College Football Should Learn from March Madness

 Jerry Thomas, staff writer

The wonderful time of the year when the grass starts to grow and the weather starts to get warmer has come. 

Spring is officially in the air, and it marks the arrival of College basketball madness.  The 2006 NCAA Tournament began in mid March, but the real madness started with the conference tournaments all over the nation. 

The anticipation and fight of the bubble teams, which are the teams fighting to get into the tournament because of weak or mediocre regular season results, is unbearable at times for programs, but necessary.  Ironically, one of those bubble teams from this year’s tourney made the “Final Four”.

 George Mason epitomizes the very reason this time of the year is so wacky.  Fans across America fill their brackets out by picking teams that will advance in the 65-team tourney, inevitably not knowing that their picks will fail miserably as evidenced by the 1,800 people out of about three million who picked George Mason in the Final Four in an ESPN poll.  I’m guessing that the majority of those people were George Mason students.

The controversial tournament committee gives teams seeds based on how well they performed in the regular season and post-season.  The committee was criticized by CBS commentator Billy Packer for placing George Mason in the tournament as a No. 11 seed.  He felt that they shouldn’t have even been in the tournament at all.  Some felt that a team coming from a mid-major conference should not be in the tournament if they did not perform well in their post-season tourney.  RPI rankings are criticized for common sense issues but are a key factor in the committee’s selection process.

Overall, the committee in both men’s and women’s basketball is not impressive.  But the madness of the tourney still looms, no matter how a team is seeded.  Sometimes, I felt like I was about to have a heart attack because of the finishes of many of the games.  Top-seeded Duke was upset by LSU in the “Sweet Sixteen”, which contributed to one of those moments.  Seeing Duke star J.J. Redick not play in an NCAA National Championship game was sad, but seeing Adam Morrison of Gonzaga start crying with three seconds left in a game because he knew that they had just blown a victory and trip to the Final Four in seconds was disturbing, but part of the madness.  

The final game of the tournament ended up being a blowout, with the University of Florida Gators capturing their first championship with coach Billy Donovan, who played in the Final Four in 1987.  But the quality of the final two games didn’t diminish the whole tournament, because the games were not close.  I felt that the madness of last second shots and blunders had to stop whenever you filtered out 65 teams to just four. 

But the fact still remains that college basketball’s post-season is far more superior to college football because of the differences.  Spring football is also in the air, which is interesting but not maddening.  Figuring out who is going to be the next quarterback at Texas Tech University is not as exciting as who is going to hit the game-winning shot in a tournament game. 

So if anybody on the BCS committee is reading this article, remember that the madness of March could work in December and the new year, if they take a few notes from the NCAA tournament.  Think about that the next time you watch a spring football scrimmage with your favorite team.  You can never have enough madness.