The Final Four — 04/01/08

Sat, May 17 2008

— The NCAA’s selection process for the 64 teams in the annual Division I men’s basketball tournament always provides fodder for heated debates in barrooms, work places and homes throughout the country as loyal fans, and some loud-mouth know-it-alls, insist that some schools were snubbed and others should have been given a higher seeding by the selection committee.
So be it. Such arguments help fuel fan interest in the tournament, and every now and then a little-known school from a small conference — like Davidson this year and George Mason in 2006 — uses the tournament to prove that they are a lot better that the so-called experts thought.
But this year the tournament selection committee pretty much got it right. For the first time ever, the four teams who will be playing for the national championship in San Antonio on Saturday and Monday — North Carolina, UCLA, Kansas and Memphis — are the teams seeded number 1 in each of the four regional tournaments. So while it was exciting to watch the upsets pulled off by Davidson, Western Kentucky and West Virginia in the tournament’s earlier rounds, in the end the best were victorious. As the fans of all four schools would surely say, cream rises to the top.
North Carolina, UCLA and Kansas are among the premiere college basketball programs in the nation, and while Memphis is the only one of the Final Four not to have won a national title, even that school — back in the days when it was known as Memphis State — lost to UCLA in the finals of the 1973 tournament. That was in the midst of when the Coach John Wooden-led Bruins were winning 10 national titles in 12 years.
And regardless of how the 64 teams are seeded at the start of the tournament, this is a national championship that is won on the basketball court and not by the votes of writers. That’s more than you can say about the Division I football championship, when arguments about which team is really the best will always be legitimate until when — and if — a playoff replaces the current system of awarding the national title.