{"id":2410,"date":"2008-03-22T17:30:43","date_gmt":"2008-03-22T17:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/22\/tampa-madness\/"},"modified":"2008-03-22T17:30:43","modified_gmt":"2008-03-22T17:30:43","slug":"tampa-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/22\/tampa-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Tampa Madness!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a late start this morning, and had to run some errands today, but I would be remiss if I didn’t post something to commemorate the wackiness in the Tampa subregional<\/a> of the NCAA Tournament. They played four games yesterday in Tampa: the first two went into overtime, with Western Kentucky beating Drake<\/a> on a last-second three and San Diego knocking off UConn<\/a> the same way. Then Siena thumped Vanderbilt<\/a> (Woo! Capital region!), and Villanova closed the day with an upset of Clemson<\/a>. Two #4 seeds fell to #13 seeds, and two #5 seeds fell to #12 seeds.<\/p>\n

This is what makes the NCAA tournament the greatest event in sports. NBA partisans will blather about the inferior talent, but to a basketball fan, these games more than make up for any talent deficit with the sheer intensity of the play. It’s a single-elimination tournament, which means you either win or go home, and I don’t care how good NBA players are, an all-or-nothing effort from college kids is way more compelling than a game-2-of-7 effort from highly paid professionals. It’s no accident that the biggest sporting events in the world– the Super Bowl, the NCAA tournament, the World Cup– are single-elimination tournaments. The NBA, NHL, and MLB with their best-of-seven series may sell more tickets, but the only time they can match the atmosphere is when they get to a Game 7, at which point, they’ve played six games to get to the single-elimination format they should’ve started with.<\/p>\n

There’s also the fact that winning with lesser talent (as is almost always the case in these first-round upsets) generally requires much better game play than you see between more evenly matched teams. I think you may have to have played the game to appreciate that, though.<\/p>\n

Anyway: Hooray for Tampa! And, as a bonus, West Virginia best Duke<\/a>, so Life Is Good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got a late start this morning, and had to run some errands today, but I would be remiss if I didn’t post something to commemorate the wackiness in the Tampa subregional of the NCAA Tournament. They played four games yesterday in Tampa: the first two went into overtime, with Western Kentucky beating Drake on… Continue reading Tampa Madness!<\/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-2410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410","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=2410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}