LINCICOME: March Madness has downside

By Bernie Lincicome, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published March 20, 2008 at 10:19 p.m.

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Out by noon.

That's what comes of midmorning basketball. Not to be confused with midmajor basketball, or submajor, that place where hobbits and Winthrop live, all gathered at the Pepsi Center on Thursday.

This was Temple, barely in, first gone, thanks to a 10:30 a.m. engagement with Michigan State, the Owls reduced to four guards and a guy from Spain by MSU's defense.

"I've never played a 10:30 game before," said MSU center Drew Naymick, not alone in the novelty. Nor had a surprisingly large and alert crowd ever seen one.

Neither the time nor the altitude may explain how thoroughly ordinary the game was, as well as the Pittsburgh-Oral Roberts game that followed.

The fault is in the anticipation raised by so much tumult over March Madness that when it is finally presented, all the flaws of college basketball and few of the delights are exposed.

There is this one obvious difference between these games and the ones usually on display at the Pepsi Center. Fewer tattoos. In fact, college basketball is relatively tattoo-free, all that unmarked skin like so many fresh, unstretched canvases.

Also, too, in college basketball there seems to be a five-pass-before-you-shoot rule. With the Nuggets, the rule is no pass.

So different is the game on view that a question came to me at halftime of the first game from a lady near press row. Why, she demanded to know, do they play two halves in college ball and four quarters in high school and the pros?

I considered the question and could not come up with an answer. "Well," she said. "It's stupid."

She might also have asked why the three-point line, the one used by foreigners and the pros, had been moved, and I could have answered that. It is still there but covered by floor-colored masking tape. Up in front of it in white is the college line, making the cheap college three look even cheaper.

This is going to change next season and will possibly open up the painfully constricted college game, too often looking like a rental car during the holidays.

"I am personally for it, although I have no criteria," said MSU coach Tom Izzo. "I'm not one of those data freaks who looks at everything that way. When you lose a game because a guy hit a couple of three-point and four-point shots, I hope they move it outside the building."

This is not to forget why we were all there, to weed out the weeds along the Road to San Antonio.

"It's one-and-done time," summed up Izzo.

The attraction and the pity of the NCAAs is just this, that it ends in a blink, all that joy of being selected crushed before you need to change socks.

And so four teams depart, leaving behind a few tears and a press room full of media guides, lined up like undone homework on temporary tables.

No need now to dwell on the Temple boast of Dionte Christmas and Mark Tyndale, offered in boxing gloves, as Temple's 1-2 punch, and we shall never know which was the jab and which was the uppercut.

This can be said about that. Both seemed to play as if they were wearing gloves, especially the ill-named Christmas.

And Oral Roberts will never have to explain why they are now the Golden Eagles instead of the Titans, or why their student body paints itself as zombies, which is, as far as is commonly known, neither.

An 18-point run in the first half and relentless rebounding by Pitt easily overwhelmed the Eagles, more pewter than golden, another case of a better team tending to its business.

MSU and Pitt will match muscles Saturday, two teams as happy to stop a score as to make one.

Izzo said he emphasizes defense because most championships he has seen are won that way (citing the Bad Boy Pistons as examples), and Pitt coach Jamie Dixon demurs.

"I don't think we're that physical," Dixon said. "I think we just try to play hard. Sometimes we bump into a few guys."

March Madness moves relentlessly on, reduced in a single day from 64 teams to 48, the luckiest of that happy number possibly Mount St. Mary's, which will not have to lose to No. 1 North Carolina until tonight, giving the hobbit team from Emmitsburg, Md., some 30 more hours of madness to enjoy than the poor, first-out Temple Owls.

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