WASHINGTON D.C. -- The shame is, George Mason could actually win this thing. What thing? The whole thing. George Mason could win the 2006 national championship, and not because of a favorable bracket or a run of luck or hot shooting at the right time. George Mason could win this thing because George Mason is national-championship good. Period.
But George Mason isn't good enough to beat Connecticut. That's the shame of it. Because waiting in the other half of the Washington, D.C., Region is the one team -- the only team -- in this entire 65-team bracket that George Mason cannot beat.
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| Yes, Lamar Butler, you're going to the Elite Eight. But you'll go no further than that. (Getty Images) |
It's a damn shame, because if it were in any other region, George Mason would have a fighting chance to get to the Final Four. And if it were in the other half of the bracket, George Mason would have a fighting chance to reach the NCAA championship game. Imagine that. Imagine George Mason, the unranked No. 11 seed from the Colonial Athletic Association, playing for the national title. It boggles the mind.
Wichita State's not bad, but George Mason made the Shockers look bad Friday in the Sweet 16. George Mason led 9-0, and then 24-11, and then 35-17. George Mason won 63-55, and that eight-point margin was about as close as Wichita State ever got.
Wichita State's pretty good. Must be. The Shockers won the Missouri Valley Conference regular-season title by two games, and the MVC is no joke. By now, everyone knows that. And then the Shockers got here, to the Sweet 16, by crushing Seton Hall and then beating second-seeded Tennessee.
But the Patriots did to Wichita State what they did to Michigan State in the first round, and what they did to North Carolina in the final 30 minutes of their second-round game. They made Wichita State look bad.
On defense George Mason took Wichita State out of its game, whatever Wichita State's game is. I've got no idea, because for most of Friday night the Shockers were only doing what George Mason allowed them to do. And that wasn't much. George Mason's quicker backcourt was swiping at the ball on the perimeter, and George Mason's more nimble frontcourt was swiping at the ball under the basket.
The official stat sheet credited George Mason with just four steals in the first half, but it looked much worse than that. Maybe because those steals came in the first few minutes, when George Mason was turning defense into offense for that 9-0 lead. Barely two minutes into the game, Wichita State coach Mark Turgeon had to pull his point guard, Matt Braeuer, for humanitarian reasons.
Turgeon spent the first half in a state of emotional disrepair, furious and helpless at the offensive meltdown he was watching. After one typical Wichita State possession, where the Shockers scrambled for 30 seconds to keep control of the ball before P.J. Couisnard hoisted a one-on-one jump shot, Turgeon literally groaned -- "awww" -- and then got angry.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Set screens! Come on!"
At the other end, George Mason was getting whatever shot it wanted. Lots of the time, that shot was a 3-pointer. Open, contested, it didn't matter. The Patriots flood the floor with three players, and sometimes four, who can hit the 3. Folarin Campbell, Tony Skinn and Lamar Butler were hitting so many of them early, it didn't matter that the team's two-player frontcourt, Jai Lewis and Will Thomas, was struggling. Lewis and Thomas, the Patriots' No. 1 and No. 3 scorers, finished the first half with combined totals of two points and two turnovers. And still George Mason led 35-19.
When it was over, George Mason had won its third game of this NCAA Tournament. Additionally, it was George Mason's third win of any NCAA Tournament. That's why this George Mason team is so beautiful. The Patriots are doing things their basketball program has never done. They're doing things no program from the current CAA has done. The only CAA team to reach the Elite Eight was then-CAA member Navy in 1986, and that Navy team had future NBA Hall of Famer David Robinson at center. This George Mason has no future NBA Hall of Famers. It has just one possible NBA player, the offensively gifted Campbell, a 6-foot-4 sophomore wing who will have a chance in two years.
Don't turn this into a David-and-Goliath thing. Regardless of the Goliath awaiting George Mason in the region title game, George Mason is no David. Before Friday, George Mason already had eliminated from this tournament half of last year's Final Four, Michigan State and North Carolina. David never had to beat Goliath twice.
George Mason's not a novelty. That's the truth. But George Mason can't beat UConn, either.
And that's a shame.
