If it had gone in Monday night, Gordon Hayward’s attempt from just beyond halfcourt would have instantly become the most famous shot in college basketball history.
Don’t believe it? Consider the following:
• Distance.
Four NCAA championship games have been decided on field goals in the final five seconds; none of the four packed the shock value of a 45-footer.
Lorenzo Charles’ follow-up dunk of Dereck Whittenburg’s airball in Albuquerque in 1983 gave N.C. State a 52-50 win over Houston in the most memorable finish of the television era. Keith Smart’s 12-footer from the left baseline in the Superdome four years later made Indiana a 74-73 winner over Syracuse. Newspaper accounts say someone named Viv Rouse made a tip-in with one second left to elevate Loyola of Chicago over Cincinnati 60-58 for the crown in 1963. Likewise, they say Herb Wilkinson scored with one second left in overtime as Utah repelled Dartmouth 42-40 in 1944.
They’d have all taken a back seat to Butler.
• Drama.
Butler (4,200 undergraduates) was the smallest school to play for the championship since Jacksonville in 1970.
It was the first team to seek the title in its hometown since 1972. The suitor that year was UCLA, which won it all for the sixth year in a row. Not exactly an underdog story.
Butler nearly became the first team since Texas Western in 1966 to win the NCAA championship without having been past the Sweet 16 in any previous season. As it was, the Bulldogs were only the third team since Memphis in 1973 to make the title game with no prior Sweet 16 appearances on the resume.
• Difference.
The perfunctory pregame greeting of the two head coaches provided an interesting moment. Mike Krzyzewski, 63, and Brad Stevens, 33, are 10,844 days apart. That’s the largest age difference among combatants in NCAA championship game history. (Phog Allen of Kansas, who was born 12 years before basketball was invented, had 10,577 days on Frank McGuire of St. John’s when the Jawhawks beat St. John’s for the championship on March 26, 1952).
Krzyzewski became the third-oldest coach to win the title. Only Allen (66 years, 4 months and 8 days) and UCLA’s John Wooden (64 years, 5 months, 17 days on March 31, 1975) were older at the time of victory.
If Hayward’s shot had gone in, Stevens would have been the second-youngest winner. Branch McCracken of Indiana was 31 years, 9 months and 21 days old when the Hoosiers won the second title in NCAA history on xx, 1940.
Krzyzewski was convening preseason practice with his second team at the U.S. Military Academy when Stevens was born on Oct. 22, 1976. Coach K won two NCAA titles before Stevens decided where he was going to go to college.
Here’s how great Monday’s championship game was: For at least a couple of hours, it made even the most ardent and absurd Duke foes forget about their irrational, immature hatred of the Blue Devils.
As Monday turns into Tuesday, the focus is likely to be on a game that even Tom Izzo said wouldn’t be that compelling rather than the tinfoil-hat assertions of a Duke-flavored conspiracy between CBS and the NCAA.
The Blue Devils, if you recall, had an easy road to Indianapolis as the No. 1 seed in the South region.
Never mind the fact that Baylor was the bracket’s third seed and that the regionals were in Houston, a three-hour drive from Waco. If you recall, Duke defeated Baylor in the South final.
But wait. The Devils only won that game because of the bogus charge against the Bears that should have been a block on Brian Zoubek. If the striped charlatans had gotten that one right, or so it was alleged, Baylor would have been up by five and would have coasted. The Devils’ subsequent 3-pointer, which put them ahead, wouldn’t have been that big a deal.
Yes, please forget that Baylor regained the lead after that trifecta and that Duke claimed everything from there on. Surely that one block-charge call, ordered from the Park Avenue-NCAA cabal, was the difference-maker.
And Duke didn’t deserve that No. 1 seed in the first place. That, we were told, belonged to West Virginia.
Ignore the Blue Devils’ thorough semifinal domination of the Mountaineers before approximately 60,000 WVU backers (either real or temporarily converted) in a crowd of 70,000.
Monday couldn’t have been real. Butler’s Brian Howard went to the bench with more than 14 minutes left after his fourth foul. Smells worse than a landfill in the parking lot of a paper mill, doesn’t it?
What? Zoubek picked up four fouls after halftime? Inconsequential.
Give it a rest. Two teams played a great game and Duke won by two when a 45-footer was a hair too strong off the backboard.
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