Indiana has thoroughly destroyed just about everyone's brackets as they do
their most earnest impression of Hoosiers - the movie, that is - and have rolled
into the title game Monday night.
In retrospect, some things are obvious. For one, Coach K wasn't just saying
nice things when he told the Indiana team that they were one of the toughest
teams he had ever faced.
They'll get Maryland, of course, after Maryland dispatched Kansas with a fair
amount of ease, except for a near-disastrous end which saw Kansas cut the lead
from 20 to 4. They couldn't quite get over the hump, though. We do
see a pattern though, because Kansas, like Kentucky and UConn, could have pushed
Maryland harder. Each team made critical mistakes down the stretch,
though, and that really killed them.
Can Indiana do it? They've proven everyone wrong so far, but Maryland
has proven to be pretty tough. We could see Dane Fife turning in another
tremendous defensive performance, and between Jeffries, Leach, and Newton, IU
has enough size and talent to challenge Maryland's big guys. Coverdale is
still hurting, and who knows how much he'll play, and A.J. Moye went out with an
injury, and both of those guys can reasonably be expected to be at less than
100%.
Mike Davis says that God is behind his success, and to be blunt, we always
hate hearing that. We're sure in a personal sense that's true, but it's
not as if God is in the BarcaLounger and manipulating fate so that Indiana can
win games. Every time an athlete or coach says that God favors him, well,
it's just too much. To paraphrase Einstein, God isn't playing dice with
this game, and He could just as easily favor a kid like Juan Dixon or empathize
with Byron Mouton, who could win the game and still be heavy-hearted. If
anything, we'd assume God has a tremendous sense of humor, and concordantly a
much more sophisticated one, and so the humor of whatever unfolds will likely be
beyond us Monday night.
We're not sure what to think, honestly, but as is usually the case, the two
strongest teams are left standing. Maryland has been vulnerable, but not
so vulnerable that anyone has figured out how to beat them, and Indiana has been
what Kentucky wanted to be in 1992, albeit with a bit more talent.
Nonetheless, this is the team that wasn't supposed to do this, and that they are
doing it, despite Mike Davis' saying that "sometimes I have no idea what's going on on the
court. No idea. It's true," pretty clearly this team knows what it's doing.
To beat Maryland, though, they'll have to manage Dixon, Blake, Wilcox, and
whoever else pops up on that particular night. We wonder if they wouldn't
consider putting Fife on Blake, with the idea being an echo of the McGuire
comment on Phil Ford: if you cut off the head, the body dies.
Come to think of it, Al McGuire was a guy who said he didn't understand x's
and o's, and wasn't really interested, either. But he understood people,
and maybe that's why Mike Davis has managed to do what he has done.
We'll wait to see the injury reports, and wait to see what our gut says, but
right now our feeling is that both teams feel convinced that they will win, and
both have shown immense resilience. While this will be perhaps the biggest
mismatch in the title game since Georgetown-Villanova, it's a compelling
match. When we were thinking about writing this, our first thought was
that it's a good thing that Mike Davis is close to God, because he'll need all
the help he can get. But the more we think about it, who knows. It's
one game, and it's about not making mistakes while also not playing
tentatively. Whoever does that best will win.