He was referring to the 40-minute format – just two halves of basketball that decides your fate in both the conference and the NCAA Tournament – versus the best-of-seven games series that decide every matchup in the NBA Playoffs.
Grant knows both scenarios well.
He’s in his 37th season as a college coach – 17 as a head coach – and he also spent two seasons in the NBA as an assistant coach with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Those long series in the pros disarm the one-punch knockout ability you get with an underdog college team that gets hot in one certain moment.
On the flip side, the good team, the more talented team that’s expected to win, must hope it doesn’t suddenly lose favor with the basketball gods. That’s the irony part of the equation Grant mentioned.
“You hope nobody gets a stomachache the night before (the game),” he said. “You hope everybody is healthy. You hope you stay out of foul trouble. It’s not always the best team that wins; it’s the team that’s playing best at that time.”
Grant and the Dayton Flyers know all about sudden changes of fortune in tournament time.
Three years ago, when the A-10 Tournament was at this very same NBA arena, the Flyers were the No. 2 seed and edged UMass in the quarterfinals and the next day met No. 6 Richmond, a team they had just beaten in the regular season 11 days earlier.
Near the end of the first half, UD point guard Malachi Smith went down with an ankle injury. The Flyers then blew a 15-point lead and lost by four.
Not only were they knocked out of the A-10 Tournament again - since they first played in it in 1996, Dayton has won the tournament just once, in 2003, when it was played at UD Arena - but it turns out that loss to Richmond made them the last team to be eliminated from the 2022 NCAA Tournament field.
In the pros, a seven-game series gives a team a lot more time to recover from the loss of one key player like Smith was to UD.
A study done last year found the No. 1 seed in the NBA playoffs wins over 72 percent of the time.
In the NCAA Tournament, the little guy, the unknown program, the seemingly overmatched team has a shot.
Just ask the Saint Peter’s Peacocks, a No. 15 seed out of New Jersey, that made it to the Elite Eight in 2022 by knocking off No. 2 Kentucky, No. 3 Purdue and a 31-2 Murray State team that had the longest winning streak in the nation.
Four years before that the University of Maryland Baltimore County Retrievers, a No. 16 seed and a 20.5 point underdog, routed top-seeded Virginia, 74-54. It was the first time a 16 seed – 0-135 in tournament history before that – ever beat a No. 1 seed.
The list of story book winners in the tournament – Cinderellas who wear sneakers, not glass slippers – goes on and on:
Loyola made the Final Four in 2018, George Mason did the same in 2006 and in 2011 VCU, coached by Shaka Smart – who cut his coaching teeth as a 24-year-old director of basketball operations on Oliver Purnell’s staff at UD – made it to the Final Four all the way from the First Four at UD Arena.
Along the way, the Rams bounced a quintet of storied programs – Southern Cal, Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and top-seeded Kansas – from the tournament.
The fascination with the underdog is very American.
It mimics the ideal of the American dream and that goes back – at least until two months ago when a vitriolic political shift rolled up the welcome mats – to the empathetic promise of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty torch.
“It’s a time when anything can happen”
March Madness begins with the Conference Tournaments – No. 3 seed UD opens A-10 quarterfinal play Friday night at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C, and No. 2 seed Miami, which was having its best season in 26 years, played Thursday in the Mid-American Conference Tournament quarterfinals in Cleveland.
“This is the best time of the year,” said Steele, who’s in his third season as Miami’s head coach after four years leading the Xavier program.
“This is Christmas for us, and for any basketball fan or basketball coach or basketball player.
“It’s a time when anything can happen. It’s a whole new season. Everybody throws the (regular season) records out and is 0-0. And on any given night, anybody can beat anybody.
“That’s why everybody loves March Madness. It’s what makes college basketball so gosh darn exciting once you get in the conference tournaments and the NCAA Tournament.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just 40 minutes of basketball.
“This isn’t the NBA playoffs, where usually the best team is going to win a seven-game series.
“In college basketball you have all these upsets. You see Oakland beat Kentucky last year and Saint Peter’s go on a run a few years ago.
“These possibilities are why college basketball, this time of year, is the most-watched sport.”
In 2023, for example, 18.1 million people watched the NCAA title game, while 16.8 million watched the NBA Playoffs.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
March Madness is like Christmas
The reasons are many:
There’s the unpredictably that Steele and Grant talked about. There’s the novelty; the matchups you never expect to see on the big stage, games like UMBC versus Virginia, and Saint Peters handling Kentucky and Purdue.
The NBA has better players, bigger stars, fancier contracts, and movie stars and headline makers sitting in the front row. But it doesn’t have the chaotic wonderment and appeal of March Madness.
There’s not the colorful pageantry and quirkiness and unfettered fun that comes with the rollicking pep bands, the cheerleaders and mascots.
And who would you rather see sitting courtside: 105-year-old Sister Jean, the patron saint of Loyola hoops? Or, a self-important talking head like Stephen A. Smith spewing loud opinions with every breath?
And this time of year, is there any more popular venture than filling out a tournament bracket?
You don’t have to be a sports fan to get involved. You can make your selections using KenPom data or because you like a team’s colors or its nickname.
Last year the NCAA estimated close to 100 million people filled out brackets in the major pick-em contests.
Mathematicians estimated the chance of anyone filling out a perfect bracket – which means picking all 67 tournament games correctly – is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. (That’s 18 zeroes.)
The closest anybody came to that, according to the NCAA, was Greg Nigl, a neuropsychologist with the Columbus Veterans Administration. He entered the NCAA.com bracket contest in 2019 and got the first 49 games right.
To celebrate his good fortune, Buick, one of the NCAA Tournament sponsors, flew him and his son to Anaheim, California for a week of sightseeing and watching Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games being played there.
The bracket challenge is something that draws families, friends and coworkers together, all of which adds to the allure of the NCAA Tournament.
Steele was right: March Madness is like Christmas.
And Grant was right, as well: Anything can happen. Along with the beauty, there is the irony.
Just ask Nigl.
After going 49-0 to start the tournament games correctly, he then missed 14 of the last 18 games.
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