That whoosh you heard on Friday
night was the sound of millions of brackets across America simultaneously
bursting into flames. The sporting spectacle whose overarching allure is chaos
was finally graced with the mother of all upsets as University of Maryland-Baltimore County upended
top-ranked Virginia to become the first ever No16 seed to
defeat a No1, springing the greatest of NCAA men’s basketball tournament
surprises in the most shocking way imaginable.
The little-known Retrievers
didn’t merely defeat the Cavaliers, the top overall seed in the field who had
lost only twice all season and won the Atlantic Coast Conference by four games
before running the table in the conference tournament. They emerged from a
half-time stalemate to break Virginia’s spirit during a second half that never
felt close down the stretch, picking their teeth with a national-best defense
that had surrendered an average of 53 points all season.
Final score: No16 UMBC 74, No1
Virginia 54.
You read that correctly. The same
UMBC who lost to Albany by 44 points less than
two months ago, that finished second to Vermont in the America East and needed
a last-second three-pointer in the
conference tournament final to punch their first NCAA ticket in more than a
decade, won by 20 points over college basketball’s best team and made a mockery of the pundits both
armchair and professional.
No16 seeds had played 135 first-round
games against No1s entering Friday night’s contest and lost all of them by an
average margin of nearly 25 points. There had been a few close calls down the
years. Princeton famously came within one point of
beating top-seeded Georgetown in 1989.
One year later Murray
State took Michigan State to overtime before fading. Western
Carolina had two shots in the final seconds to topple Purdue in 1996, twice
missing their chance at history. But the blowouts far outnumbered the near
misses. None had even come within single digits of the holy grail since
Arizona’s nine-point win over Weber State in 2014.
Until
Friday.
Surely
there have been more consequential upsets in NCAA tournament lore: North
Carolina State’s buzzer-beating stunner over Houston’s Phi Slama Jama in
1983 and Villanova’s epochal triumph over Georgetown in
1985 were both in national championship games and became archetypes of the
modern-day March Madness mythos as it ballooned into the mainstream spectacle
that today generates nearly $1bn in TV money.
Louisiana State (1986), George
Mason (2006) and VCU (2011) were each No11 seeds who scored Elite Eight upsets
over No1s to complete improbable runs to the Final Four. Florida Gulf Coast,
one of a few No15 seeds to knock off a No2, delivered a stirring encore against
San Diego State to crash the Sweet 16. All UMBC won on Friday
was a second-round date with Kansas State on Sunday.
But there was something about No16
over No1, one of the last things in sports that had never, ever happened, that took on a mythology of its own and made
natural fodder barroom debates: the sort of psychic blockade once associated
with the four-minute mile and the sound barrier. One day it could happen, we
told ourselves year after year, even as it felt less and less likely with each
passing tournament.
Now
it finally has. And it couldn’t have come at a better time for college
basketball, which has played out the season amid a spreading FBI probe into widespread
bribery, fraud and cheating at the highest echelons of the sport that’s already
ensnared dozens of top programs, prompting the NCAA to launch an independent
investigation led by former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
Yet
for one night the essential purity of the knockout format managed to overshadow
the problems mounting at the gates, putting a fine point on why the NCAA tournament endures as one of
America’s most valued sporting traditions: Throw together 68 teams in a
one-and-done format and there’s no telling what will happen.
Unlike football
where the big guy will beat the little guy 10 times out of 10, basketball is a
sport where one untimely injury, one whistle-happy referee or one hot hand can
leave a heavily favored top seed scratching for its life. The better team
doesn’t always win.
On
Friday night, the hot hand belonged to UMBC’s Jairus Lyles, who poured in a
game-high 28 points on 9-for-11 shooting and etched his name alongside the long
roll of previously anonymous heroes who vanish from American life as quickly as
they appeared, but whose cameos endure in our sporting consciousness: Arceneaux and Lewullis, Pittsnogle and Farokhmanesh, McFadden and Blizzard.
There’s
no sensible reason a college basketball tournament should hold a nation of 320m
souls in its thrall for three weeks every year, but it doesn’t take long to
discover there’s very little that makes sense about March Madness. It’s right
there in the name.
It’s an event that showcases a unique cross-section of
America, from urban centers to outlying areas that go unrepresented by
professional sports teams, brought together under one tent like no other event
in sports.The
whole enterprise points directly into the mainline of why people watch sports:
they’re unpredictable. And
never more than on Friday night in Charlotte.
Source: Guardian