March Madness
Kelsey Tanouye
April 23, 2010
Filed under Sports
For basketball fans the month of March brings the annual “holy grail” of the collegiate season: March Madness. What starts out as the top 65 NCAA Division I Men’s basketball teams from all across the nation dwindles down over the span of a couple of weeks to what eventually becomes known as the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and then the prestigious lone NCAA champion. Every year the tournament is full of big surprises, but this year had to have seen some of the biggest upsets in recent years.
Top-seeded teams like Kansas, Ohio State, Syracuse, Kansas State, and Kentucky, which were all heavy favorites, were all stopped short of moving on to the Final Four in down to the wire games against underrated teams like the University of Northern Iowa and Cornell leaving Duke as the only no. 1 seed to be left in the grueling tournament. However, despite all of this, the final showdown had to have been the biggest shocker of all.
In front of a crowd of 70,000 people, the no. 5 seed hailing from the West division went up against the number one seed Duke from the South division at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. Butler University (which has an undergraduate enrollment of about 4,500) was the smallest school to reach the championship, let alone the Final Four, in this year’s tournament while Duke made its first Final Four appearance since 2004.
The stakes were high, and the odds were in favor of Duke, but the game was still uncertain of a winner until literally the last few seconds. When Duke’s Brian Zoubek made one of two free throws for a 61-59 lead with only 3.7 seconds left, it was only a half-court shot that Butler was left with to depend on for a game-winner. However, some questioned at first why Zoubek was signaled to purposely miss his second free throw. If he had made his second free throw then Duke would have had a 62-59 lead, and Butler would have had to advance the ball from out of bounds within the allotted 3.7 seconds to the opposite end of the court and attempt to hit a three-pointer. This would have all had to have happened though with a flawless breakdown of the Duke full-court defense, which already shut down the Butler offense throughout the game to a 34.5% field goal percentage. On the other hand, with Zoubek missing the shot on purpose Butler would have had to get the rebound, transition through the full-court press by Duke, and try to set up for a half-court shot on the run which, let’s face it, is a hail-Mary.
That last attempt at a major upset was handed to Gordon Hayward who was the one to let the ball fly within those last seconds, but while some Cinderella stories have fairytale endings the journey towards a national championship for the Butler Bulldogs ended too close without a win for comfort. After all this, don’t be surprised if Butler comes back charging next year, because they most likely will be going all the way for a win with most of their team returning. And when it happens, don’t say I didn’t call it.
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