There’s something we see in every sport, but never so achingly often as each year in the NCAA tournament. To lose stinks, sure. To lose a close game stinks worse.
But nothing stinks more than to lose after giving up a decent-sized lead.
To get blown out is no fragrant affair, either, but the emotions are usually muted then. Getting beat soundly tells you something worse about your team than losing 69-68, as Michigan State did to Iowa State on Saturday. Getting your tail kicked leaves you with less to feel proud about than falling 78-74, as Vanderbilt did to Maryland. But …
It was that taste of victory, that sense that it was impending, that really made these games hard to take for the Spartans and Commodores. Blowouts are the things that should stink the worst for the loser, but they almost never do.
There’s a pretty obvious physiological reason, of course. The adrenaline rush of a tight game comes to a crescendo when the buzzer sounds. You release all that forward momentum of adrenaline through celebrating or lamenting, screaming with joy or burying your head in your jersey.
Vanderbilt in the first half was up by as much as 18 points against the top-seeded Terrapins. Vandy wasn’t exactly a team of giants to begin with this season. But then the Commodores lost their primary post player, Hanna Tuomi, with a stress fracture a month ago. They became the Mini-Dores, a team with leapers and scrappers who said, “We can SO do this.”
And they almost did … except for one big thing: Marissa Coleman wouldn’t let them. She had 42 points and 15 rebounds, a game so amazing that it was hard to do it justice writing about it.
Coleman somehow seemed sure Maryland would win even when things looked most dire – did we mention the Terps were down by 9 with 4:46 left? _ and she made play after play down the stretch. People will question if Vandy coach Melanie Balcomb left Jennifer Risper on the bench too long in the first and second halves because of foul trouble. They will wonder if there was a better way to try to keep Coleman from taking the shot that won the game.
Ultimately, though, Coleman looked so certain that you wondered if she could see things nobody else could. I thought that and then, in one of those weird coincidence things, I saw my friend Joe Posnanski wrote a recent post on his blog about “knowing” things before they actually happen.
To read this makes you think of Coleman. Somehow, she knew Maryland was going to win, and she was going to make it happen.
As for Michigan State, the Spartans saw a seven-point lead disappear in just over a minute at the end of the game. That’s the worst kind of loss to have – the “out-of-thin-air” loss. The “wasn’t this game over with us winning?” loss.
So while they did a lot right, what Vandy and Michigan State have to suffer the cruelest kind of loss: the “missed it by that much” defeat.
The miss that’s as heavy as a millstone.
Didn’t the marketing ffioce Assistant VP at EMU produce a much celebrated marketing plan for EMU basketball a year or two ago? Was it so lame that it precluded pricing tickets to ah .ah meet demand for exceptional home games that would ah .ah .possibly have real DEMAND for tickets? Marketing EMU football and basketball is tough, as there is no actual market demand for those games: available seats always exceed demand for EMU home games. The seats have virtually no real value. There is no large fan base. So marketing the games is tied into tricks (come to the game and you might win an iPad!). The EMU marketing staff, in Welch and in the athletics department, have no ability to even imagine how to market tickets for a game that could have a real sizable audience one with the potential of real demand: But the principle is simple price tickets to sell, and sell them to satisfy the customer. Don’t package what is desired (a ticket to the MSU game at EMU) with what isn’t desired (a series of EMU tickets, or a season ticket). You’re not going to trick MSU fans into becoming EMU basketball fans, and if you annoy them, they’ll skip the game entirely. As just happened! Our marketing staff haven’t learning the adage about the customer is always right, and instead tried to trick MSU fans into buying what they don’t want. So they didn’t show up and bought nothing. Fire the relevant EMU marketing/AD officials and replace them with undergraduate EMU majors in marketing, and we’d get improved performance.
Sometime during the MSU game, I remarked that the game was going to be a heartbreaker for *somebody*. When MSU went up in the waning moments of the game I thought they might actually pull off another upset, but those [confounded] 3-pointers struck again for Iowa State.
I was really bummed about the MSU loss, and yes, the no-call at the very end, but I got all philosophical afterwards and noted that the result could have easily gone the other way, and we’d be wowed by MSU’s resilience and saying “them’s the breaks” for relying so heavily on 3-point shooting in ISU’s case.
Stanford got the memo and didn’t keep it close at the end.
* I have to add that ISU’s coach was about as gracious as could be following the game. I didn’t really “hate” ISU going into this, but I felt a tiny bit better about the loss after his comments. I still think everyone is a footnote to UConn this year anyway.
I’m really excited about MSU’s program, though. Hopefully they chuck the millstone and like Tennessee, grind it into sand under their skin to goad them along to a much improved 2009-2010 season.