Where are the No.1s? Bracket Busting March Madness Reaches its Final 4.
Jerrell Jones
March 31, 2010
Filed under Sports, Uncategorized
The journey to the Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium has turned everybody’s NCAA Tourney brackets upside down.
No.1 seeded Kansas didn’t even make it to the Sweet Sixteen. Sure, we expected teams like West Virginia and Duke to have a legitimate chance of making it to Indianapolis, but two No.5 seeds in the Final Four also?
Very few expected Michigan State to make it as far as they did without their best play maker Kalin Lucas who went sprawling to the hardwood against Maryland. This Michigan State team has rallied without Lucas, and players who had lesser roles in the offense have played much bigger parts, resulting in some surprisingly impressive wins. Durrell Summers and Draymon Green have stepped up and have been clutch in key moments where their team needed a score.
The Butler Bulldogs just steam-rolled their way through the West. They upsetted No.1 seeded Syracuse 63-59. They dominated in the paint, from beyond the arch, and they flat-out beat Syracuse on fast break opportunities. If they keep up their style of play, they might already have the tournament won. They are by far the underdogs of the Final Four even with Michigan State there. “My bracket was busted after the second round of the tournament, who would have guessed that a lot of the top seeded teams would have had an early exit against mid-grade teams,” said senior Bart Goode.
Duke is the only remaining No.1 seed, but they have a tough challenge in Bob Huggins’ Mountaineers. Mountaineer fans are rallying behind Huggins and WVU. Sports information director Brian Messerly told the AP that, “What he has said about growing up in the state of West Virginia and what it means to him is dead-on,” Messerly said. “We don’t have professional teams, and the state has embraced him and this team. It has been a tremendous feeling.”
When you have an insane clutch player in De’sean Butler, who has made 6 buzzer-beaters this year, it causes concern for Duke if the game stays close up to the final minutes of regulation. Despite this, Senior Josh Jones says that Duke has it in the bad. “I KNOW Duke is going to win, West Virginia has no chance of beating the Blue Devils, they are going to lock up De’sean Butler and hold him under 10 points.”
