The glory of ugly

So, Virginia and Texas Tech for the big prize tomorrow night, and, no, boys and girls, it will not be prettified. Drop a pile on the winner making it to 70 points, because you'll be rich if it happens. Vegas isn't going to touch that one.

This is because, if Virginia plays lockdown defense, Texas Tech plays lockdown-and-throw-away-the-key defense. What the Red Raiders did to Michigan State last night, they've pretty much been doing to everyone all year. They climb in your jock, and they stay there. They take away your passing lanes. They switch, collapse, switch again, force you to take shots with which you're not comfortable.

In the face of that, Michigan State shot a tick under 32 percent last night. The Spartans went 7-of-24 from the 3-point line. Cassius Winston, the engine of everything for Sparty, scored 16 points, but he had to hoist 16 shots to get there. Twelve of them didn't find a home.

"It's like they never make mistakes," summed up Michigan State forward Kenny Goins, who played 33 minutes, managed just four shots and missed them all.

Virginia, meanwhile, limited Auburn to 62 points, and for the second game in a row escaped when it had no earthly business doing so. On the Cavaliers' last possession, they got away with a blatant double dribble, and then Kyle Guy was fouled releasing a desperate triple from the corner when his defender stumbled into him with his lower body.

And so, we may get a 64-61 final tomorrow night. Or, shoot, maybe even 54-51. One Shiner Moment instead of One Shining Moment.

It's not the kind of basketball the masses can get behind, not in the age of Steph and James Hardy and the Greek Freak. America likes its buckets filled here in 2019, and the more outrageously the better. And yet here we are in Minneapolis with two teams whose specialty is taking the outrageous out of the equation. No one is going to get anything they don't earn tomorrow; during one two-minute stretch of the Tech-Michigan State game, for instance, six of eight shots put up were airballs.

You can say no one's going to want to watch that. Or you can say this will be one for the purists, all those pebble-grained dweebs who thrill to the arcane business of helpside shifts and double-downs and gloriously impeded passing lanes.

And who wins?

You've got to like Virginia, I suppose, simply because the Cavaliers play killer D, too, and are more offensively gifted than Tech. But the Blob believes in the relativity of luck, and the Cavaliers all but exhausted theirs against Purdue and Auburn.

So, I'm taking Tech to become the first Texas school to win a national title since Texas Western won in 1966 with an all-African-American starting five, changing the landscape of college basketball forever. The Blob does love its history.

Which is frequently un-pretty, too, of course. Fitting.