Mike Kelley celebrate with a game of "Bowl over the Skinny Point Guard."
Big Ten fans, let out your chests with a collective "Grrrrrrr." It's only been done once before (the ACC, '90 and '91).
When you let in a couple 13-loss teams like Wisconsin and UNC, it's amazing how quickly you can break the old record (24) by, oh, 16.
No, not the latest effort from Kenny Rogers, but a reminder that before there was Wisconsin, there was Villanova.
It's hard to believe two weeks have passed since neighbors and co-workers nationwide duked it out over whether St. Bonaventure deserved a 12 seed, or Syracuse a 4. In the cut-throat world that is the NCAA tournament, 94 percent of the teams get rendered irrelevant in the time it takes Billy Packer to write an apology letter. However, the fact that one of those still relevant features a leading scorer (Wisconsin's Mark Vershaw) averaging 11.9 points a game will be featured on an upcoming "Unsolved Mysteries." And though impossible to prove, it's believed that in the 13.7 million office brackets filled out before the tournament, not a single one had both Wisconsin and North Carolina reaching the Final Four. Very few had Florida. But as unlikely as they seemed two weeks ago, none of the four semifinalists seemed all that unrealistic four days ago. To some, they seemed inevitable. Even at the lowest depths of UNC's rocky regular season, the Heels' talent couldn't be denied. Based on their record, they shouldn't have even been invited. But they were, and once they upset Stanford, once it was clear Brendan Haywood had come to play and Joe Forte was not your average freshman, this had become the team that got ranked as high as No. 2 early in the season. The grossly talented Gators may have been a No. 5 seed, but they also happened to win a share of the SEC title, demolish the likes of Auburn, LSU and Kentucky and erase a 21-point road deficit to DePaul. When they routed Illinois in the second round while weary Duke struggled against Kansas, the Gators suddenly sat in a pretty position. Wisconsin has been the underdog every game of the tournament. But after it frazzled the country's leading scorer (Fresno's Courtney Alexander) and region's top seed (Arizona), doing the same to a young LSU team and a Purdue team it had beaten twice became more than just a possibility. As for the one "favorite" left, Michigan State has done its best to blow it, falling into late holes against both Syracuse and Iowa State. The Spartans' amazing ability to turn the tables shows why they're expected to take home the title next Monday. But then, this hasn't exactly been a event for the expected. See ...
This year's seeds add up to a record-high 22. In Vegas, that's a bust, but with this much possibility, we would tend to disagree.
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