Rush The Court

We’ve been anxiously awaiting the next thirty days for the last eleven months.  You have too.  In fact, if this isn’t your favorite time of year by a healthy margin then you should probably click away from this site for a while.   Because we plan on waterboarding you with March Madness coverage.  Seriously, you’re going to feel like Dick Cheney himself is holding a Spalding-logoed towel over your face.  Your intake will be so voluminous that you’ll be drooling Gus Johnson and bracket residue in your sleep.  Or Seth Davis, if that’s more your style.  The point is that we’re all locked in and ready to go.  Are you?  To help us all get into the mood, we like to click around a fancy little website called YouTube for a daily dose of notable events, happenings, finishes, ups and downs relating to the next month.  We’re going to try to make this video compilation a little smarter, a little edgier, a little historical-er.  Or whatever.  Sure, you’ll see some old favorites that never lose their luster, but you’ll also see some that maybe you’ve forgotten or never knew to begin with.  That’s the hope, at least.  We’ll be matching the videos by the appropriate week, so all of this week we re-visited some of the timeless moments from the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.  Enjoy.

NCAA First and Second Rounds

Dateline:  1989 NCAA Tournament First Round – #1 Georgetown vs. #16 Princeton

Context: Whenever someone tells you that it can’t be done… that it’s impossible for a #16 seed to beat a #1, show that person this clip.  In an era when all-american players such as Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo and Charles Smith stayed for three or four years, a plucky little Ivy League team led by a cantankerous old coach took his Princeton Tigers to within a shot of pulling off the biggest upset in NCAA Tournament history.  Some might argue that Georgetown was never really in danger of losing that game, given that they were the superior team and that when it counted they were able to make the winning plays.  Keep telling yourself that.  Given the relative inexperience of some of the elite teams in college basketball these days, it’s simply going to be a matter of time.  Remember that Albany had UConn down double-digits in 2006 with less than ten minutes to play, and that we’ve seen #1 seeds Pitt (vs. ETSU in 2009) and Illinois (vs. FDU in 2005) struggle to put away first round underdogs in recent years.  The recipe for this upset will be an overrated #1 (such as Purdue in 1996) taking on a #16 that plays a style of basketball that frustrates the top seed.  It will happen, and the below clip shows how it will go down.