Decades from now, the debate will rage in stylized chili parlors throughout the Queen City: Of the twin collapses on the night of March 18, 2018, which was the bigger choke – Cincinnati’s or Xavier’s?
Mind you, this assumes that anyone in Hamilton County, Ohio, can ever speak of basketball again.
At No. 2, Cincinnati was by far the highest remaining seed in a defoliated South Regional. Xavier was the No. 1 seed in the West, which just saw No. 2 North Carolina get thrashed by Texas A&M. The Bearcats led No. 7 Nevada by 22 points with 10:50 remaining and lost. The Musketeers led No. 9 Florida State by 12 points with 9:50 remaining and lost 75-70. We ask again: Which was the bigger gag?
Volume-wise, Cincinnati’s. The Wolf Pack authored the biggest second-half comeback in NCAA tournament history. Twenty-two points, we note, is more than 12. But Nevada was such a whirlwind over the final 11 minutes that it’s hard to say the Wolf Pack didn’t earn their outrageous victory.
Xavier still led by nine with 5:32 to go. The Seminoles weren’t exactly scoring in bunches. Thing was, Xavier all but stopped scoring. Over the final 5 ½ minutes, it made six turnovers. Its shot to tie inside the final 15 seconds was an airballed trey by a 6-foot-10 center. This was pretty darn bad, too.
These were two of the nation’s half-dozen best teams, their campuses separated by 2 ½ miles. (By way of contrast, Duke and North Carolina are a distant eight miles apart.)They can’t stand one another. Their Crosstown Shootout is annually a glowering affair. Yet here they stand, united in epic failure.
Yes, Nevada and FSU deserve great credit. They got way down, they rallied, they survived and advanced. But seeing this happen in the same arena on the same night was beyond belief, even by the standards of a tournament that has given us UMBC and Loyola.
Said Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton, whose team finished 9-9 in ACC play: “In college basketball, it’s almost like a revolution. People start categorizing teams by the reputation players get when they’re coming into college … I don’t think you can really call these upsets so much as you can call it March Madness.”
Then: “I can’t say we’re much better than Xavier, but we were much better in the final 2 ½ minutes, and sometimes that’s all that matters.”
Sometimes, yes. And now the West has broken open almost as completely as the South, which just became the first regional ever to lose its top four seeds before the Sweet 16. The West figures to come down to No. 3 Michigan and No. 4 Gonzaga, and both were nearly undone in the round of 32. In the Midwest, 11th-seeded Syracuse just beat No. 3 Michigan State, always a popular pick to go the distance. The East is the only regional that looks the way you’d have guessed it would.
But maybe now we should stop guessing. Maybe we should forget about our brackets and just watch – because this tournament has become like a bus system. There’s another shock coming every few minutes. Over five hours Sunday night, the city of Cincinnati lost a doubleheader. Good thing the Bengals keep winning all those playoff games, huh?
About the Author
