An ode to the prequel to March Madness

NCAAB
Brian Hauch

An ode to the prequel to March Madness

I’d like to start this blog by stating the obvious. I know most people don’t care about March Madness until the first Thursday of games tips off, I guess that’s not so obvious to baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, but hear me out.

The prequel, or prelude, or championship week, or whatever you want to call it is the best basketball we are going to see all of March.

Back before the world shut down in 2020, I was on Spring Break with my fiance Rose. We had some downtime between the Mets spring training game and our night on the town, so I turned on a SOCON Tournament game between Wofford and Chattanooga.

In the final seconds, Wofford legend Storm Murphy drilled a floater to put the 7-seed Terriers a win away from the Big Dance.

A few hours later, Utah State’s Sam Merrill absolutely cooked a 30-1 San Diego State team in the Mountain West championship, finishing the night with a game winner of his own.

 

I flipped my shit.

Rose learned that day a lesson that every casual college basketball viewer needs to learn. The madness starts, and is better, during the first chapter of March.

These kids in the CAA, SOCON, Patriot League, and so on are playing for their lives. The emotions of a conference tournament final in a mid-major is 10x more elevated than a final four. Besides the scattered outlier such as Lipscomb legend Garrison Matthews or the aforementioned Merrill, these conference tournaments are the pinnacle of these athletes career.

Getting into the Big Dance is the holy grail. For most guys reaching the Final Four, they have a professional career in basketball to fall back on, not a future career in real estate or car dealerships. The pure tension is on another level, and at the end of the day, that’s why we watch sports.

That brings me to yesterday. The Atlantic Sun, known for being the conference that brought us Dunk City, brought us possibly the best night of college basketball this season.

We’ll start our journey with 5-seeded Austin Peay taking on 4-seeded North Florida. The 5-seed Governors took town the Ospreys in overtime after this bucket. Take a look at the bench.

From there, Austin Peay won by three in a back-and-forth free basketball frame. The madness didn’t stop there.Β Fast forward about 30 minutes to one-seeded Eastern Kentucky taking on 15-16 Jacksonville. EKU won by 16-points in the lone regular season matchup heading into this one. That was in January. This is March.

Just a few hours into the quarterfinals of this tournament the one-seed has fallen and one of the longest tenured programs, with a few tournament wins by the way, went down in overtime. That alone is a great night on mid-major action. Surely we can’t have more fireworks, right?

Tell that to North Alabama senior guard K.J Johnson.

Johnson’s runner not only added another upset to the already wide-open ASUN Tournament, but it also sunk Lipscomb, a team he played with for the first two years of his collegiate career.

People, THIS is March. The field of 68 is great, but if you want drama, suspense, and pure emotion. Tune into the prelude.

Contact/Follow us on all socials β€œlinktr.ee/viewsfrom400” for all our coverage, posts, and takes from the best part of the stadium. You can also follow Brian on Twitter/X @TheRealBHauch

 

Discover more from Views from 400

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

One thought on “An ode to the prequel to March Madness”

  1. Pingback: Guide to College Basketball Championship Week, Mid-Majors Pt. 1

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Back To Top

Discover more from Views from 400

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading