Very little in life, or at least in sports, can be both good and bad at the same time. Sometimes, there can be that split emotion, but typically it roots itself on one extreme or the other. For example, when your team, the team that you watched play like a bunch of Xanaxed fed elephants for the past five years and you still watched every damn game with the 16 other diehards, starts to compete- I mean really compete- and all of the sudden you have to deal with everyone being your best friend and uber-fan Number One from supposedly the day they were born. But, 90% of you is still rooting for the championship run while the other 10% of you swears that if you see another bandwagon jumper you’re going to remove their larynx with a melon baler. That’s about as close as it comes to being split in your opinions of something in the sporting world. Actually for me, and the other members of the hardcore Tigers basketball faithful, we have a perfect analogy- the first game of the Tigers NCAA tournament. Of all of the teams around the country, all 325 or so involved in their conference tournaments, I only cared about two of them. The rest of the teams could’ve all been swept up into a spaceship and taken to Sam Cassell’s home planet and I wouldn’t have minded. Nope, two teams. Memphis and North Texas. That’s it. Of course, of all of the permeations that the tourney could’ve afforded both the Tigers and North Texas, we pull the team with the one guy I truly root for, the one team that I check the scores online for every game. Hell, the one guy I featured in The Press last month in my Tigers article!!! Man, how did we pull Johnny Jones in the first round, a class guy through and through who bailed this school out of one of its’ darkest days and then led a team (North Texas) to the NCAA’s for the first time in nearly two decades. I feel badly for Johnny and I only wish there was another way for this to go down. Sadly, there’s not and North Texas will have to feel the wrath of this talented Tiger team. That just hurt to write. And yet even that doesn’t split my emotions. But the tourney selection did. Here’s why.
My first reaction after the Tigers were left out of the first three brackets on CBS’ longest, most uninspired programming of the brackets since I can remember them airing (by the way, can Seth Davis of CBS come off as more smug? Is this possible? Id he Billy Packer’s long lost son?), was a jump off the couch (actually, let’s call it a listing roll as apparently I was the official celebrator for my friend Tim’s 31st birthday as well as Tristan and Lacy’s once a year excursion outside of their front door after the hour of 8 pm on successive weekend nights) as I now knew we were the top #2 seed and in the bracket with an overrated Ohio State team and a Texas A&M team that scared me much more in January than it does in March. But then the call from Ira occurred and began to erode a lot of the joy. We, The Tigers, were in the South Region. This was good, seeing as Memphis is also, you know, in the south. What I failed to realize/ remember (hangovers will do this) was that the South Region somehow gets played, in the third and fourth rounds, in something called San Antonio. I actually thought that San Antonio was where the Spurs played and it was a kind of NBA basketball outpost for foreign players and a whining seven-foot swimmer. On further review, this is not the case. It’s an actual city with actual people and, shock of the century, it’s REAL close to none other than College Station, which, by the way, is not a city at all, just a place some 25,000 people congregate each year in September and decide not to leave until May. They do a lot of pushups there. It’s to keep them warm during the winter months. Regardless, once again, what looked to be promising turned out to look a touch more tarnished as this new piece of information fully invaded my brain. One part of me is excited about the two early games in New Orleans. The other part of me can’t believe we got the screw job from the tournament committee two years running… as the higher seed!
To give some degree of background, the tournament selection committee seeds each of the top four teams in each region in a quasi- “home” pod, which mean they take into consideration trying to keep those teams as close to home as humanly possible. Great work guys. There should be a little advantage to rolling off 22 straight wins, a 19-0 conference run and taking on as many comers as we could handle. The thing is, the committee swears they don’t keep home court advantage in mind come the third and fourth round games. Yet, in back to back eerily similar situations, the Tigers, seeded #1 last season, get #2 UCLA in the Elite Eight in Oakland, a destination only a touch easier to get to from Memphis than Saturn, while Bruins fans had a nice leisurely drive up the coast a couple of hours so as to make certain Tigers fans would be outnumbered 16,500 to 4. Same again this year, as Texas A&M, a #3 seed to Memphis’ #2, gets to go to San Antonio to face the Tigers if they both make it that far in a game that would be the equivalent of staging the game in Tunica for Memphis’ sake. Why has this now happened twice in successive years? What’s it going to be next year- Memphis gets a #1 seed but has to go through Duke, North Carolina and NC State while playing in the Winston-Salem pod? Maybe they’ll just have us play at the Dean Dome. But, on the first two rounds, it’s a good thing and it did come at the right time.
OK, so the committee screwed up. They do it every year. They’re starting to look a lot like Lindsay Lohan. And they’re as contrite as Paris Hilton. (And no, I didn’t have a girlfriend move in with me this weekend and bring along her magazine collection. But thanks for wondering.) They moved Nevada down to a seven seed, a team that is 28-4 and has done everything it should have to avoid a second round match up with the, in essence, #5 overall seed in the tourney. That said, Creighton shouldn’t have to face them in the first round either. Both teams were seeded too low, while 21-11 Purdue garnered a #9 seed. But, this happens all the time. (In a related story, the fans at both Drexel and Syracuse must be trying to find home addresses of the committee members and putting them up online to try and find the people who screwed their seasons.) But it doesn’t change the fact that the Tigers are going to have a tough time in the second round. What it does change is the fact that hopefully, New Orleans will be a home court advantage for the Tigers. Reno’s a long way from the Big Easy, so we should advance to San Antonio. And there’s the rub.
Get to San Antonio and it’s Texas A&M (probably) and then Ohio State (probably). Like I said before, it’s closer from College Station to San Antonio than it is from Memphis to Nashville. And the fact that Ohio State enrolls more people per year than Memphis typically has on it’s campus in its’ entirety isn’t going to help the situation either. So, while we are in the South Region, we have to play somewhere that’s just as easy to get to as Oakland, in the Southwest United States and have to go through one team that basically is from the city and the college fans that arguably travel better than any other college not named Notre Dame. I’m not lamenting, not totally at least, and I don’t mean to. It’s just a little conspicuous, don’t you think? It’s like the committee has been secretly saying for the last two years, that yes Memphis you did the right thing by playing a tough schedule and they know we can’t just up and leave our conference, so they seeded us accordingly. Of course, they hope that we don’t realize that they’re leading us into the prison showers. Umm, little hint to the committee, we noticed.
All of that being what it is, I still think this team is ready to shock. Earlier in the season, I had this team pegged as a Sweet Sixteen participant and not much else. More than anything regarding the Tigers, I thought this was the loaded year for college hoops. All of these dynamic freshmen joining already strong clubs ready and poised to do serious battle come March. In reality, it’s been like that date you set up with the girl you meet in a bar at two in the morning. You’re both a solid five drinks past making any rational decisions and you’re only about six hours from waking up with a gut-wrenching feeling and the twelve scattered Krystal boxes lying next to your bed. Apparently, all of the sand on the entire Eastern seaboard beach came to rest in your mouth during your sleep. So, like a good soldier, you call and agree to meet for that preordained date. You get there and within five minutes you realize this girl has nothing to say. Nothing. You spend the next twenty minutes trying to strike up any sort of verbal communication- hell, you’d start speaking Martian if it would loosen up the mood- until the movie starts and you’re bailed out. That, in a nutshell, is how the 2006-07 season played out. Many teams looked tremendous on opening night. Not so much anymore.
And now, the Tigers have a chance. A real chance. Even, with the South Region draw, more than a puncher’s chance. Ohio State has been playing close games all season, which you might think would get them ready for March until you realize that when a victorious college basketball team can win a game while scoring 49 point in an entire game all your games are going to be close. I don’t care if your playing Bill Walton’s UCLA teams or the Wooddale Junior High team. Luckily, Nevada or Creighton will lose to the other one and we should have home court advantage in the second round. Then, it’s Texas A&M in San Antone. I’ve seen them many times this year and the Tigers are going to give them trouble. The Aggies aren’t particularly deep and they rely so much on Acie Law that the rest of the team has taken a backseat to his game this year instead of developing two stars like Georgetown (A&M has two legit players in Law and Joseph Jones). I doubt if Law has seen a combo of the likes of Antonio Anderson and Andre Allen this season guarding him, but he’s going to be in for a nightmare if and when he does. And then it’s the #1 seed I wanted to see in our bracket- that’s right those Ohio State Buckeyes, who are vulnerable and feared all at the same time. But, they’re young and they don’t yet know how to deal with the pressure. A perfect quote was from CDR yesterday talking about the differences of this year’s team and last year’s and, inadvertently, could certainly sum up Ohio State. This year, he said (and I’m paraphrasing because it was on the radio and it’s really hard to write things down while driving in Memphis traffic) the team is much more prepared because last season the freshmen (and Andre Allen) had no idea the pressure and what to expect from the NCAA tournament. This year, he said, it’s different. They’ve been there and they’re getting the freshman ready for the pressure. He’s right, but he also, without saying it and probably without even meaning it, made an even bigger statement with his words. He’s reminding us that this year, it’s a team effort, that no one is above a win and no one is above a loss. They are what they are. At the end of the day, that’s what this team prides itself on doing- winning and that’s why so many people who were in the same camp as I was, the Sweet Sixteen camp, are now firmly entrenched in the Wry Smile Camp. The group of people, that whenever you ask them how far you think this team can go, they just smile that wry, almost Grinchesque grin and say “Far.” Or as Coach Cal put it (again, paraphrasing)- ‘I don’t see people lining up to play us.’
I don’t either and for some strange reason, I awoke this morning, headache and all, and I had the strangest sensation. I thought the tournament had already started. I saw myself, standing in a building, surrounded by 50,000 or so of my favorite people I had never met and I was in a state of complete shock. I couldn’t move a muscle. And then I realized where I was and what I was doing. I was standing inside a certain arena in Atlanta watching as the clock hit zero and these kids who I’ve admired all season long, maybe more than I’ve ever admired a Tigers team, going ballistic as we finally brought something home that should have been here a long time ago. Some 35 years ago, to be precise. And I just stood there, hoping that someone wouldn’t photograph me while having that look on my face and doing my best Dick Vermeil impersonation.
I’m hoping to have Déjà vu all over again in about four weeks.
On more thing. I’ve always felt this and always wanted to write it, and I probably have in some form or fashion over the past few years on this site, but here goes. Memphis has, undoubtedly, the best college basketball fans I’ve been around. Actually, let me rephrase- the best and most knowledgeable basketball fans around. Some people will take obvious umbrage at this assertion, but I think it’s true. I have lived all over this country and I’ve never been to a game that people knew, collectively knew that is, when to cheer, when to shut up and what to say in the right and wrong situations. I think I might have told the story of the woman who sat behind me last year at the Gonzaga game, a grandmother who was certainly more qualified to coach the Grizzlies than any coach they’ve trotted out this year. And there were a few sequences (especially when Morrison was killing us early in the game) where she made even me blush. This coming from a guy who A) grew up going to Shea Stadium and Mets games as a kid and B) once heckled Kenny Rogers, Carl Everett and Juan Gonzalez in the same game for an entire nine inning spring training game (Juan Gone tried to hit me twice with foul balls in the seventh inning- which prompted some great banter from the people who were sitting around me.)
But, when it really struck me was during the Houston win, when not only was everyone in the stadium ready to erupt with about a minute left to celebrate the unbelievable run this team went on, but just to congratulate the team en masse. Everyone in the stadium knew to stand and stay standing and clapping as the Tigers took the air out of the ball. But, the other instance, and the one that really got me was when the Houston players were announced as tourney runners-up and everyone gave them a standing ovation. All of the fans knew Houston had given it their all, that they were outmatched at every position and they still didn’t back down and that was pure class. We knew what we were clapping about, we had been there so many times with graduating seniors that we wished we could keep for one more year, the loss that meant another trip to the red headed step children of post-season play, the season that showed promise only to be derailed by injuries. We understood that and we hoped that Houston could have been afforded those same luxuries we had wished for, but we knew they couldn’t. So, when they had their kids named to the All-Tournament team, everyone stood and cheered for them. They fought the good fight and we acted like we had been there before. I’ve always maintained that we do a couple of things better than anyone else- we make better barbeque, we do bankruptcies like Hershey does chocolate and we play and know basketball. It’s in our DNA. I just thought it was as good a scene as it gets in college basketball and it showed a lot about Memphians and the University itself.
And with that, I now must pack the car for the trip to New Orleans. Hope to see you there. And, as always, Go Tigers!
