King Kaufman's Sports Daily
NCAA Tournament: The last underdog goes down -- but how doggy was Davidson? Plus: Obama bracket clinches presidency.
Read more: Sports, Basketball, College Basketball, NCAA Tournament, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
March 31, 2008 | If the Davidson Wildcats hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent them. In a way, they were invented.
The plucky, underdog, out-of-nowhere and so on and so forth Wildcats took the top-seed Kansas Jayhawks to the last possession Sunday in the Midwest region final in Detroit. Had Jason Richards' desperation 3-pointer gone in at the buzzer, No. 10 Davidson would have been only the third double-digit seed ever to make the Final Four, after No. 11s LSU in 1986 and George Mason in 2006.
Kansas prevailed, 59-57, to achieve another, less-romantic milestone. This will be the first Final Four that features nothing but No. 1 seeds. Memphis blasted Texas 85-67 to win the South in Sunday's other game. On Saturday UCLA drilled Xavier 76-57 in the West and North Carolina beat Louisville 83-73 in the East.
This is evidently one of those years when the race does go to the swift and the battle to the strong, which is the way to bet anyway, as you may have heard.
And that's how you did bet. You being the people, the mouth-breathing masses. The public, as represented by the bracket of the CBS SportsLine users, picked the four No. 1s to go to the Final Four, something not one other member of this column's esteemed Panel o' Experts -- see the next item -- had the sand to do.
So you're not a bunch that has a soft spot for plucky underdogs. But you bet on Davidson. That says something about Davidson.
The people's bracket gave the thumbs up to the NCAA selection committee's seeding decisions, picking only five upsets in the whole Tournament, and that's if we include your choice of UCLA over Memphis in the semifinals, the third-highest No. 1 over the second-highest, not exactly a Buster Douglas kind of thing.
Three of the other upsets you picked were slight, one seed position separating the teams. You were right about No. 9 Texas A&M over No. 8 BYU in the first round and wrong about a pair of 5-over-4s in the second, Notre Dame over Washington State and Clemson over Vanderbilt. Neither Clemson nor Vandy got that far, having both been upset in the first round.
The only upset you picked where more than one slot separated the team was No. 10 Davidson over No. 7 Gonzaga in the Midwest. And you were right, of course. In spades. Davidson went on to beat No. 2 Georgetown and No. 3 Wisconsin before giving No. 1 Kansas a hell of a scare. Kansas coach Bill Self ended the game on his hands and knees on the sideline, slapping the hardwood in joy and relief over his team's escape.