Blogging the Bracket

Charles P. Pierce writes for the Boston Globe Magazine. He is a frequent contributor to Sports Illustrated and also appears regularly on National Public Radio. SI senior writer Alex Wolff is the author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure. Here Pierce and Wolff discuss Day One of the NCAA Tournament.

From: Charles Pierce To: Alexander Wolff Subject: Yango's Tango Thursday, March 17, 2005

'Lex:

Strange little tourney bubble we're in, what with all the dogs and ponies parading through the halls of Congress while Henry Clay does triple salchows in the Beyond. It was a hoot to see your own former Socialist, Bernie Sanders, among them. (Shepherd or Shetland, Bernie? Eugene Debs went to prison for this?) Anyway, I'm sure you were as amused as I was this morning by the moral outrage of Rep. Tom Osborne (R-Weight Room), the man who blessed the sports world with the good red-state values of Lawrence Phillips. Never been so glad to be taken out to Boise in my life; my public bushwah needle already was deep in the red zone and Bud Selig was still hours away from the microphone.

(Speaking of which, what happened to the Boise State floor? It's now psychedelic only in sections. Did they run out of paint? Did they run out of mushrooms?)

I suspect you and I will be discussing the relative merits of Duke as we go along but, as I once was identified as the leader of the Vast Anti-Dukie Conspiracy by no less an authority than Micki Krzyzewski, it's probably up to me to point out that CBS has whipped me around twice already, and I've heard commentators Mike Gminski, Jay Bilas, Jim Spanarkel and our buddy, famous Beltway spalpeen Seth Davis. Somebody at Black Rock must have lost Gene Banks' phone number. If Syracuse and the Blue Devils do meet in the 16s, the alumni crowd in the broadcast center's going to look like the last 10 minutes of West Side Story.

Has there ever been a tournament that began with such a stunning ensemble performance of toss-your-jock-out-there basketball as the one summoned up by the representatives of the "major" conferences? Even the two winners -- Kentucky and Oklahoma -- didn't seem overly enthusiastic about their work. (With the game in the satchel, the Wildcats still gave up a coast-to-coast layup to EKU's Matt Witt. He missed, but that's hardly the point.) And neither Pitt nor Alabama ever seemed to tumble to the fact that they were actually, you know, behind.

If I were the coach of a favored team, I would absolutely hate to play the first game of the day. (And that goes double if, like Pitt, my club had to tee it up at 10 a.m. local time. How'd you like to have paid the plane fare from Pittsburgh to Boise and have your team be eliminated by lunchtime on the first day of the tournament?) You've barely had time to go through the gift bag, and Guillaume Yango is dancing on your head. Pitt actually was seeded below Pacific, but the Panthers left most of the first half back in the hotel, probably on the shelf next to the conditioner.

UW-M is another story entirely. As you undoubtedly have noticed, neither one of us has much of a rooting interest in the tournament this year. (Someday, we'll have to explore the existential question of whether it's worse not to make the NIT, or to make it and fail to crack 50 on your own floor against Western Freaking Michigan.) Anyway, back when I was walking the bluffs above the lake, UW-M was the place we went if we wanted to be hippies for a while. It was located on the extremely cool East Side of Milwaukee, not far from the redoubtable Downer Prestige Theater. Back then, the idea of the Panthers winning a game in the NCAA basketball tournament seemed roughly akin to picking The Flying Burrito Brothers to win Daytona.

Nevertheless, you could see this one coming. On Super Bowl weekend, I took a busman's holiday and drove down to Gainesville, where I saw Alabama get absolutely drilled by a Florida team that was at that point even money not to make the tournament at all. Worse, the Tide simply rolled up and quit at the beginning of the second half. Which is exactly the wrong kind of competitive personality to have if you're playing early against a team that's hungry. I saw it again today -- just enough softness around the edges to keep them behind, and a very similar endgame to the one put on Bob Knight years ago by Mouse McFadden of sainted memory and the Cleveland State Vikings -- on whose floor, come to think of it, the game was played.