First of all, I don't hate Duke basketball, but it's really fun to write a headline like "Hokies Punk Dukies." It rolls off the tongue like teeth from a hockey players mouth...
Anyway, if you didn't watch Seth Greenberg's Virginia Tech squad upending basketball royalty on Thursday night, then you missed one of the more exciting finishes to a college basketball game this season.
Sure, the game was good -- lots of lead changes, three-pointers on either end in the closing seconds to flip the lead from one side to the other -- but ESPN actually deserves much of the credit. The network came back from a timeout with 3:20 to play in the game and didn't run another commercial until the clock hit zero. There were three timeouts when ESPN could've stepped aside, but they didn't. VaTech's late thirty-second timeout was just that -- thirty seconds.
Both coaches had a hand in the drama as well. Confident in their teams, Greenberg and Mike Krzyzewski let them play as the game swung back and forth in the final ninety seconds. When Jamon Gordon scored on a tip-in to give the Hokies a two-point lead with thirty-two seconds left, the expected Duke timeout never came. When J.J. Redick drained a three-pointer nine seconds later, Greenberg trusted his boys enough to let them run. The result was a Zabian Dowdell three-pointer to push the lead back to two.
Even then, Coach K kept his final timeout in his pocket as his Blue Devils raced up the court with less than fifteen seconds to play. Duke's controlled desperation eventually gave Daniel Ewing a great look at a three-pointer with eight seconds left, but his shot was off. Duke secured the rebound, and Krzyzewski finally huddled his troops, but there was still no commercial. Greenberg followed with a timeout of his own before the final 4.9 seconds, but these delays heightened the tension that ads would've killed. Viewers were treated to the raucous noise of Cassell Colisseum instead of another spot for Viagra or Chevrolet.
And so as another Ewing three-point attempt clanked off the rim and the good folks of Blacksburg, VA, showed their inexperience at celebrating as they tentatively wandered down onto the court, looking like hesitant swimmers dipping their toes in the water, I wondered why all basketball games couldn't be like this.
When we get to March and CBS takes control of the greatest two weeks in sports, they'll chop the action up into four-minute bite-sized pieces. The closing two minutes of the game, a time ripe with drama as two teams fight for tournament survival, will be divided even more. Coaches will insert themselves in the action by calling timeouts after each basket, and the network will jump off to a three-minute commercial break each time. The players will cool down, the fans will relax, and the television audience will be reminded for the seventeenth time that CSI and CSI: Miami are two different shows. The game, suddenly, will be secondary.
Madness, indeed. To quote the Japanese fans in Bad News Bears in Breaking Training: "Let them play!"
Great stuff. Thought I'd drop you a line to introduce a new blog.
Dedicated to Pardon The Interruption, it's called Pardon The Eruption.
Feel free to check it out! Thanks!
Posted by: drew | February 18, 2005 at 11:05 AM