WASHINGTON (AP) – As anyone who’s ever participated in an NCAA pool at the office knows full well, there always are upsets at the men’s college basketball tournament.
Hey, that’s why they call it “March Madness.”
Still, it’s been quite awhile since there were this many stunning results and so few favorites headed to the Final Four. The biggest surprise of all is George Mason, a commuter school in suburban Virginia that never had even won a single game in the event until this year.
“We don’t mind being the Cinderella,” George Mason guard Tony Skinn said after his 11th-seeded team knocked off No. 1 seed Connecticut 86-84 in overtime Sunday at the Washington Regional final.
Apparently, there was more than one pair of glass slippers lying around. This is the first time since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 that none of the four teams seeded No. 1 reached the Final Four.
The main culprit is George Mason, but joining it next weekend in Indianapolis will be two other schools seeking a first national title, LSU and Florida. The fourth semifinalist is UCLA, which dominated college basketball by winning 10 championships in the 1960s and 1970s, but had fallen on harder times of late.
George Mason is the first team since 1986 – and only the second in history – to be seeded 11th and make it all the way to the Final Four. And it’s the biggest outsider – no basketball tradition to speak of, not a member of a major conference, no superstar player – since Ivy League school Penn made it in 1979.
“It’s something they probably never imagined,” said Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun, who’s won two championships. “We’ve imagined it, and we’ve done it. They could never have imagined it.”
George Mason now faces third-seeded Florida, which knocked off No. 1 seed Villanova 75-62 in the Minneapolis Regional final.
In next Saturday’s other Final Four game, No. 4 seed LSU will play second-seeded UCLA. Led by gregarious and 310-pound Glen “Big Baby” Davis, LSU won the Oakland Regional final by beating No. 2 seed Texas 70-60 in overtime Saturday. UCLA defeated yet another No. 1 seed, Memphis, 50-45 at the Atlanta Regional.
“Nobody could have predicted what we’ve seen – not just this afternoon, but this whole tournament,” NCAA selection committee chairman Craig Littlepage said after watching George Mason cut the nets down to celebrate. “It’s affirmation that this is a great game.”
The Final Four has been dominated by college basketball’s big boys for more than a quarter of a century, with powerful teams and tournament-tested conferences gathering at the end of the season to sort out the champion.
Now, for the first time since 1980, neither the Big East nor the Atlantic Coast Conference will be represented at the Final Four; those high-profile leagues combined to produce the past five national champions, including the ACC’s North Carolina last year, and the Big East’s Connecticut in 2004.
George Mason eliminated both of those schools, along with 2005 Final Four team Michigan State, despite having relatively small players not thought of as NBA prospects.
“They don’t measure heart by inches, they don’t measure courage, they don’t measure basketball instinct and intelligence,” Calhoun said.
The Patriots, he added, “are not on a magic carpet ride because there’s any myth there. They are good. They are really, really good.”
Perhaps, but George Mason’s basketball program is certainly unheralded: The team never has been ranked in The Associated Press poll, and it lost two of its last four games before the NCAA tournament.
Its players are unheralded. Asked this weekend to list some of the colleges that recruited him out of high school, Skinn joked: “George Mason, George Mason, George Mason. I’m glad I chose George Mason.”
Its conference is unheralded, too. It had been 20 years since the Colonial Athletic Association received two invitations to the NCAA tournament, and some Connecticut players weren’t able to name which league the Patriots play in.
All of the above are among the reasons that some questioned whether George Mason deserved to go to the tournament at all.
No one, of course, has any doubts these days.
When Lamar Butler hit a 3-pointer to give George Mason only its second lead of the game, at 52-51 about halfway through the second half, Connecticut called a timeout. While Patriots coach Jim Larranaga stood with his arms crossed, smiling, Butler and a couple of teammates looked up at the scoreboard, mouths open.
Perhaps they were wondering, “Can this really be happening?”
It sure was.