“No way that just happened.” Tommy Callahan, Tommy Boy, 1995.
So our highly heralded Butler Bulldogs, the 2010 Underdogs of the year, once again defied incredible odds and made it to the NCAA Championship game! After beating VCU in their Final Four matchup, the famously scrappy squad continued their miraculous two-year run in the Tournament that had many national media members actually saying that they should not be considered Underdogs at all anymore. Noooooo. Don't say that!!! So what happened next? Well, they went out and played in what history will almost certainly remember as, “the worst Championship game ever played.” The Bulldogs shot 18.8% from the floor. Ouch. And that percentage is not just from three-point range by the way, that’s from everywhere. (In fact they shot better from behind the arc, at a 9 out of 33 clip, than they shot from "two-point land" at 3 out of 31! Amazing. I’m pretty sure that that 3-31 from two-point-territory has never happened before… in a basketball game at any level!)
If they had even managed to shoot 30% (and that still would have been bad for them) they might have been able to win the game anyway, because UConn played awfully on offense as well. The Huskies shot just 34%, including 1-11 from the three-point line and looked just as out-of-sync on offense as their counterparts. Usually that’s not nearly good enough to win the NCAA Championship, but on this night it was. UConn took over in the second half, leaving the Butler guys to wonder what could have been. After extraordinarily making back-to-back trips to the Tournament Championship game, they finished their season on monday night in perplexing and embarrassing fashion. From the mountaintop straight to the valley. Well, that’s sports for ya.
Ugh. Sorry Butler. For what it’s worth you will still get strong consideration for this year’s Underdog of the Year Award if you haven't wrapped it up already. Admittedly though, that is probably not much consolation. But c’mon, it’s nobody’s fault. Who would have guessed that your two best players would shoot 5-28 from the floor? That the best individual shooting percentage on the team was Chase Stigall's 27%? Or that the bench production would total two Ronald Norad free-throws? Maybe it's really a question for the super-computers at NASA. How could every single player on one given team all be that off at the same time? I don't know if a probability for such a scenario is even possible to calculate, but I'd have to imagine that it would be astronomically small. It's the perfect storm for a nightmarish offensive output and it’s just the kind of thing that can happen in a one-and-done tournament. On any given night, for no particular reason, things can fall apart. But hey, at least both teams played inspired defense!
Honestly though, lots of NCAA tournaments have ended in similarly anti-climactic fashion. It’s not an indictment of the system and maybe it’s actually a vindication. Nothing could possibly live up to the thrill of the first two rounds of the tourney with all of the amazing competition, cinderella stories, and buzzer-beaters. And it's very possible that the two teams that remain standing at the end are technically “inferior teams” to some that are watching at home, but that’s what makes the Tournament so special. Because Butler isn’t the best team in the country. Maybe they’re not technically even in the top ten. But they deserved to be there. And Underdogs everywhere are going to be waiting with bated breath to see what they do next year!
C’mon Butler!
Underdog of the Year ThreePeat??
Count ‘em out… I dare you.
Thanks for reading.
Underdogs OUT.
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