Columbus, One Week Later

Timeliness does not appear to be a strong suit of this blog, so I doubt many of you are surprised by a week’s delay in my second-round report. The benefit, though, is some perspective on Virginia Tech’s first NCAA appearance in eleven years.

Sunday was a long day. I was up by eight, had my Timmy’s by 10, and was checked out of the hotel for good by 11:30 for what turned out to be over five hours of basketball, thanks to a rather extended UVa-Tennessee match; I didn’t hit Interstate 670 post-game until 5:30, and it was 10 minutes to midnight by the time I got home. Five hours in an arena was brain-numbing, Interstate 70 through eastern Ohio wasn’t any better, and then it got dark. I was ridiculously happy to see traffic and the occasional streetlight by the time I rejoined 70 from 68 in Hancock, MD. Conclusion: don’t do this kind of thing solo again. (Of course, that wasn’t the original plan anyway — thanks, Southwest!)

In retrospect, all that talk about us being a different team and more capable of beating Southern Illinois than we had been in November would have been applicable in early February, but not March. SIU followed the same basic pattern we saw over and over in the last month of the season: guard Zabian Dowdell very tight, keep Deron Washington from penetrating (and thereby posterizing your interior defense) at all costs, and work the shot clock until the open 3-pointer appears with 2-3 seconds left. (For that matter, so did Illinois; their refusal to finish off the 3 was what eventually killed them.) Compounding the problems, A.D. Vassallo went ice-cold, and Seth Greenberg left him in the game far, far too long; with A.D.’s confidence went the team’s chances of pulling back into the game after SIU’s take-charge run at the end of the first half.

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Things You Need To Know: Day 1 in Columbus

So I arrived in Columbus a little bit before noon yesterday. I ran over to Cooper Stadium to pick up a Clippers hat, as they’re the Nats’ new AAA affiliate, expecting to head to Nationwide after and get a cheap Session 1 ticket from a desperate scalper shortly after tip. By the time the Clips’ staffers found a size 7-3/4 hat, UVa was up 19-4 and the game wasn’t even worth the $20 I was willing to pay. Thanks, Clips! You saved me $20 and an afternoon of tolerating deliriously happy Hoo fans. I appreciate it.

The evening session was something else entirely.

• Scalpers outside were getting absolutely destroyed, even though the arena was mostly full by game time. Lesson: unless you’re going to a North Carolina site featuring UNC, a Southern California site featuring UCLA, or somewhere similar where a highly crazed basketball fan base has a less than 3-hour drive to the arena, don’t buy in advance for the NCAA tournament unless you’re getting a great ticket for face value.
• Nationwide Arena is a beautiful hockey arena — shame the Blue Jackets are so bad. They took several design cues in the bowl from the Air Canada Centre; outside the bowl, the concourses are wide, with lots of food options, lots of hockey displays, and even a built-in practice rink. If I ever have a reason to be back here when the Jackets are in town, I’m definitely seeing a game.
• Ohio State fans made up a significant percentage of the crowd. Of the participating schools’ fans, Illinois dominated, and SIU came up behind. Holy Cross probably trailed us by a little bit, but their fans were great — lots of students, loud, excited, and had some class despite quite a bit of baiting from the SIU folks.
• We need to work on this whole basketball traveling thing, and we need to get out of our regional comfort zone. Columbus is no farther a drive for most Hokie fans than is Atlanta, but we don’t know much about the Midwest at all (we try to ignore West Virginia — states beyond it are completely lost), and I think that suppressed turnout somewhat.
• I had expected the Ohio State fans to lean Illinois’s way as a fellow Big 10 school, and I think they wanted to. But the way Illinois was playing, they just couldn’t; for most of the game, the OSU fans around me just rode both teams for the awful basketball they were witnessing. Tech played badly out of its usual Jekyll-and-Hyde incompetence (it was the N.C. State/Marshall/Western Michigan Hokies on display for 35 minutes); the Illini were deliberately making the game unwatchable, with sleep-inducing offensive sets and not a player on the court that wanted to shoot the ball. If Illinois had tried, they could have been up 18 at the half rather than 8; they left the door open all night long. The result: when Tech decided it wanted to win after all and pulled within one possession on the eventual game-winning run, the arena flipped over to our side.
• Second game quickie evaluation: neither team shot well (from the floor or the line). Holy Cross played hard, but SIU had probably the four best athletes on the floor, and that counts.
• Band rankings: SIU, Illinois, VT, Holy Cross. The Saluki band was a genuine highlight of the second game, playing everything from Hey Ya to Georgia On My Mind and a rather advanced mockery of Carry On My Wayward Son.

When it looked like the game was over midway through the second half, I was working on my Zen, and to some extent my conclusion holds even though we won: this basketball thing is only going to happen at Tech bit by bit. I’m nearly as proud of this Tech team as I was of the ‘04 football team, but it’s all baby steps, from the team (composure on the big stages) to the fans (get your leave requests in early, folks; worst case, you take two days off to watch wall-to-wall basketball on TV, and what’s so bad about that?) to the band (instrument distribution needed some rework for the sound to carry better from the floor).

But we’ll be here on Sunday, and that’s all that matters right now.