One of these things ...

 ... is not like the others. Although it once was, way back in the Before Time.

See, at last we have our Final Four. And it is Gonzaga, Baylor, Houston and ... UCLA?

Wait, what?

You mean 11-seed UCLA? You mean the UCLA that was down 13 to Michigan State in the first half of a play-in game? You mean the UCLA that lost its last four regular-season games, and finished fourth in the Pac-12, and lost nine games in the regular season?

Yes, sir. That UCLA.

Hung on to oust 1-seed Michigan in the Elite Eight last night, 51-49, and don't ask me how that happened. The Bruins just sort of scrounged around and made the game ugly the way Mick Cronin's teams tend to do, and they got 28 points from Johnny Juzang, who kept the wheels on when UCLA was down early. And now they get another 1-seed, unbeaten Gonzaga in the Final Four.

UCLA in the Final Four. 

Turn the clock back to 1970, to bell bottoms and Vietnam and Hell, No, We Won't Go. To Cambodia and battle lines bein' drawn and the Chicago 7, and to Bummer, the Beatles just broke up. To John Wooden and Lew Alcindor and Lucius Allen and Bill Walton, who was counterculture all the way but loved the squarest man in America like a second father.

The ultimate overdog then, the Bruins are the ultimate underdog now. The overdog is unbeaten Gonzaga, which not all that long ago was everyone's favorite Cinderella story. Now it's UCLA wearing that glass slipper, the fourth 11-seed to reach the Final Four in 16 years.

Of course, the others were named George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth and Loyola. Not, you know, once-upon-a-time buckets royalty.

 Remember the other day, when the Blob said college basketball in 2021 is not the same game it was back in the day?

This isn't quite quite what I meant. 

But it works anyway.

Cosmic disturbances

 I suppose there are worse portents. A plague of locusts could have fallen on those ancient championship banners. That equally ancient Indiana jersey -- the one with No. 42 on it, Mike Woodson's back when he was thin and young and the proud owner of a luxurious 'fro -- could have shrunk in the wash.

But on the day the man who needed no introduction was introduced as Indiana University's new men's basketball coach, stuff happened. And not good stuff from a karma/portent situation.

First, the Indiana women, carrying the Indiana brand forsaken by the men these past four years, finally ran into a team they couldn't crack, falling to 3-seed Arizona in the Elite Eight. It was the first time the women had reached the Elite Eight in the program's history,  and the first time any IU basketball team had gone that deep into March Madness in 19 years.

And then, in Indianapolis, in the heart of a state where his name is not well-favored among those of a certain allegiance, Kelvin Sampson reached the Final Four.

His Houston Cougars dispatched Oregon State 67-61 in the Elite Eight, and now it's on to college basketball's summit weekend. In Indianapolis. In Indiana, where the whole blamed tournament has been played.

Kelvin Sampson.

So on the day the Bobbyheads finally got themselves a Bob Knight guy to restore IU basketball's dusty glory, the man who left a smoking crater where that glory once had been reached the pinnacle of his own resurrection. And now we'll all have to choke down one of the media's favorite tropes -- Cue Redemption Story, take eleventy-thousand -- against an Indiana backdrop, 45 miles north of the scene of Sampson's original sin.

After the breaking the same rules at Indiana he broke at Oklahoma, the NCAA threw him out of its circus for being too corrupt, which is a hell of a feat considering the entity doing the throwing. Then they let him come back. Now he's really back, and let the feel-good features flow.

Maybe that's a bad omen, portent, whatever, for Mike Woodson and IU. Or maybe it just suggests the past is the past and now it's on to a brighter future -- even if the Woodson hire is itself a significant nod to the past.

Then again, I could be reading too much into all this. I suppose that's possible, too.

"Ya think?" you're saying now.

Oh, be quiet.

The pick. (With questions)

 So I'm watching Michigan put Florida State's season on the shelf, and I can see this now. Sort of. Maybe.

I'm looking at my TV, and there is Juwan Howard with his NBA resume, and there is Phil Martelli with his college resume, and I see what Indiana's thinking. If it could work in Ann Arbor ...

And so to the Hire, to Mike Woodson coming home to Assembly Hall as Indiana's fourth head coach since Bob Knight, to a 63-year-old NBA lifer who's been a head coach for more than 600 NBA games, most of them losses. He's Indiana's version of Howard, albeit 15 years older. Thad Matta, also hired yesterday as IU's associate AD for basketball, fills the role of Martelli, sort of. 

Gotta think that's the thinking, anyway.

Gotta wonder, also, how long-term is Indiana's thinking, given that if Woodson fulfills his reported six-year deal, he'll be nearly 70 when it's time to re-up it.

So there's my first question.

My second question is why Indiana would again do something that feels like an experiment, when athletic director Scott Dolson said Indiana was done with experiments where its basketball job was concerned. But that's not really so much a question as an observation.

So is this: College basketball is not the same game it was 40-some years ago when Mike Woodson played there. Which is what makes me think this could actually work, maybe.

Look. It's great Woodson's a legacy Hoosier and all, and that he played for Bob Knight, whose shadow continues to enrich Indiana basketball's past while restraining its future. That at least will satisfy the diehard Bobbyheads. 

What will satisfy today's recruits, on the other hand, is entirely different. And that's where Woodson's NBA cred is a plus.

First off, anyone who thinks he's going to come in and install some version of Knight's prehistoric  motion offense will likely be sorely disillusioned, because you don't attract talent in 2021 by saying "Come to IU and set screens for four years."  Those days are done.

No, the college game looks and operates a lot like the NBA now. It, too, is professional basketball in everything but semantics, operating by the same business model and motivated by the same imperatives. Which means, theoretically at least, that the college game should not be nearly the alien landscape to an NBA lifer that it was 40 years ago.

That dovetails neatly with another reality: No one's going to come to IU because they've always dreamed of playing for Mike Woodson. To kids in 2021, Mike Woodson is just some old guy who played at IU when there were still laces on the basketball. What they'll come for is Woodson is a guy who's played and coached in the NBA for 40 years and knows what it takes to get there and stay there.

So IU buckets under Woodson will likely look a lot more like the NBA than the '76 (or '81 or '87) Hoosiers. And if Woodson was never successful with that model in the NBA, he did make the teams he coached better.

In Atlanta, he took the Hawks to the playoffs in 2007-08 for the first time in eight years, and got them to the Eastern Conference semifinals the next two seasons. And in New York, he went 18-6  after taking over the sadsack Knicks in March 2012, then wrung 54 wins out of them the next season.

Ultimately he lost his job in both places, because the Hawks were the Hawks and the Knicks were the Knicks. But both teams got better under his hand.

That's a salient point in Bloomington after four years of Archie Miller, during which the Hoosiers consistently got worse the longer the season went on.

That's not likely to recur if Woodson's track record is any guide.

And will that be enough for the perpetually disgruntled IU fan base?

Maybe. Sort of. We'll see.

Seeing the light

 Self-interest is a wonderful vehicle for clarifying things. The truth may be out there, but until it affects you personally, you sometimes don't see it.

Consider Mick Cronin's vision much improved, in that case.

See, he's got his UCLA Bruins playing in the Sweet Sixteen today, but he doesn't have Dashien Nix. Nix was a showroom guard he had on the hook a couple years ago, until he didn't. Nix opted to go play in the NBA's G-League instead, an option now available to top-flight prospects coming out of high school.

Cronin doesn't have a problem with that. What he has a problem with is the G-League actively recruiting Nix after it knew he was a major UCLA recruit.

And here we go again, the NBA talking junk about how the pros and the colleges are all in this for the athletes' welfare, while treating the colleges like something you scrape off your shoe. And Cronin's damn sick and tired of it, because now it's affecting him.

"A free farm system for 40 years for the NBA," is how he described it the other day.

Well, yes, and the colleges have gone right along with it. Instead of taking steps to push back against the NBA for its absurd 19-year-old rule, they've merely exploited it by signing every year's new crop of Dashien Nixes knowing full well they're just using Whatsamatta U. as a waiting room until they turn 19. 

Which of course makes an utter joke out of the professed mission of college athletics, which is to allow gifted athletes access to first-class educations.

That has been a laughable notion for a long time in the upper reaches of college athletics, and nothing illustrates it more starkly than the one-and-dones precipitated by the NBA's idiotic rule. College coaches and administrators wring their hands and talk junk themselves about it, but the bottom line is the bottom line. If signing a handful of one-and-dones can gain you access to another round of cash in the NCAA Tournament, they'll gladly keep doing it.

Because if they were serious about not using these kids as ATMs, they'd stop recruiting them. Or tell them they wouldn't recruit them without at least a two-year commitment.

Or do a lot more than just complain about the NBA's restraint of trade.

"It's America," Cronin told ESPN Radio the other day. "A guy can go to war when he's 18. He can grab a gun and get killed for his country, but he can't put his name in the (NBA) draft? Come on, man, it's ridiculous."

Indeed it is.

So stop talking and start doing.

The sting of true loss

 The games will go on again today, as the games must. Four teams will reach the Elite Eight. Four will go home, wounded and hurting and unable, for the moment, to stop thinking about what might have been had they just shot straighter, defended harder, been less the victim of basketball's cruel physics.

Loft plus trajectory equals victory. Too much or too little loft, plus too much or too little trajectory, equals just another stat in the rebound column. And heartache. 

But let's talk about true heartache a moment. Let's talk about true loss.

Both happened in northern California the other day, when a young man, his sister and a third person died in a car accident. The young man was 23-years-old. His name was Oscar Frayer. And three days before his young life ended before it had properly started, he played in the same tournament sixteen teams will resume playing today.

Frayer, see, was a 6-foot-6 senior guard/forward for Grand Canyon University, which last week played in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history. The Antelopes lost to Iowa, 86-74. As noted in a story by Myron Medcalf of ESP.com, Frayer started 107 games for GCU in his career, and in his final game contributed eight points, five assists, three blocks and a steal to the Grand Canyon effort.

It was the pinnacle of his basketball life, one imagines. And when it was over he was off first to commencement and then to the rest of his life, having earned a degree in communications.

Now he and his sister and another person are gone. Like that.

No loss you see across the next few days will ever be as final, nor sting as hard.

One shining moment

 And, no, we're not talking about THE One Shining Moment, which is what all of America waits up for the first Monday night in April because CBS refuses to start the NCAA championship game at a civilized hour. 

We're talking about what happened out in Tempe, Ariz., the other day, where a 30-year-old man decided to commit sexual assault on a 71-year-old woman in a park in broad daylight. And where what subsequently happened proves that maybe God wears an Aaron Rodgers or Patrick Mahomes or Tom Brady jersey on Sundays in the fall.

What subsequently happened was, Justin Herron and another man came to the rescue.

Herron, see, is a New England Patriots offensive tackle out of Wake Forest who just completed his rookie season. He's rather large. OK, he's really large: 6-5 and 305 pounds of professional athlete. And when he and a man named Murry Rogers saw what was happening, they leaped up and started yelling at the guy to get off her.

Then Herron pulled the guy off her and told him to sit his ass down and wait for police. I imagine it was a little like a regular-sized human plucking a hotdog wrapper off the sidewalk.

Anyway, the Tempe police declared Herron and Rogers heroes, and Roger Goodell and the rest of the NFL suits must be on their knees thanking a benevolent Almighty. Because, of course, it happened right in the middle of the whole Deshaun Watson mess, in which one of the league's its brightest stars is getting buried in civil suits as an alleged serial sexual harasser/molester.

PR like that you don't need when you've expended so much time and effort telling America you take sexual assault and domestic violence really really seriously. Really.

Now they've got Justin Herron to trot out there and say "See? NFL players GET IT."

Shoot. They might just erect a statue of the guy somewhere.

Parity beckons

The Blob has yapped enough the last few days about the particularly mad Madness of this year's men's March Madness. It's high time, in the interests of the equity the NCAA shuns, to look in on the women's March Madness.

(Yes, I know. The NCAA has forbade the women from using the lucrative March Madness brand. Screw them. This is my Blob and I make the rules, and my rules say the women's tournament shall be called March Madness, too.)

In any event, something interesting and fairly significant is happening on the women's side.

Once upon time there was Connecticut and there was Tennessee and there were Baylor, Stanford, South Carolina, Notre Dame and the Texases, the University and A&M. Iowa and Purdue, sure. Duke and North Carolina a bit later.

Everyone else?

Everyone else was kibble.

A lower seed, back in the day, had about as much chance against one of the top four or five seeds as a stalk of wheat has against a combine. The women's tournament was a second-grade classroom: Big kids towering over little kids, and miles and miles of chalk.

But something wonderful is happening these days.

Parity has entered the building.

Twelves are beating 5s. Elevens are beating 6s. A 13 beat a 4 the other day, and last night, a 2-seed (Texas A&M) had to go overtime against a 7-seed (17-11 Iowa State) and survived by two to reach the Sweet Sixteen.

Conclusion: The women's side is starting look more and more like the men's side every day. Except for, you know, the branding and the amenities and the facilities and that sort of thing, which are still low-rent and still convey the NCAA's unspoken sentiment: You girls get back down in steerage where you belong.

That said, when a 13-seed like Wright State knocks off a 4-seed like Arkansas in the first round, that's a good thing. When a 12-seed Belmont beats 5-seed Gonzaga, that's a good thing, too. Or an 11 like BYU knocking out a 6 like Rutgers.

All of that means the women's game has more quality players than ever before, and not all of them are winding up at UConn. And that means the women's game is growing the way a sport should grow, from the grassroots up.

More elementary girls playing basketball leads to more middle school girls playing basketball leads to more high school girls playing basketball -- and more to the point, more highly skilled high school girls playing basketball.

The NCAA can treat the women's game like a nuisance all it likes. It's still getting better anyway.

And, yes, it's March Madness, too. No matter what a bunch of withered old white guys say.