Serendipitous wrote:I didn't even realize last night was the championship game until I put the tv on CBS and discovered the 8:00 programming change. No Carolina, no care. Well, I take that back. I send in my brackets but when everything "fell apart" I didn't have a reason to keep up anymore.
Butler winning seemed like a long shot (pregame I commented that they were so cute, like chihuahuas challenging mastiffs) and it looks like they kept that score tight throughout the entire game. Glad it wasn't some total blowout. Keep the Dookies sweatin'.
After the game, coach Krzyzewski said that he thought the game would be considered historic, and to a small degree, I think he may be right. After all, for the past several years, the championship has been won by teams featuring young, freshman or sophomore basketball prodigies who entered the college system with no intention of staying long enough to come close to graduating. Kentucky this year was a big example of such a team this year, yet it fell to a "nobody" team that was a little closer to the whole "student-athlete" model.
The media kept saying that Duke had little chance of winning, because they had no national-level "superstar" players (which I thought was slightly incorrect, as their top 3 scorers were All-American type players, it seemed to me), and was "only" playing as a well-formed unit with good back-up depth. Analysts thought that such a team couldn't possibly withstand the power of Kentucky or Kansas. A lot of folks even questioned the placement of Duke in the seedings above Syracuse.
But all the other 1-seeds fell to less flashy teams. It seems that for this year at least, the phenom-driven teams were giving somewhat inferior performances. I'll be watching with interest as to whether this is a one-year bump in the trend toward 2-year appearances by NBA-bound stars, or a shift toward more balanced college programs.
