A college basketball season that saw five different teams hold, albeit not for long, the No. 1 ranking has generated a Final Four of one obligatory mid-major, two solid teams from power conferences and one overwhelming favorite. Parity? It just took a hike.
On March 3, the Louisville Cardinals were ranked 10th in the Associated Press poll. Today, the Final Four is theirs to lose. Their run through the Big East tournament and four games of this Big Dance has been so breathtaking that the best player on the last team to go undefeated is a believer.
“I like Louisville,” Scott May said Friday, speaking after his 1976 Indiana Hoosiers were introduced as the greatest team in 75 years of March Madness. (Votes were cast by fans on the Internet. Those who recall the 1968 UCLA Bruins must not have WiFi.) “I like the way they play. I like the way they play defense. I think they have the momentum to take it.”
Wichita State will meet Louisville in Saturday’s first semifinal, and the Shockers should be no mystery guest. They’re a splendid team coached by Gregg Marshall, who’s as clever as anyone working at a mid-major. The Cardinals are a double-digit favorite, but Wichita State is gifted enough and edgy enough to give Louisville a run.
The Shockers credit Wichita State alumnus Antoine Carr, once a Hawk, for supplying some of that edge. Carr spoke to the team as it sought to break a January losing streak, and his advance was to “play angry.”
Said forward Carl Hall, who’s from Cochran: “That kind of turned around our season.” (Of Carr himself, Hall said: “He looked very angry.”)
Hall looked ridiculously happy Friday. He grew up two hours south of Atlanta, but hadn’t been to the Georgia Dome before this week. Not long ago, he was working in a lighting factory in Cochran, his basketball career having been shelved by a heart ailment. Pointing to the ceiling in the World Congress Center, he said: “I probably painted those lights.”
Goodness knows what would happen in Wichita if the Shockers pulled the shock of shocks. Beating Ohio State to win the West Regional prompted students to re-christen campus buildings. Thus did a dormitory known as Fairmount Hall become — saw this coming, didn’t you? — Carl Hall.
That said, Wichita State remains a game welterweight. Louisville is a legitimate heavyweight. Louisville will play Monday night.
Another boxing metaphor: It’s said that styles make fights, which is why Syracuse-Michigan should be a lulu. According to Ken Pomeroy’s exhaustive data, Syracuse ranked sixth nationally in defensive efficiency; Michigan ranked first in offensive efficiency.
Syracuse defused the nation’s second-most-efficient offense in its 61-50 dismissal of Indiana in the East Regional. “It’s hard to beat a team like Indiana convincingly,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said Thursday, but his 2-3 zone did the deed.
Said Michigan coach John Beilein, no longer the best coach never to reach a Final Four: “We have to change what we do because we’re going to see a zone for 40 minutes. It’s something we have to practice. We don’t see it very often.”
Then this: “When you have a player like Trey Burke (the national player of the year), you get the ball in his hands as often as you can. If the zone negates that, we’ll just have to do our best.”
The Wolverines will try to make Syracuse play faster than it wants, but the tournament rule of thumb is that it’s harder to speed a grudging opponent than to slow a frisky one. The guess is that Boeheim’s zone will claim yet another victim, which would, come Monday, give us: the season’s fourth collision of Louisville and Syracuse, two Big East schools bound for the ACC, this time with the winner taking all.
Syracuse won the first meeting, Louisville the past two. As strong as the Cardinals look, it must be recalled that one of the great NCAA championship upsets was sprung by Villanova, which had lost to Georgetown twice during the Big East regular season, but made 78.6 percent of its shots on April Fool’s Day 1985.
The Cardinals reached the 2012 Final Four as a No. 4 seed and were beaten by Kentucky, which was as big a favorite as Louisville is now. “I don’t want to say last year was a fluke,” forward Chane Behanan said, “but this year is just totally different. We have the No. 1 seed. It’s a lot of pressure with everyone expecting us to win.”
It is. But Louisville seems stout enough to bear any burden. It enters as the favorite. It will leave as the champion.
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