March Madness

As the March Madness “Big Dance” tournament is rounding the end, it looks as though the underdogs have taken over this season. Though, there were many big wins for teams that were expected to win, there were also a number of huge upsets. I was lucky enough to be able to watch some of these upsets live. I was at the United Center in Chicago, IL when a #11 seeded, Virginia Commonwealth team thoroughly upset the #3 seeded Purdue Boilermakers. The game was intense to watch because the VCU team was only lucky enough to get into the tournament by the extra places added to the tournament just this year in the play-in games. Purdue should have been in control the whole game, and had a quote on quote “easy win” when looking at the game on paper, but VCU was able to get the win out of the game and move on to the sweet 16 games. Not only was VCU a big upset, but as hard as it was for me to watch our Notre Dame basketball team play, they also were on the down side of a big upset as well. The FSU #10 seed really hit hard on our #2 seeded team just moments after VCU beat Purdue. Again, most people went into that game thinking that this would be an “easy win” just because of the rankings and how we had previously played. On paper everything seemed to work perfectly in our favor; even an elite 8 or at the very least a sweet 16 chance was heavily in our favor.
Watching these two games in person as well as watching many of the other upsets that have thus far happened in the tournament got me thinking about the difference between what a team should play like versus what they do play like. It’s hard to imagine on paper a #10 seed beating a #2 seed by over ten points, but when watching it, you clearly saw who the better team was on that specific day. Maybe we could have played better on a different day, and maybe nine games out of ten that we played against that same team we would win, but that one opportunity the team who played best (regardless of their seed on paper) advanced to the next round. I just think it’s incredibly interesting how no matter how hard or long we study the way in which a team plays, it is nearly impossible to pick the perfect winners for each and every round.
Amy Prestinario, ND 2012
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