March Madness Day 1 was exciting, emotional, and at times very silly
Ted Berg writes the Morning Win newsletter for For The Win. Follow him on Twitter at @OGTedBerg or email AskTedBerg@gmail.com.
The Madness… it's happening.
The big appeal of the first couple of rounds of the NCAA Tournament, I think, is the sheer volume of high-stakes games. Practically every player on every roster -- whether it's a perennial Final Four team or some school you've never heard of -- has spent a lifetime dreaming on a deep March run, but lose one game and you go back to campus to face actual schoolwork like a shmo.
Emotions run high throughout the Tournament, so the early rounds produce moments of beauty and anger and sadness and Charles Barkley losing his dang mind as his alma mater nearly blew a big lead.
But it's too early for all that, and I am here to try to save you some time so you will be able to watch more basketball later this afternoon. Today's edition of the Morning Win aims to round up all the silliest stuff that happened in the Tournament on Thursday, from the extremely tall athletes posing with normal-sized sideline reporters to the ridiculous antics of dunk-thirsty crowds.
Here we go:
First and foremost, the NCAA legitimately, unironically wants you to know that it "opposes all forms of legal and illegal sports wagering." I cannot make a fart noise loud enough to summarize my feelings on this. Americans put $10 billion on the line during March Madness, and there's absolutely no way the tourney would be so lucrative for the NCAA if we didn't all have money riding on it.
But meanwhile, where some high-profile coaches are full-on millionaires, the dude from Abilene Christian has to patrol the sideline with a big rip in his pants because he lost his other suit earlier this season. This feels like an actual stress nightmare I might have. Good news: You have the opportunity of a lifetime to coach on your sport's biggest stage. Bad news: There's a chance everyone sees your butt-cheeks.
A Marquette player tried to throw down a thunderous dunk but got thunderously rejected by the rim.
LSU's Emmitt Williams went flying into the scorer's table and spilled a reporter's beverage all over some electronic equipment. Everyone was OK, but no one is really without blame: Williams looked like he was flopping, and how're you going to have an open, uncapped drink in a seat like that? I get that reporters need to stay hydrated and caffeinated -- believe me -- but some sort of screw-top thermos stored in the space between your feet seems a much safer option.
All of Yale's wisdom couldn't help the school past LSU, and everyone made the same joke about the recent bribery scandal. To be fair, Lori Loughlin's daughter did look completely overmatched by the LSU defenders.
Oh, and Bill Murray was on hand to watch Louisville, where his son is an assistant coach. Brian Doyle-Murray was there too, but he doesn't move the headline needle even though he low-key co-wrote Caddyshack.
The Madness resumes today, as you probably know. And perhaps silliest of all, my colleague Charles Curtis believes Duke is going to lose. Oh, c'mon. It would be the one year I'm actually pulling for that team that it exits the Tournament early, but my bracket expertise is as respected as it is well researched, and I have the Blue Devils winning it all.
Thursday's big winner: Ja Morant
Like a lot of casual college basketball fans, I got my first prolonged look at Murray State guard and potential No. 2 overall NBA Draft pick Ja Morant on Thursday. My expert analysis: Holy crap, this guy is so good. Someone should have told me more about Morant before I haphazardly filled out my bracket on Tuesday. And it's cool to me that he plays for Murray State in the Ohio Valley Conference and went unranked by major recruiting services out of high school, because I like the idea that all the traditional powerhouse programs just totally whiffed on a guy. I'm old enough to remember when Steph Curry was an undersized Davidson guard lighting up my Georgetown Hoyas in the tournament.
Quick hits: Tiger, Ichiro, Harper
- One bro at the Players Championship wore a T-shirt featuring the image of Tiger Woods' 2017 mugshot. He caught video of Woods as he walked right by him and appeared to crack a half smile over the image. It made for a very exciting day for one bro at the Players Championship.
- Ichiro Suzuki's spectacular playing career ended on a weak groundout in the Mariners' Tokyo Series game against the A's on Thursday. Teammates cried on the field as the 45-year-old legend exited, and Ichiro treated Japanese fans to a prolonged victory lap after the Mariners' win. What happens next might be even more interesting: It's as easy to imagine Ichiro transitioning into a front office role and guiding a team to a championship on either side of the Pacific as it is to envision him disappearing from the spotlight forever. In spring training of 2017, when asked what he'd do after baseball, Ichiro said, "I think I'll just die." Here's hoping its not that.
- Bryce Harper hit two monstrous home runs in a Grapefruit League game against the Blue Jays on Thursday. One of the byproducts of Harper's long winter on the open market is that it prevented him from having a full spring training to get up to game speed, but he looks to be rounding into form. Spring training is probably too long, anyway.
This day in smart sports
Mixing it up, just for today. Because it was on this day four years ago we learned that Baltimore Ravens guard John Urschel had published a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics titled " A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector." I have no idea what that means, but I assume it's smart. Urschel retired from football in the summer of 2017 and is pursuing a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from M.I.T.