Apologies to the two people who will actually read this for taking so long to get it up. Really just pure laziness on my part.
...and wow. I thought the officiating in Thursday's game was bad. This game made it look like the three officials in Thursday's contest were the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
(Extraneous comment: Am I the only one to whom the phrase "Holy Ghost" sounds utterly stupid? I mean, Ghost? Seriously? Do the GhostBusters go after him? And can someone please explain the whole Trinity concept to me, period? Believe it or not, as an amateur Byzantine-ist, I know a fair amount about early Christian theology. I still don't understand how you can get three-Gods-in-one, or indeed what the point is supposed to be. Islam and Judaism at least have clarity on their side.)
In any event, it was awful. The first half was basically whistle-free; at one point Robin Lopez was literally tackled during a loose-ball situation and no foul was called. Then we get to the second half, and there's whistles blowing all over the joint. Everyone, by now, has probably seen the final play (where Brook Lopez was "fouled" by Chase Budinger on what appeared to be a totally clean block), but I can't even count the number of times that Jerryd Bayless lunged into the paint and basically threw himself at his defender and got a foul call. Got old mighty quick, I have to say.
Give the kid credit, though. He made free throws like his family would be executed if he missed one. 16-for-16, I believe. Amazing. Talk about a premium talent. He's up there with Kevin Love, Brook Lopez, Malik Hairston and Ryan Anderson in contention for All-Conference honors, and a darkhorse for Player of the Year.
One thing is very clear, and it's that Arizona is nothing-- NOTHING-- without Bayless. I can't remember a team where one guard dominated the offense to such a degree. He scored 75% of their points against ASU! That's borderline unbelievable at any level.
And that segues into my lecture du jour, which is about injuries and the selection committee process. Arizona seems like they will get a pass on their 1-3 stretch early in Pac-10 play in which he was injured and unavailable. Now, as a Pac-10 true believer, I think Arizona is basically an NCAA tournament team anyway-- and their RPI and SOS back them up even if they finish in the bottom half of the league. But that doesn't mean they should get a pass for overrecruiting a small roster and neglecting their bench. If they get in, it should be because they earned it.
We know that teams' performance is weighted by the committee based on who was and wasn't playing in a given game, and who will or won't be around for the Tournament. The infamous hosing of Cincinnati after Kenyon Martin broke his leg, where they were dropped to a #2 seed for no other reason than that a player was hurt, is the most obvious example. But there have certainly been others. Heck, Stanford might get a mulligan on the Siena loss, which is even less excusable given that Brook Lopez was absent due to suspension, not injury.
In my mind, this is one form of the cardinal sin (are there enough religious metaphors in this post?) of "projection seeding." Teams should be seeded based on performance-- period. Not who you think will advance, who has the best players, whatever-- the 4 #1 seeds should be the four teams that did the most work during the regular season. And injuries simply don't factor into that. Your #1 player, who comprises 50% of your offense, was out? Golly gee. Perhaps you should have recruited or developed some better players to pick up the slack. You think Kansas is going to notice if one of their starters is out? Shit, Brandon Rush missed like 1/3 of the season and the team was undefeated in his absence. Why? Because they go 10 deep with quality players, that's why.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as a game that "shouldn't count." Pro teams don't get to throw out games where they were missing key components. If they did, the A's would have made the baseball playoffs last year, based on their undefeated 2-0 record for the season.
It's not OK to seed a team based on the perceived quality of their tournament roster vis a vis the rosters that they had during various pre-tournament games. The only fair way to seed-- keeping in mind, of course, that college athletics are never really "fair" given teams' disparate budgets and recruiting capabilities-- is to seed and admit teams based on what they accomplished. As Joe Lunardi pointed out the other day, if it's just a beauty contest based on the roster, why bother to play the season at all?
I'm sure I'll have more to say on this later. For now, suffice it to say that while Arizona has a legitimate beef about the officiating-- although I think the cardinal errors more or less balanced out, that's not an excuse for committing those errors-- they have no beef for the loss of Nic Wise and Brett Brielmayer to injury. Resilient teams deal with injuries by inserting quality backups, not by whinging to the powers that be about how their losses shouldn't matter.
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