In the same arena but on different regional tracks, the Miami Hurricanes and Florida Gators are circling each other cautiously on this first weekend of the NCAA tournament.
If they ever actually meet on the court, it will be in the Georgia Dome’s national semifinals, which is so far down the road in this wacky event that we might as well be predicting a whole line of lightning strikes. That’s way too many assumptions for a game played by kids and officiated by men infatuated with the sound of their own whistles.
Which of these two teams, for openers, is the likeliest to wind up as a mirage? It figures that at least one of them will, based on Miami’s thin NCAA history and on Florida’s lack of an improvisational, buzzer-beating hero who can take over when all the careful game-planning goes to pot.
The guess here is that the Gators will go down first, bumping into the same Elite Eight roadblock that’s stopped them the last two years.
It has nothing to do with relative seeding. Billy Donovan dragged a No. 5 seed into the national championship game in 2000 and won it all with a No. 3 in 2006. Where Florida stands Friday, a third seed in the South with tons of tournament experience and a real fever for defense, is a perfectly fine launching point for another deep run.
The difference for me is that Miami simply looks like a more complete team, less dependent on the three-pointer and significantly beefier under the bucket. There have been times in this remarkable ACC championship season when timely rebounds and tips-ins and blocked shots saved the Hurricanes, and there will be times in this tournament when nothing else will do.
Combine all of that with Shane Larkin’s rapid passing gear in the lane and Durand Scott’s generally fearless nature and the Hurricanes look like a Final Four team, providing the East’s top seed, Indiana, is willing to cooperate.
Wait a minute. Did we just slingshot Miami past Pacific, Friday’s lightly-ranked opponent, and the Gators past Northwestern State, another supposed warmup act? Better take a breath here. March has taken the starch out of some truly great teams through the years, and in 2013 there are no truly great teams in the tournament field.
Jim Larranaga, who earned every bit of the East’s No. 2 seed at Miami, has chosen to tone down the single-elimination savagery of it all, just as he did during his signature Final Four run as coach of George Mason in 2006.
“I think if you start talking about how much pressure someone is feeling, they start to dwell on that,” Larranaga said. “If you talk about how much fun you want to have, the players focus on that.”
“So I don’t talk about pressure at all. We talk about enjoying ourselves and playing the game they love and playing in the venue that they have wanted to play in, to kind of make dreams come true.”
No doubt, Miami needs a primer in every kind of NCAA survival skill. The Hurricanes are in the tournament for only the seventh time in program history, and none of this year’s players have played a minute of it. Even Pacific has been down this road more often, making nine NCAA fields through the years.
Florida, meanwhile, is up against the highest-scoring team in the nation at 81 points a pop. Northwestern State subs players out five at a time, pressing constantly. In this way the Demons upset Iowa in another No. 3 vs. No. 14 match in 2006. It could happen to the Gators Friday. It could happen to anybody any day, but listen for the emphasis from today’s interview sessions.
“Our goal is to get to the national championship and win it,” said Florida guard Kenny Boynton, who is down to his last shot after a school-record 138 starts. “Nothing less than that.”
That’s the weight that the Gators are carrying into this thing. The Hurricanes have only this moment, trying to get past the Sweet 16 round for the first time and capping a season that could be, as Larranaga put it Thursday, “maybe the best in school history.”
Maybe is the biggest word of all in March, and the best.
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