Tournament Offers So Much More, and This Year It's Needed

Maybe the NCAA men's basketball tournament will save the season.

Maybe a string of first-weekend upsets and buzzer-beaters will divert our attention from what has been a very ordinary season.

We've become trained like seals to applaud at the very mention of Selection Sunday and the sight of a tournament bracket, and legitimately so, because March Madness has delivered more consistently and more dramatically than probably any annual event in American sports.

People love college basketball so much it's become blasphemous to criticize the product as a whole, to suggest the season was just, well, blah. But that's what it was. There aren't many great teams, if any.

There aren't many upperclassmen we're just itching to see. Conferences that often are loaded and deep, like the Big Ten and the SEC, are unimpressive at the top and dreadful beyond the first four or five teams. Even Dick Vitale, college basketball's biggest advocate, used the word "mediocrity" to describe the tournament field when it was announced yesterday evening.

Of course, we remember the college season based on how the NCAA tournament plays out. Not much that happened in the 2005-06 season was as memorable as George Mason's Cinderella run in March. If the tournament's dramatic and full of wonderful games, that's pretty much how we remember the season. And this season needs a bailout.

Don't get me wrong, I turn into a cheerleader the second week of March every year. I get all gooey-eyed over the conference tournaments, especially the one-bid leagues where the whole season comes down to a tournament final.

American University getting into the tournament for the first time is what makes the whole thing so wonderfully sappy and exciting.

But this season needs a boost, lest it be crowded by Tiger Woods and the Houston Rockets, which as of this morning are the two best stories in sports by a mile. You couldn't watch Tiger sink that putt on No. 18 at Bay Hill without coming out of your seat. And if you love basketball, and don't have some cultural or political agenda, you can't watch the Rockets, without Yao Ming, and not appreciate the effort and teamwork and high school-like joy they get from playing together.

I hope the college boys can give me a little bit of what the Rockets have demonstrated over the last month -- and history suggests they will.

At least we're starting with a tournament field relatively short on controversy. Okay, maybe Virginia Tech could have gone in over Baylor. And if I were an Arizona State Sun Devil and I were left out of the field, only to watch my blood rival, Arizona, get in after beating the Wildcats twice, I'd be a little nuts. Arizona State finished with a better conference record, had quality wins over Xavier, Stanford and Cal, yet had to be ripped when Arizona received an invite. Of course, the men's selection committee can counter with the fact that Arizona had a much better RPI and strength of schedule.

Still, we can pretty much skip the squabbling and get right to my tournament forecast.