King Kaufman's Sports Daily
This year's George Mason: It's Marist! Plus: The double bonus is a double lousy rule.
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March 20, 2007 | So now that the dust has settled from the first 48 games, who is this year's George Mason?
That's the question that was being batted around before the NCAA Tournament by media outlets counting on their audience not realizing that most years don't have a George Mason, which is what made George Mason's 2006 run to the Final Four so spectacular.
The answer before the first round was "probably nobody," and the answer after the second round is -- Marist!
Or Florida State.
I'm sorry to say I've been ignoring the women's Tournament, which is tough luck for me because if I'd been paying attention Monday night I could have seen Stanford, the second seed in the Fresno region, get upended on its home floor by the No. 10 Seminoles.
My excuse is there are only so many hours in the day, and I just haven't been able to keep up with women's basketball in even my usual just-barely way this year. However, reading Kansas City Star writer Mechelle Voepel's piece for ESPN.com about Stanford's decade of painful postseason failure more than made up for it.
"Some Stanford fans probably feel like they simply can not take any more," Voepel writes.
Music.
And let's have one more chorus of that 1998 game when Stanford became the only top-seeded NCAA Tournament team in history, men or women, to lose to a No. 16. And it was a home game.
Sweet music.
No. 13 Marist made this year's Sweet 16 by dumping No. 4 Ohio State and then No. 5 Middle Tennessee. There are still some potential Cinderellas playing Tuesday night. No. 8 Pittsburgh has to play Tennessee in the Dayton region, but the game's in Pittsburgh. Nine-seeds Notre Dame and Wisconsin-Green Bay will look for miracles against North Carolina and UConn, respectively, and 8-seed Temple only has to beat Duke in Raleigh, N.C. That's all.
Double-digit seeds making the Sweet 16, top seeds being tested before the Final Four. The women's Tournament is improving year by year.
Next page: Still hard to make the women's Tourney a priority. Plus: Rules we hate -- the double bonus