The Madness. Some thoughts.

 I'm gonna miss Robbie Avila this week.

I'm gonna miss Indiana State's big galoot of a center, with his dad body and Revenge of the Nerd goggles and A-rating game. Looks like a stiff; plays like a stud. Guy has the whole package going for him -- even the nickname, Cream Abdul-Jabbar -- and had Indiana State made it past the velvet rope into Da Tournament, he would have become part of March Madness lore.

Alas, Indiana State, the 28-6 Missouri Valley regular-season champion, wasn't granted entry. Michigan State, which won nine fewer games and finished 10-10 in the Big Ten, is the nine-seed in the West. So the Sycamores don't get in, and MSU, which had exactly the same number of conference and overall wins as Indiana and lost the head-to-head to the Hoosiers, goes Dancin' while the Trees opt for the NIT and Indiana turns down an NIT invite.

Life isn't fair.

And on that note, the Blob presents a few more thoughts on the upcoming mayhem, instead of just shutting up and going away:

* The Long Haul loses again.

Which is to say, one of the reasons ISU will be NIT-ing instead of Dancin' is because North Carolina State came out of nowhere to win the ACC tournament and San Diego State did the same in the Big West and UAB and Montana State did the same in their respective conference tournaments.

Collectively, those four schools lost 56 games this season, with Montana State finishing 17-17. That they're all imposters someone smuggled past the Madness guards goes without saying.

This is why the Blob has long maintained, against all reason, that it's the winner of a conference's regular season title who should get the automatic bid to the Madness, not some down-standings team that pulls three or four wins out of its hindparts after stinking it up for four months. And if this renders the conference tournaments moot for the mid-majors, so be it.

As John Wooden once sort of said,  they're nothing but cash-flow window dressing for the conferences anyway. And that's especially true for the Power Five conferences, which are going to get multiple bids no matter what.

OK. I'll get off my soapbox now.

* Who will Purdue lose to this time?

The Boilermakers landed the No. 1 seed in the Midwest, which means they'll play in Indy Friday night, which means their loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten semis didn't mean diddly. As didn't 1-seed North Carolina losing in the ACC final or 1-seed Houston getting blackjacked by 28 in the Big 12 final.

Anyway, it's on to the Madness, and on to a first-round matchup Purdue has weirdly (or not so weirdly) been pointing toward all season. They got laughed off the big stage last year after lowly Fairleigh Dickinson knocked them out in the first round, a 16-seed taking down a 1-seed for only the second time ever. The ridicule stung, and it's given the Purdues a nasty edge they were missing last season.

So, anyway, beware, whoever wins between 16-seeds Grambling and Montana State. Purdue wants your livers on a stick. The Boilers want to feed you a steady diet of elbows, posterizations and a hard rain of three-balls. 

It's nothing personal. And, of course, it's entirely personal.

* Little Guy alert!

Every year the Blob picks out a tiny no-hoper to root for, because Da Tournament is all about the tiny no-hopers and sometimes the tiny no-hopers win. So who are the Little Guys That Might this year?

Well, you've got your Bigger Little Guys, like Yale and Colgate and Vermont and even Your St. Peter's Peacocks, last seen knocking Purdue into the offseason a couple years ago. They've all been here recently, as has Grand Canyon, WAC champion and Madness participant for the second straight year. And so they can almost be considered Madness regulars. 

However ...

However, it's the Littler Little Guys I'm looking at, the underdogs of underdogs. And there are a few.

I'm talkin' Samford, to start with, and Wagner, and Stetson, whose star player is Jalen Blackmon from Fort Wayne and Marion. There's Howard and James Madison and Longwood and, yeah, Long Beach State and Montana State.

I'm not in the tank for any those, however.

No, sir. This year, my heart belongs to Duquesne.

And, yeah, I know, you probably don't think of Duquesne as a Little Guy, because a lot of people have heard of it. It's a private Catholic research school in Pittsburgh that opened in 1878, so it's been around awhile. Its athletic teams are called the Dukes and they play in the Atlantic 10, and the university has a campus in Rome, the big one in Italy. Which is kinda cool if you think about it.

That's not why I'm rooting for the Dukes, however.

I'm rooting for the Dukes because they haven't been Dancin' in 47 years. In fact the last time they won any sort of postseason national title was in 1955, when they cut down the nets at the NIT.

That was 69 years ago, for those of you keeping score at home. Sixty-nine years -- and 47 since they've even been a part of the Madness.

Forty-seven years! Man, that was 1977, the back half of the Decade Taste Forgot. Disco was big. Fashion was fake-silk shirts with 747 wingspan collars and leisure suits made from fabrics not found in nature. Music was the BeeGees and The Night Chicago Died and Bobby Goldsboro singing "Honey" and "Watching Scotty Grow."

 (But also Steely Dan and other cool stuff)

In other words, it was a long damn time ago. And now the Dukes are BACK, baby. And they're an 11-seed in the East, which means it won't be a monumental upset if they knock off 6-seed BYU in the first round.

After which they probably get washed by 2-seed and Big Ten tournament champ Illinois, although it's a Big Ten team and we all know how Big Ten teams like to poop the bed in the Madness. So who knows?

In any event: Go, Dukes. Make us all proud.