The Legacy of Maggie Dixon by Jack Grubbs

Author:Jack Grubbs [Grubbs, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

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March Madness

March is a month defined by two extraordinary events. First, on March 20 or 21, our planet experiences the vernal equinox. As Earth orbits the Sun and rotates on an axis inclined some 23.5 degrees from the plane of the ecliptic, it finds itself with exactly 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness. In the Northern Hemisphere, the next day will have more sunlight and less darkness. In the Southern Hemisphere, darkness overtakes the sunlight. For the United States, the long winter is coming to an end, and the trees, bushes, plants, and grass are pregnant and ready to bloom. Secondly, and certainly more important to basketball fans, it is the start of the annual NCAA Tournament. Large or small, Division 1 men and women’s basketball teams fight it out to make the Big Dance. March Madness ends in April, with one team crowned as the best in the nation.

The format for the women’s tournament is straightforward. A total of 64 teams play in the single-elimination tournament; approximately 32 arrive by winning a conference tournament championship, and another 32 are invited “at large.” An “at large” team is one beaten in a league tournament but having a solid record against highly rated opponents. For the lower-ranked teams, unless they win their conference tournament, they have no chance to be invited to the Big Dance. Once the league tournaments are completed, the 32 “at large” teams are selected. The 64 teams are then seeded from one to 64 and broken into four groups of 16. In each group, number 1 will face number 16, number 2 will face number 15, and so on.

On the men’s side, until 2018 no men’s number 16 seed had ever beaten a number 1 seed, although 16th seeded Princeton a lost 50-49 heartbreaker to top-rated Georgetown in 1989. In the 2018 NCAA Tournament, number 16 University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), bludgeoned the top-rated University of Virginia Cavaliers, 74–54. On the women’s side, number 16 Harvard took down number 1 Stanford, 71–67, in 1998, at Stanford. To their credit, throughout the years, the loss of two key Stanford players to injury prior to the game has been little used as an alibi. Quoting Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer, “They were a very good team—they had a great player [Allison Feaster], an excellent coach [Kathy Delaney-Smith], and I think it was the perfect storm.”

The fact that Army won the regular-season Patriot League title was a “good news–bad news” situation. The bad news stemmed from the fact that they were nowhere near being ranked a “high-powered team.” The message was clear—unless Army won the Patriot League Tournament, the season would be over. As for the good news, Army would be seeded first and host the number-eight team in Christl Arena. On the downside, winning three straight games, of which at least two would be against strong conference teams, is a monumental task—a task never achieved in the history of the West Point women’s basketball team .

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