It’s that time of year, when “mid-major” and small conferences have their basketball tournaments, with the winners earning one shot at sports-geek immortality with a chance to score an upset in the first round of the NCAA’s. Four teams earned automatic bids yesterday, and they deserve a post of their own:<\/p>\n
Winthrop<\/a>: At 28-4, the Belmont<\/a>: The Bruins blew out East Tennessee State with a three-point barrage, earning their second straight trip to the NCAA’s. They lost to UCLA last year, in a Bruin-on-Bruin clash, and it remains to be seen whether the selection committee will set them up for more fun nickname games this year.<\/p>\n Davidson<\/a>: Davidson is another small team with a gaudy record (29-4), which earned another NCAA bid by holding off the College of Charleston. Davidson will be the only NCAA particpant to be rated one of the top 10 liberal arts colleges<\/a> in the country, so I’ll be pulling for them provided they don’t draw one of my teams.<\/p>\n Eastern Kentucky<\/a>: The Colonels earned an NCAA bid thanks to the one field goal hit by Josh Taylor, a freshman guard who hit a lay-up with 2.9 seconds left to win the game, 63-62. Someday, his grandkids will be really sick of that story, but today, he’s the most popular guy in eastern Kentucky.<\/p>\n The fifth team to secure a bid is Penn, who locked up the Ivy League title a few days back (the Ivies are old-school, and don’t have a conference tournament). I didn’t see any of that game, so they don’t get a blurb.<\/p>\n Congratulations to all these teams. Enjoy your moment in the spotlight, and good luck against anybody other than Maryland or Syracuse…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s that time of year, when “mid-major” and small conferences have their basketball tournaments, with the winners earning one shot at sports-geek immortality with a chance to score an upset in the first round of the NCAA’s. Four teams earned automatic bids yesterday, and they deserve a post of their own: Winthrop: At 28-4, the… Continue reading Let’s Hear it for the Little Guy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Slow Moving Basset Hounds<\/s> Eagles probably ought to be favored in their first-round game. The system being what it is, though, they needed to sweat it out a little bit, winning a tight game over VMI, who had a chance to tie at the buzzer.<\/p>\n