Once upon a bracket

Sporting News, The, March 18, 1996 by Michael Knisley

Everybody has a story. An unlucky shot here. A bad draw there. An atrocious call, a fluke injury. The spinouts on the drive to the Final Four, the hidden turns, the icy patches of road that scream, danger! danger! danger!, and leave you careening out of control.

They tip it off in the NCAA Tournament again this week, and the stories will grow. Damn the luck of the draw, they'll say. How are we supposed to heat a had break like that? If only...

Connecticut knows the dangers as well as anyone; Since the 198990 season, UConn has taken one of the nation's top programs into the tournament. Three times in the last six seasons, the Huskies have been seeded No. 2 or higher, but something always has come between them and the Final Four. There is always a story.

Last year, in Travis Knight's story, Connecticut was a No. 2 seed in the West Regional, to UCLA's No. 1. If only Missouri had shut down the lane ...

"Missouri couldn't have beat us," UConn Coach Jim Calhoun says.

So here is Connecticut, back for another drive, this time as a No. 1 seed in the Southeast Regional. Colgate in the first round. Eastern Michigan or a middling Duke team in the second. The Huskies don't have a higher-seeded team, a UCLA, between them and the Final Four this time. They shouldn't have to hope that somebody else will lose to clear their way. Their 30-2 regular season was strong enough to eliminate that hazard.

The teams that leave the littlest to chance you figure, are the teams that win the tournament. But nobody eliminates chance altogether, and chance is where the stories start. Nobody wins the NCAA championship without a little bit of luck.

Do they, Coach Calhoun?

"No. Well, yeah. I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that," he says. "If you're great, you can. And right now, Kentucky is the only great team. I think Kentucky could get beat somewhere along the line, but they have the most margin of error. They can afford to have more players have bad days than the rest of us."

Take a chance on Kentucky, then, as the prohibitive favorite this year, for all the right, hyperbolic reasons. Kentucky has a million great players and all of them are all-galaxy. Kentucky won 800 consecutive games during the regular season, and none of those victories came by fewer than 100 points. Kentucky runs up and down the court so fast and so relentlessly and with so much depth that no one can keep up. Kentucky has a genius coach and a championship tradition and everybody's endorsement as the best team in the land.

But then remember that in 1991, UNLV had all those things Kentucky has and didn't get out of a national semifinal game against Duke. All those players and all those victories didn't eliminate the chance of a loss back then, and Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino knows that all of his advantages now don't eliminate the chance of a Wildcat loss. In fact, the winning streak (27 games, actually) ended last Sunday, when Mississippi State somehow undid all the momentum the Wildcats' regular season had built.

"Are we the deepest team? Yes. But does that mean anything? No," Pitino says. "I do think we're capable of beating anyone. But I look at UConn, and that backcourt (Ray Allen and Doron Sheffer) is terrific, and the frontcourt is very, very good. They have a good bench, too. Or you play Georgetown on a certain night, and you're going against one of the most exciting, flamboyant players I've seen come along in quite some time in Allen Iverson. If you don't stop him in the tournament ...

"I'd feel very comfortable if this was a best-of-seven series. But it isn't."

The luck of the draw, as it happens, ought to cause a little hand-wringing in Lexington, Ky., this week. Looming large in the second round of Kentucky's bracket is Wisconsin-Green Bay, which plays one of the most deliberate, methodical styles in the nation. The Phoenix, which lost, 74-62, in December at Kentucky, is the anti-Kentucky. Danger! Danger! Danger!

Purdue knows. The Boilermakers played Wisconsin-Green Bay in the first round last season. The Boilermakers, seeded No. 3, won, but by a point, 49-48. Then they were upset by Memphis, 75-73.

Which is another story.

"We played Green Bay in the first round, and the game ended about midnight," Purdue assistant coach Bruce Weber says. "It was close, so Cuonzo Martin had to play every minute, and it just wore him out. It wore our kids out mentally and physically to play against Green Bay, because playing those guys is like going to the dentist for two straight hours. They mentally and physically make you concentrate so much. We had to put all that effort in. Not to take anything away from Memphis, but we could've beaten them. I just think we hit a point in the Memphis game where we didn't have anything left. Especially Cuanzo. It wasn't a very good draw for us. "

You never know. You take a style into the tournament, a style that makes you what you are, and then something, or somebody, takes it away from you. Nothing you can do about it. Princeton plays No. 1 seed Georgetown to a standstill before losing, 50-49, in the first round back in '89. Now the Tigers are back, ready to take the air out of the ball against UCLA, the defending national champion, in the first round. And they have that ol' 'win-one-for-the Gipper' thing going for them, because longtime Coach Pete Carril has announced his retirement.