Late Thursday: It didn't happen until the night session, but the 2008 NCAA Tournament finally spit out its first great finish in the third set of games Thursday.
Fifteen-seed Belmont took No. 2 Duke to the wire in a West region game in Washington, D.C., but Duke held on to win 71-70.
Belmont had a great chance to win it. The Bruins were down one after playing matador defense on Gerald Henderson, who drove coast-to-coast for what would be the winning layup with about 11 seconds left. They had the ball out of bounds under the Duke basket with 4.0 seconds left, but they threw away the inbounds pass.
Belmont was still able to get a pretty good look at a 40-foot would-be game winner at the buzzer. At least to the extent that a 40-footer can be a pretty good look. The shot, by leading scorer Justin Hare, missed and the Blue Devils escaped.
A Belmont upset would have been great, especially on a near-half-court shot, but it was a terrific game all the same, nip and tuck down the stretch and with an exciting finish. That's all you can ask for. If the underdog won all of those, it wouldn't be any fun.
Only two of 16 lower seeds won, and one of those was Texas A&M over BYU in the West, a 9 beating an 8, which really doesn't count for anything. The only meaningful upset was No. 11 Kansas State beating No. 6 USC in the Midwest, which really didn't look like much of an upset at all. The freshman showdown pitting K-State's Michael Beasley against USC's O.J. Mayo never really materialized.
Beasley got into early foul trouble, though he did come back to have a good game. But it was his supporting cast -- also mostly freshmen, and particularly Mayo's old high-school teammate Bill Walker -- who controlled the game. Mayo did score 20 points, two fewer than Walker and three fewer than Beasley, but a couple of garbage-time baskets inflated that total.
It seems counterintuitive that in this age of parity we're seeing fewer upsets in the early rounds of the Tournament every year, but I think what's really happening is that the selection committee is doing a much better job of seeding than it used to.
Back when the committee just wouldn't buy the idea that a team from a smaller conference could actually be worth a damn, big-conference teams would regularly get overseeded, then they'd lose in the first or second round to a smaller-conference team that had been underseeded.
It would look like an upset -- the guys in the dark uniforms would have the crowd behind them, and they'd win and be really happy, and the guys in the white suits would look shocked -- but as often as not it wasn't. In a lot of those "upsets" over the years, if the teams had played each other 10 times, the "underdog" would have won seven or eight of them.
Something to think about as you try to count how many national commercials are using Beethoven's Ninth on their soundtrack.
The upset-light Tournament has led to a bunched field early in the Panel o' Experts contest. The leader at the moment is -- you, the crowd, as represented by the users at CBS SportsLine.
The public picked the favorite in every first-round game except two: Texas A&M over BYU and Davidson over Gonzaga, a 10-over-7 in the Midwest Friday. So far, so good on the upset calls. The only game you all missed was Kansas State over USC.
In the second round, the masses are picking two 5-seeds over 4's, Notre Dame over Washington State in the East and Clemson over Vanderbilt in the Midwest. Otherwise you've got favorites all the way to the title game, except you have North Carolina beating UCLA. Memphis is a higher 1-seed than UCLA, so the Tigers would be the favorite pick in that semifinal. The fact that the public generally agrees with the selection committee's seedings supports the idea that the committee is doing its job well.
Thanks to helpful reader J.G. Harrington, Tony Kornheiser's bracket has been located at This Website Stinks! Michael Wilbon's is also there, so he's on the panel too.
And former champion Yoni Cohen of YoCoHoops.com e-mailed his bracket, but with the disclaimer: "I left Fox Sports at the end of last season to concentrate on politics. This season I wrote a handful of columns as a freelancer for Sports Illustrated on Campus, but am not much of an 'expert' these days."
The NCAA Selection Committee and I both missed two games; Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated, whose bracket doubles as the magazine's bracket, the inspiration for this contest, missed five; and Seth Davis of S.I. and CBS missed six. I think he picks a lot of upsets just to stand apart from his on-air partner, Clark Kellogg, or Chalk Kellogg, as Davis calls him.
Everyone else missed three or four. The USC loss really hurt the S.I. boys. Stewart Mandel had the Trojans in the Final Four, Wahl and Davis had them in the Elite 8. Keri also had them in the Elite 8. Kornheiser, McCain and Cohen had them in the Sweet 16. The only other bracket that got hurt anywhere near as badly was Gregg Doyel's. The CBS SportsLine columnist had Baylor going to the Elite 8.
On Friday, we'll do it all again, with the other half of the first round. Watch this space for updates throughout the day. First up: Tennessee vs. American University at 12:15 p.m. EDT. Gonzaga-Davidson -- your other upset pick -- Drake-Western Kentucky and Miami-St. Mary's follow a few minutes later.
Previous column: Running commentary from Day 1
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his Facebook page.
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