When is being 68th a good thing? When you just make it into the NCAA tournament
All hail my two favorite days of the year, which this year fell on March 18-19 — the two days when sports fans argue loudly and passionately over who is the 68th-best college basketball team in the nation.
Let’s hear it for mediocrity!
As bids were awarded to fill the 68 slots that make up the NCAA tournament, fans and pundits prepared to get their dander up over the best team to be left out and the worst team to get in. Oklahoma snubbed? The travesty! Virginia in? The injustice! Because it MATTERS who the 68th-best team in the country is, really it does.
Yay! We’re No. 68! We’re No. 68!
It happens all the time. The 68th-smartest kid in the class casts aside the vape pipe and comes out of nowhere to win the spelling bee. The 68th-best candidate on Indeed gets the job. It’s the underdog story we all love. The 68th-best basketball team cutting down the nets is like Bibi Netanyahu winning the Nobel Peace Prize: longshot, but it could happen.
Let’s hear it for the famous 68s. Interstate 68. NFL Hall of Famer Joe DeLamielleure wore No. 68. That popular noise-rock duo of Josh Scogin and Michael McClellan formed that band “’68” singing their popular hits including “The Knife, The Knife, The Knife.” Who doesn’t pause sentimentally at the 68th bottle of beer on the wall? The movie ’68 memorably documented the lives of Zoltan Szabo and his family, Hungarian immigrants, as they worked hard to make a life in San Francisco. Hurrah for Zoltan. You go, boy.
Nowhere else in life is the 68th-best anything so celebrated, so passionately defended, so held in such superstitious awe as the 68th-best basketball team on Selection Sunday. My God, how could they have left out Pitt? No Xavier? What in the name of Zach Freemantle are they thinking?
Forget that most leagues don’t even have 68 teams. Consider professional basketball. Now imagine that the NBA had another 38 teams, all of them progressively worse than the Washington Wizards. What would the odds of that last place team winning a title? Do numbers even go that high?
And it’s not these teams’ fault that they didn’t get in. It’s because there’s a conspiracy on the part of the elite selection committee members to snub deserving teams, while elevating establishment teams with lousy records led by coaches popular in the college basketball establishment. It’s called Deep (Michigan) State.
And that means, for those who lost out — and even some that didn’t but were dealt an unfairly low seed — it becomes a matter of personal insult.
Here’s who I root against. Any coach who says some variation of the following: “Everybody’s disrespecting us.” “We’re tired of people putting us down.” “You guys have been writing us off all year.” “Nobody’s giving us a chance.”
And no one “disrespects” a team more than its own coach.
Nick Freaking Saban, whose Alabama football team would be winning like 10 titles in a row with entire rosters that would be selected in the first round of the NFL draft, would with a straight face say things like “We’ve been underdogs all year.”
St. John's coach Rick Pitino, bless his heart, said of his own team during the season, "We are so nonathletic that we can't guard anybody without fouling," calling them “slow” and “physically weak.”
When the NCAA left his nonathletic, slow and physically weak team out of the field, Pitino called it “fraudulent” and “flat-out wrong.”
The entire Mountain West conference, after receiving six bids, felt “disrespected” for being awarded low seeds. Which is sort of the equivalent of complaining, “Hey, we’re not the 68th-best team, we’re the 48th-best team.”
Whatever you say. But in presidential terms, that would still make you the James K. Polk of college basketball. Let mediocrity rule.
Want to take a bite out of your fear of snakes? Have 'em for dinner.
Reality in America, and our perception of it, appear to be two very different things
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Hurrah for the team that placed 68th in the NCAA basketball slots
