Afternoon Baseball

Odd day in sports. An IRL driver dies -- a rookie on the circuit who had been a journalist before chasing his dream. The terrible irony is that Dan Wheldon wins, again, but is overshadowed, again, just like he was all last year by the midgit with long hair, Danica Patrick.

EDIT: While we're talking about teams that coasted on championships they didn't earn, the UConn women and their disappointing senior class actually have played some excellent ball. Barbara Turner scored 31 points and hit a 3 with five seconds left to get the win today. I rarely care about the women's game, but they have actually overachieved, which is something incredible to say about the dominant program in major college sports.

UConn pulls its first choke job since losing as a No. 1 seed in Ray Allen's last year; Cincy, Duke, Florida and the Big Ten have pulled about 25 chokes since then, for a comparision, so it's been a while. And 'Nova loses, too, pretty much destroying most brackets.
UConn is interesting, since they haven't looked like they care for weeks. I think it's as simple as this -- a lot of the guys on this team were part of the last championship team, and somehow think that they've won it before. No. Okafor and Gordon won that championship by themselves. This was simply a collective group who knew they were better than everyone else, believed the hype and decided that they had little left to prove. NBA teams making tough draft choices, beware.

All the Final Four teams deserve to be there -- they've won big games, and shown more composure collectively than the tournament has ever seen. But it's also true that this is the least talented Final Four in a very long time. And for all the talk of people loving upsets, they don't love them when it really counts -- past the first weekend of the tourney. And no offense to the upset teams, but this tournament has been so much more about good teams giving away games, and not teams winning through excellence. All in all, an incredibly exciting tournament that has been a blast to watch, but also has produced an incredible number of goats.

Maybe I just don't appreciate the underdogs like I should. We'll see if the ratings for the Final Four reflect my sentiment or not.