When the conference tournaments arrive, the label most readily assigned to this time of year is “Championship Week.” However, much as there’s really no such thing as “Bowl Week” in college football, there’s also no such thing as “Championship Week” in college basketball.
The bowl season and conference tournament season run two full weeks (the CFB Playoff National Championship Game not being a bowl, since it is not the only postseason game for the competing teams). Therefore, this part of the college basketball calendar should be called “Championship Fortnight.”
There are some tournaments in the smaller “one-bid” leagues in the second half of the fortnight, but the power-conference tournaments take center stage in that second week. The first week is fully given over to the smaller leagues, so with brackets and seedings firmly in place, what are the biggest stories you should monitor in the coming days? Two stand out above all others. If even one of them ends happily, it will become one of the biggest developments in this college basketball season.
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Seventy-six years.
76.
That’s a lifetime for many human beings, very close to our current life expectancy, in fact.
Seventy-six years ago, World War II began.
Seventy-six years ago, a Major League Baseball game was televised for the first time.
Seventy-six years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not yet won a third term as President of the United States.
Seventy-six years ago, something else happened as well: The NCAA tournament came into existence. The two teams that met in the first CFB Playoff National Championship Game — Oregon and Ohio State — also decided the first NCAA tournament title, with the Ducks beating the Buckeyes on Northwestern’s home floor.
Speaking of Northwestern, the Wildcats are the one power-conference team that has never made any of the first 76 NCAA tournaments. Only four other teams across the country have been eligible to make all 76 Dances… and have failed to make a single one. Army and The Citadel have eaten this historical bagel.
The other two teams? They sit at the heart of our story today… and in a coming week chock full of both pressure and opportunity.
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The Saint Francis Red Flash hail from Pennsylvania. They’ve made an NCAA tournament appearance. The Saint Francis Terriers, from Brooklyn, have never made an NCAA tournament — not in 1939, and not in any subsequent year. William and Mary — one team, not two — has also failed to go Dancing over the last 76 years. The Tribe made the final of the Colonial Athletic Association tournament last March, but Delaware — a persistent nemesis (nine straight wins over the Tribe) — denied the Virginia-based school its moment in the sun.
Now, as the page turns to Championship Fortnight in 2015, the Terriers and the Tribe know they have their best chances to break through. Both teams secured No. 1 seeds for their respective conference tournaments, Saint Francis in the Northeast Conference, Bill and Mary in the Colonial.
You can simultaneously realize that while a No. 1 seed is hardly a guarantee of success, it nevertheless represents an easier path through a bracket, certainly in the quarterfinals. Being a top seed steers a team toward an eighth or ninth seed in the quarters instead of a sixth or fifth seed. Being able to get through that quarterfinal comparatively less anxiety can create a greater reserve of energy for the semifinals. That can translate into a more relaxed performance in the final… should a team advance that far.
Saint Francis dominated the NEC during the regular season, winning the league by three games over Robert Morris and Bryant. In marked contrast to the Terriers, William and Mary earned its top seed as part of a four-way tie in the standings (with Northeastern, UNC-Wilmington, and James Madison), and needed UNC-Wilmington to stub its toe against Elon in order to earn a share of the conference title. Yet, at the end of their respective journeys through regular-season competition, the reality of a top seed remains the same. Saint Francis might be able to impose itself on the rest of the league, and it knows that it will avoid both Robert Morris and Bryant until the NEC final. William and Mary knows that Delaware — its tormentor — is safely on the other side of the Colonial tournament bracket. (The Blue Hens are seeded sixth.) There’s considerable reason for both teams to feel hopeful about their chances.
Now, all that’s left is to do the deed.
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Many people will say that one team is only playing for itself, not for past generations of teams that fell short. Moreover, many will also say that what has happened in the past does not influence the future. To an extent, they’re obviously right — this is a 2015 tournament, not a 2014 or 1984 tournament. It is its own entity. That much can’t be denied.
Yet, it remains quite true that a present-day team in any sport can — and has, and will — carry the weight of the past on shoulders that might not be able to handle the burden.
It was so obvious that Iowa State — with a chance to snatch the Big 12 title from Kansas on Wednesday night against Baylor — was not able to handle the pressure of the situation. Faced with the possibility that it could become the first non-Kansas team to win the Big 12 outright since Oklahoma State in 2004, the Cyclones dissolved into a pool of anxious mush in the final five minutes. You could see it in the wildly errant shots Iowa State hoisted, and in the disjointed nature of the Cyclones’ play at the offensive end of the floor. That response to pressure was tied to only 11 years of history, however.
What about the Chicago Cubs’ memorable meltdown against the Florida Marlins in the 2003 National League Championship Series? You can talk all you want about how that series was about one year, one season, one journey, but if a team ever appeared to carry the load of accumulated failures over a much longer march of time, the Cubs painted just such a portrait in Games 6 and 7.
The larger realization should be obvious: While individual teams and their member athletes are immersed in one season’s pursuit of history, the outside reality of their situation involves a constant encounter — revived with each press conference and each scan of daily news coverage — with the shadow of the past:
This week, Saint Francis, Bill, and Mary will be asked about the Seventy-Six-Year Itch. They’ll be asked about it seven times seventy-six times in the coming days. Those questions might be difficult to deal with in the media spotlight, but the only spotlight the Terriers and Tribe have to conquer is the one on the court, when the ball is tipped later this week.
A simple truism about sports suffices to capture the challenge in front of these two snake-bitten schools, as they attempt to write histories quite contrary to what has gone before for Saint Francis, Bill and Mary:
If you’re good enough, you’ll get it done.
Should either one of these schools break through, we’ll be writing about Saint Francis or William and Mary for a long time to come.
Should both break through, this will become one of the most memorable Championship Fortnights in college basketball history.
Are you ready for what could be a particularly memorable dose of Madness this March? No two teams will tug on your heartstrings more than the Terriers and the Tribe, two groups that no longer want to belong to one of the most unfortunate five-team lists in sports history.
