Preamble
Regardless of what Baylor does in the next few hours, it will all be about Gonzaga. As we advertised at the start of the men’s tournament, the main story was whether any team could stop Gonzaga’s attempt to not only win his first NCAA championship, but start an undefeated season.
In fact, we may have just witnessed the Gonzaga Bulldogs ’biggest challenge to the UCLA Bruins, who managed to make the unprecedented journey from the first four to the final four and then forced Gonzaga to play an overtime and almost the forced to play a second. . Then, of course, Jalen Suggs created an instant legendary triple from almost half a track to take them away from perfection.
Jalen Suggs makes three.
It was a great match, to the point that the instant analysis ended up being “maybe it really was the Men’s Championship.” Well, the Baylor bears might be waiting for everyone to overlook them. After all, before Gonzaga proved vulnerable for the first time in the entire tournament, he struggled to take an 11th-Seed upstart, Baylor absolutely outscored Houston’s No. 2 78-59. If they are overlooked as a footnote to Gonzaga’s story, maybe that will work for them.
This is the downside of the Bulldogs: the pressure is on Mark Few’s team. Gonzaga spent most of his life as a major midfielder who could never win the big game, always hesitating at the biggest moment. Until this race, their most memorable moment was Adam Morrison who broke down crying on the track as they were crushed by (of all the teams) UCLA. Literally unbeatable all season, there are many chances that if they don’t win this last game, the time will never come. On Saturday they saw it all broken and if they fight today, Baylor will start to smell the blood. Maybe this will go as it is written, with Gonzaga easily handling Baylor or maybe … or maybe it depends on who has the last ball.
That’s how he’s supposed to go, of course, it’s all about the players on the court. We talk about the programs, the coaches, the qualifiers, the brackets and everything that surrounds the tournament, but it’s about the athletes on the track. They are the reason we observe and ultimately control the outcome. Okay, that sounds a bit off, but that’s what college basketball does even to those of us who remain extremely cynical about everything that goes on behind the scenes.
If you would like to join today’s liveblog, feel free to email your thoughts to [email protected] or tweet them at @HunterFelt. This is the NCAA Men’s National Basketball Championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium. They say we will start around 9:20 pm EST, but we will be back here much sooner.