Monday, March 22, 2010

NCAA Basketball Tourney SI Article

Excellent piece from this week's Sports Illustrated on the NCAA Basketball Tournament.



From Tim Layden, "High Stakes" is all about March Madness and the ramifications of what can happen out of the tournament... with reference to some great past storylines in Bryce Drew and Valparaiso from 1998 and George Mason 2006.

For me personally, though, I think of Tyus Edney going coast to coast to win an early round game en route to a UCLA Championship and the #16 seed Princeton Tigers almost taking down Georgetown in a first round matchup. In the not quite as amazing, but still memorable category were the games I saw this last weekend with Michigan State taking down Maryland at the buzzer and Northern Iowa beating #1 seed Kansas.

One great thing about the tournament is each memorable game can stand on it's own as exciting, but then you never know what will follow and just how much that win can mean... i.e. UCLA wouldn't have advanced out of the early rounds to later win the title if not for that Tyus Edney bucket.

Even if someone's not a huge basketball fan, it's compelling writing from Layden about something with a lot of human drama.

Going beyond this piece again, if the below clip isn't human drama, I don't know what is...