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GOLDEN EAGLES
Todd Rosiak, beat writer
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For this Marquette team to make the NCAA's field of 64 (plus one) - now there's a huge deal. Even blended into the school's sizable basketball tradition, it's become one of those real years of distinction.
But for this Marquette team to have made it amid a gaggle of 96, the general reaction would've been somewhere along the lines of, "Great, but doesn't everyone?"
Among MU lore, you could file it between a pretty good Al McGuire season and a good Bob Dukiet season, as if either exists in the mind. The lifetime Blue & Gold patron with the juice to have a permanent seat in the jewelry-rattling section may or may not commit it to memory.
That would be one of the consequences of this silly tournament-expansion idea that, like a Bob Saget sitcom, refuses to go away with dignity.
There is little that makes a college basketball regular season, much less the conference tournament, special anymore.
Add a whole bunch of North Central Wyoming-Thermopolis States to the mix, and you might as well start giving every Division I school with an enrollment above six and a covered gym the Oscar-night treatment.
It would further reduce the college basketball experience to a peewee soccer tournament, with everyone getting a trophy for showing up.
You certainly wouldn't get the stoked house at the Bradley Center on the first Tuesday of March for the season-defining, woodshed whuppin' Marquette laid upside Louisville's head in another marvelous performance.
Because what was a very important game would've been meaningless by now.
The slow-building, delicious drama of this Marquette team's push toward the NCAAs would've been settled by November's Centenary-Maryland Eastern Shore-Grambling State-South Dakota scrum.
There would be no incentive for the Golden Eagles, or anyone else, for that matter, to upgrade their RPI-killing nonconference schedule. Like Pitt coach Jamie Dixon recently noted, why, there ought to be 11 Big East teams in the tournament! But why stop at 11? It's not like DePaul is particularly busy in mid-March.
That right there is why you should never listen to coaches when it comes to such matters. Of course, coaches are all for tournament expansion. They get bonuses. It keeps the mediocre among the flock employed because it's hard to fire an underachiever after he's made the tournament.
Not that it's terribly exclusive in its current form, but the preference should be to keep the NCAAs as discriminating as possible, if only to get the kind of beautiful performance that developed against Louisville.
There was the traditional power with the designer coach against a team that really had no business breathing Louisville-type air when this season began, only to win by 21.
But like McGuire might say on the evening his memory was honored, it was a time to go barefoot in the grass, a chance to congratulate the temporary.
You don't get those moments in a frivolous regular season, Buzz Williams dancing or Darius Johnson-Odom throwing down a dunk that's still rocking the place.
Maybe Marquette learned how to step on throats like this because the NCAA carrot was dangled. When so many tell you it's not achievable, it means so much more. Without the incentive, would this level of growth have been possible?
Maybe, because you can't take anything away from what these players and coaches have accomplished. No one in the country has played harder, and now that they've won 20 overall and 11 in a killer league, they've earned their way in.
It's been a special year, and so much sweeter to get to the tournament the hard way. As always, there's something to be said for such exclusivity.
Send e-mail to mhunt@journalsentinel.com
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