Underdog-ed

 Florida Atlantic was the darling of the masses last March, a team that played exquisite basketball and beat a lot of the usual heavies as the Owls incinerated brackets all the way to the Final Four.

Everybody loves an underdog.

Well. Unless they stop being an underdog.

And so here I am on the Magic Thingy Formerly Known As Twitter yesterday, watching the reax to ANOTHER underdog, Bryant, stunning the formerly underdog Owls in the Owls barn. And suddenly everyone seemed to have fallen out of love with the Former Underdog.

Laughably overrated, some folks said. A fraud, other folks said. A fraud that plays in a HIGH SCHOOL GYM, still other folks said.

And yet the Owls are still the same team with the same head coach (Dusty May), playing the same brand of basketball. So what happened?

I'll tell you what happened: College basketball circa 2023 happened.

Which is to say, the transfer portal and NIL have completely altered the landscape, in the sense that everyone's got players now. Bryant, for instance, has a kid named Sherif Gross-Bullock, who dropped 19 points and 11 rebounds on FAU. And another kid named Earl Timberlake, who went for 13 points and 12 rebounds.

(Today's pop quiz: Who is Bryant University and where is it? The answers are it's a school with an enrollment of 3,751 located in Smithfield, R.I. It belongs to the America East Conference and plays in the 2,000-seat Chace Athletic Center. And it's been around since 1863.)

Anyway ... so what about FAU yesterday, which has most of last year's team returning?

Pretty simple, really. The Owls had one of those games where they couldn't hit water if they fell out of a boat.

FAU shot a horrendous 26.2 percent (17-of-65) and 16.7 (5-of-30) from the three-point arc. You could put blindfolds on your entire roster and not shoot that poorly. And while some of that was likely because the other guys played lockdown defense, a lot of it was also because ... well, because they couldn't hit water if they fell out of a boat.

So the underdog got underdog-ed, and maybe discovered its new reality: You make the Final Four, you're not sneaking up anyone anymore. Instead you've got a big neon target on your back now, and everyone you play is gonna try to hit the bullseye.

Also, there are more FAUs and Bryants  out there than ever before. Which means the Madness ain't gonna be confined to March anymore.

And how do you not love that?