Cdizzle wrote:rlh04d wrote:Cdizzle wrote:There are a ton of examples. The fact that Gonzaga is singled out, given the year they had last year, is something that I don't stand for. But then, I looked up some history and found a lot of facts to support my claims before I began spouting.
I feel bad for Gonzaga. I think they would have made the Final Four if it wasn't for us. They were a far tougher opponent than Ohio State.
Agreed. People hating on Gonzaga are missing the boat on the fact that that game was one of the more incredible games in NCAA tournament history.
"Nine possessions. 23 points. A six-point deficit turned into a seven-point lead in just over seven minutes. The opponent, the top-ranked team in the land, had scored 1.25 points per possession during the surge, a figure that would have led Division I for the season. The Zags didn’t choke. They were beaten by one of the greatest stretches of clutch offense we’ll ever see."
http://college-basketball.si.com/2013/0 ... d-gonzaga/http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/sport ... html?_r=2&http://kenpom.com/blog/index.php/weblog ... hita_state
Yep.
That Gonzaga game was the only one that I don't know we would have been able to replicate again. It took an incredible, amazing game from the Shockers to win.
It didn't require that against Pitt, La Salle, or Ohio State. We were simply the better team. We dominated those three teams, almost never trailing against any of them. Even against Louisville ... I thought Gonzaga still played us better. We just got into foul trouble and didn't have the clutch shooting we had against Zaga, and Louisville got bailed out by a bench player catching fire.
Yet Gonzaga still gets crapped on for losing in the Round of 32, completely independent of the fact that the team they lost to went to the Final Four, and almost never trailed in any of their other games until less than 10 minutes remaining against the eventual National Champions.
The Gonzaga/Ohio State comparison is just a matter of who played us first. If we were the 10 seed in that bracket instead of the 9, we would have beat Ohio State in the round of 32, and then played Gonzaga in the Elite 8. And Ohio State would have been the one that was "overrated."