Hike up your pants, lace your boots tight and put your game face on because it’s about to get crazy.
All over the West Coast, everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past five months is thinking the same thing.
Pac-10 Tournament. Potential for a team to grab a bid to the Big Dance and a chance for fans to forget everthing for a month and become enveloped in the madness.
You skeptics out there may be thinking to yourselves, “What’s the big deal?” But let me pose a challenge to all those March Madness nonbelievers.
Doubt it all. All of the hype, the heart-wrenchers, the buzzer-beaters, the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory ““ ignore it. You can even go to class without a portable TV if you really want.
But no matter what you say, when it comes down to it, March Madness is the most thrilling, pants-wetting, heart-attack-inducing event in sports. Ever.
No playoff format in any other sport produces such an opportunity for any team to play its way to a national championship while providing nonstop action and excitement. And for the Pacific-10 Conference, it all begins today.
No other sport really sucks you into each and every game like March Madness does. Every year around this time, I find myself on a couch somewhere with a slice of pizza in one hand and the remote in other, desperately switching the channels between commercial breaks, rooting for teams I’ve never heard of.
Who would have thought I would ever care so much about Weber State’s free-throw shooting or Central Connecticut’s offensive rebounding? (Yes, Central Connecticut is a college.)
The complete and utter insanity of the NCAA Tournament is what keeps people glued to their TVs for a whole month. Who could have predicted that George Mason would have reached the Sweet 16 last season, much less the Final Four? (Who is George Mason anyway? I always assumed it was that guy from “24.” Maybe some people in Virginia liked Season Two a little too much and decided to name a university after him. We’ll never know.)
The insanity of the Big Dance is one thing, but if you look at it from a realistic perspective, the thing is tough to win. Damn tough. There are 65 teams (read: 64 losers) that earn a spot to compete. I don’t know of anything that has more losers than that. Maybe the first round of American Idol, but it’s close.
For some teams, just getting to the tournament is a moral victory in and of itself. For Wright State and Oral Roberts University (again, both are real-life colleges, and both clinched berths this week), getting to the NCAAs is the equivalent of meeting Shamu ““ it’s something you dream about but never expect to happen.
All of these unknown teams would never be in a championship discussion if college basketball had a normal playoff system. But that’s the beauty of it. They all have the opportunity to have an impact on who eventually wins it all. This is why every team brings the intensity every March ““ they know they’ve got just as good a chance to knock off those top seeds as anyone else does.
So why not the Golden Eagles of ORU or the Bulldogs of Wright State? Because the way I see it, they’ve both got a one-in-65 shot to win it all.
E-mail Feder at jfeder@media.ucla.edu if you think Vegas would take issue with that last sentence.