Running 2010 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament thread

I'm Gus Johnson and I get buckets Twitter hits.

 

Hell of a game. Too bad. I was hoping for a Xavier/Butler Elite Eight game.

 

Thanks to the miracle of the DVR, I was able to rewind and listen to Gus Johnson's, er, banshee scream when Jordan Crawford hit that insanely long three.

I've often been critical of him, but he was the perfect announcer for this game. Imagine if Joe Buck was calling it.

He made the game more exciting and in his quiet moments did a great job slipping in asides to give the characters on stage more depth.

Gus won me over tonight.

 

I don't know. I've always wondered what Gus Johnson would do to a game that merited his screaming. Turns out, his screaming just gets repetitive and when a play merits a big call, Johnson just gives us his usual screaming. I'll take a guy who gives me 7s all the way through and kicks the excitement meter to 10 on a big play over a guy who starts at 10 and stays there.
That was some insane shooting there though.

 

As a Kansas State fan, what a night.

I can't believe they won. They weren't supposed to. You play a team THAT hot, a team that is drilling 3 pointers from all corners, and you don't win in the tournament. I could see the conversations tomorrow about "holy shit, how awesome was Xavier last night?"

But, Xavier's best was enough to tie. Twice.

Unreal. Considering the rate at which I'm drinking and my excitement, now 90 minutes after the end of the game, I may not sleep tonight.

 

That's definitely the gamble you take in late-game situations, where referees are supposedly taught to swallow the whistle unless they absolutely have to. They weren't going to call anything on the dribble, but you have to on the shot attempt.

I know some people think it's a lock to foul in those situations, but for me, I would rather take my chances with my team playing defenses than let the team trailing score two points with the clock stopped, or maybe even score four on a single possession and win like Kentucky nearly did against Mississippi State -- which then lost an automatic bid to the tournament -- when Wall airballed that 3 that got put back to send it to overtime.

 

No, as the higher seed, K-State was supposed to. Besides, Xavier didn't make a single stop in the first overtime. You cannot win games unless you make stops, and they couldn't make one. Xavier, in that sense, was fortunate to have pushed it into a second overtime.

 

As a fellow K-State fan, I say screw sleep! I'll wear my purple with pride tomorrow and everyone will understand why I have this crazed smile on my face and bags underneath my eyes.

 

A very interesting night indeed.....

We saw Kentucky at its best during that 30-6 run in the first half. We then saw Kentucky at its worst when it was outscored 20-8 in the first 15 or so minutes of the second half.

The really good Kentucky team turned turnovers into easy lay-ups, dominated the backboard and pounded the shit out of Cornell in the paint with lay-ups, putbacks and dunks. The really bad Kentucky looked like they weren't interested, settled for jumpers (which they couldn't make) and they fouled instead of playing good defense.

If the first team shows up and plays for 40 minutes three more times it will win a national title. If the second team shows up for any extended period of time the next three games, they will go home.

West Virginia is a motherfucker to try and score against but I'm not sure the Mountaineers can score enough to beat Kentucky.

You can live a long time and not see a game as good as K-State and Xavier and if K-State plays that well offensively Saturday, Butler will get blown out.

Syracuse can now join Georgetown and Louisville as three Big East teams that laid down like choking dogs when it counted. A horrible job by the Orange tonight against they should beat by double digits nine out of ten times.

 

Syracuse had that game won at 54-50 before it went into total brain-lock.

Inexcusable.

Butler, incidentally, got away with about a half-dozen traveling violations, but it doesn't change the fact that Syracuse was still in a position to win and blew it.

 

Some Gus Johnson from last night...