NCAA Tournament, Day 1 and 2

OK, I admit this is going to be a weak review of some great action thus far. Unfortunately I was unable to see most of Thursday’s games and I was so engrossed with yesterday’s games that I cannot give it justice so I’m really not even going to try. I just feel compelled to write something, so here we go.

East

Assuming you don’t consider 9s over 8s and upset (and my goodness, Eric Gordon was terrible), there was all chalk in the East. Worse yet, there were not even good games. Oklahoma-St. Joseph’s was moderately entertaining but St. Joseph’s got themselves in too big of a hole to escape. Really the best game of the bunch was American putting a scare into Tennessee. The most impressive performance of the region was the hot shooting of Butler and Pete Campbell just slaughtering South Alabama.

Midwest

Starting with the Tampa games, we’ll see a 12/13 match-up so that’s fun. Siena looked terrific in slaughtering Vanderbilt. Beasley, Walker and company beat up on USC pretty easily. One of the big stories of the first two days was Stephen Curry blowing up against Gonzaga. That set up a pretty fascinating match-up against Georgetown. UMBC actually has some really good shooters but they couldn’t hit anything against the Hoya defense. As good as some of those UMBC shooters are, they are no Stephen Curry. My guess is Davidson will need to have someone else step up to knock off Georgetown. I feel cheated by the Kent State-UNLV game. I’m not saying Kent State should have won but they’re better than a 10-point a half team and that really should have been a good team.

South

Absolute chalk across the board in the South. I think the big thing to mention here was Jack McClinton’s second half performance against St. Mary’s. Curry got a lot of attention for his 30 point half against Gonzaga, and rightfully so. However, I really never heard much about McClinton’s 32 point half against a St. Mary’s team that forgot all about the whole thing where you’re supposed to score points; in fact, McClinton single-handedly scored as many points as St. Mary’s scored in the second half. The biggest thing I’m looking forward to seeing in round 2 is if Mississippi State can keep up their momentum that they got in that comeback win over Oregon to beat a Memphis team that really wasn’t that great against Texas Arlington.

West

The West has been by far the most exciting region thus far. A 15 seed had a lead with 12 seconds left and it was by far not the story of the region. Once again the Tampa pod dominated and in this case even more than the Midwest region as the 12 and 13 seeds won on buzzer beaters (or near buzzer beaters) in overtime. The Drake-Western Kentucky game was just a glorified three-point shootout and surprisingly WKU actually won it. I felt that the San Diego win was a bit more smoke and mirrors. Scoring was a bit of a chore for the Toreros (except for Gyno Pomare) and UConn seemed like they could score anytime they went inside, which they shockingly did not do every possession.