At tonight’s Big Sky title game, courtesy of MockSession:
Here’s the photo I took as that was happening:
UPDATE: Northern Colorado is going dancing! And I was there to see it!
Indeed, much like Kyle and Bally did at Long Island tonight, DU Bally and I rushed the floor with the UNC students:
For more photos and video, see my liveblog at right.
UPDATE 2: Here is ESPN’s video of the end of the game and the fans rushing the court:
Last night, the league I’ve been following all season (because of my Pioneer Pulse blog), the Sun Belt, provided us with what The Mid-Majority calls the “first eternal highlight reel moment” of this Championship Fortnight: a game-winning #superhoop by Arkansas-Little Rock’s Solomon Bozeman, showing why he was the conference’s player of the year:
The entire ending of the game, particularly the final minute, was intense. I was already calling it an “INSTANT CLASSIC” before Bozeman’s shot sent me (and just about everyone else) into a tweet-frenzy. I can’t find a video of the whole closing sequence, but you can get a little flavor of it from this ESPN clip. (Random aside: Media companies that post clips on YouTube, but disable embedding, don’t understand YouTube. In a word, #FAIL.)
I almost wish I’d kept my ticket and flown to Arkansas for that game even though DU wasn’t in it. What a game! I can only hope tonight’s Big Sky title game in Greeley, which I’ll be at, will be half as entertaining as the Sun Belt’s grand finale.
The fifth-place finisher in the six-team Sun Belt West, Arkansas-Little Rock (19-16 overall, 7-9 in regular-season conference play, RPI #200), is your 2011 Sun Belt Champion, bound for the NCAA Tournament (almost certainly by way of Dayton) for the first time since 1990, thanks to the last-second heroics of conference player of the year Solomon Bozeman.
What a game! Congratulations to the champs, and good luck in the Big Dance, Trojans.
Like my giant bracket says, Sun Belt West represent!!
The way the tournament played out, with all the top seeds falling early and two non-bye teams playing for the title, made Denver’s first-round pratfall against Florida International (which lost its next game 73-38) all the more frustrating. This really was anybody’s tournament. It could have been the Pioneers’. But they basically forgot to show up.
Ah, well. Maybe next year.
If the blog looks all screwy this morning, with a big blank space in between the blog content and a tiny right sidebar, view my stylesheet and hit reload on your browser, then come back to this page and again click reload. That should fix it.
What I’ve done is create a massive right sidebar for ScribbleLive-fueled live coverage (largely Twitter-based, but also archived for posterity) of March Madness-related events, starting with tonight’s Montana @ Northern Colorado Big Sky championship game (7pm MST, 9pm EST, on ESPN2), which I’ll be at in person. Bally is stoked.
Also note the new masthead, from Hinkle Fieldhouse during BracketBusters 2007. (I used a different masthead from the same game last March.)
With five days till Selection Sunday, we’re getting closer and closer to the 16th annual Living Room Times basketball pools — NCAA men’s, NCAA women’s and NIT. And I can’t wait!! This year, the men’s NCAA pool will have a newly compressed entry deadline, thanks to the First Four a.k.a. #quadPIG, which can no longer be ignored, as the #PIG could be. It will also have a revamped scoring system, for the same reason; details on that later.
First, though, the pools need a logo! I’ve had great success in prior years soliciting logo designs from my readers, so I’m going to do that again. If you logo is picked, you’ll get, um, an autographed photo of DU Bally! Or a prize of equivalent value. 😉 Submit entries via e-mail to irishtrojan [at] gmail.com, or upload them somewhere on the Interwebs and post the link in comments here.
Rules: I need a logo for all three pools. They’re the 16th annual Living Room Times pools. The logo shouldn’t include the term “NCAA,” nor incorporate use the NCAA’s logo, both for legal reasons and because one of the LRT pools is for the NIT. Better to use “basketball pools” instead. Suggestions: I tend to like “clean” logos, surrounded by white space, though that’s not an absolute rule. Basketballs, brackets and such tend to look good. Also, you may want to consider using in some fashion the font, called “Marriage” (not the new cursive font by the same name, but the old, 1990s-era TrueType font called “Marriage”), that appears in the masthead of the this blog. But that’s just an idea, by no means a requirement. Lastly, I highly recommend saving the logo in editable form (i.e., Photoshop or whatever you use), in case I like it but want to request a tweak or two.
I’ll set the deadline to enter for 2pm Mountain Time (noon Eastern) on Friday — although, if you want to enter but need more time, let me know.
After the jump, a look at previous years’ logos.
The Space Shuttle Discovery is wrapping up its final mission, and this morning the crew was awakened by none other than William Shatner, putting a new twist on the “Star Trek” opening-theme voiceover:
When I heard this on CNN, it gave me goose bumps. I kid you not. (NERD!!!)
I’ve been doing most of my March Madness talk on Twitter, but with less an a week till Selection Sunday, it’s high time for a bubble overview. Here’s where things stand right now, per a slightly tweaked version of Andy Glockner‘s breakdown:
LOCKS: Arizona, BYU, Cincinnati, Duke, Florida, Georgetown, Kansas, Kansas State, Kentucky, Louisville, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Pitt, Purdue, San Diego State, St. John’s, Syracuse, Temple, Texas, Texas A&M, UCLA, UConn, UNLV, Vanderbilt, Villanova, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Xavier
PROBABLY IN: Florida State, George Mason, Missouri, Old Dominion, Tennessee, Washington
BUBBLE (competing for 11 spots): Alabama, Baylor, Boston College, Butler, Clemson, Colorado, Georgia, Gonzaga/St. Mary’s loser, Illinois, Marquette, Memphis, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Richmond, UAB, USC, Utah State, Virginia Tech
PROBABLY OUT (or needing autobid): Colorado State, Harvard, Missouri State, New Mexico, VCU
Glockner has George Mason and Old Dominion as “locks,” but I’ve put them in “probably in,” since some folks don’t seem quite so sure. I still think they’re in solid shape, though — and if VCU beats Old Dominion tomorrow, you can scratch the Rams off the “probably out” list, and edit the bubble teams category to “competing for 10 spots.” Conversely, if Butler wins the Horizon title game tomorrow, that’s one less team on the bubble competing for one of those precious spots. Same if Utah State wins the WAC.
Anyway, bottom line, it’s an incredibly weak bubble, not just because of the three extra spots in the tournament, but due to weakness extending all the way up to the #7 seed line or so. Hence team likes USC and Colorado, both with a slew of incredibly awful losses, even being in the mix. The weak bubble also seems to be creating more disagreement that usual among bracketologists, so it should be an interesting week, with a lot of suspense right down to the wire.
Florida International 53, Denver 49, final. The Pioneers’ season is over, ending with a profound whimper. DU finishes a deeply disappointing 13-17 overall, 9-8 in a weak Sun Belt, a first-round exit from the SBC tourney, and no postseason appearance.
Those great expectations? Completely unmet. Yes, there were major injury problems with this team this year, and they have the potential to be a lot better next season, if they can stay healthy. But make no mistake, the Pioneers underachieved, and tonight put an exclamation point on that.
The game wasn’t nearly as close as the final score. DU trailed 22-12 at halftime — yes, you read that correctly — and was 15 points behind with 5:21 left. The Pioneers only got within low single digits in the closing seconds, when it was too little, too late.
The offensive efficiency numbers aren’t out yet, but this had to be Denver’s worst performance of the season, or close to it. They shot just 34% from the field and 24% from three, including an 0-for-13 start; again, by the time they started hitting #superhoops, it was far too late. Keep in mind, this is the nation’s 5th-best three-point shooting and 63rd-best overall shooting team. But tonight they couldn’t hit a shot to save their lives. As Coach Joe Scott put it with understandable redundancy: “We didn’t shoot the ball well, and we didn’t put the ball in the basket. I thought the game was there tonight for us to be successful but we were off. You can’t win if the ball doesn’t go in the basket. We just didn’t shoot the ball well.” Indeed. Only Florida International’s own offensive incompetence kept the game from being an Arkansas State-like wipeout.
Anyway, more later, perhaps. For now, I have plane, hotel and car rental reservations to cancel — there will be no crazy trip to Arkansas for me — and then I gotta get to bed.
P.S. Here’s Joe Scott after the game:
Below is a CoverItLive window showing all the tweets on @PioneerPulse, automatically imported. This post will serve as my running “liveblog” of the Pioneers’ season. Feel free to respond either by commenting here or by tweeting something at @PioneerPulse.
[Originally timestamped 2/5/2011 at 11:08 PM; bumped to top. -ed.]
It’s not DU-related, but Pioneer Pulse readers may enjoy my belated full blog writeup of “Brendan & DU Bally’s Excellent Above-the-Red-Line Adventure” to BYU-Wyoming and SDSU-Colorado State.
Hopefully I’ll be going on another “Excellent Adventure” next week — to Hot Springs, Arkansas and then Greeley, Colorado. If Denver makes the Sun Belt title game, I’ll be in Hot Springs on Tuesday for it. Then, I’m going to the Big Sky title game (hopefully involving Northern Colorado) on Wednesday evening, potentially driving straight to Greeley from DIA, if my Arkansas plans happen. Go Pioneers! Make my plans completely nuts!