Soft Pretzel Logic

So the day comes to an end, and we have a grand total of one upset. Yes, it was a big one: Virginia Commonwealth over Duke. It was great to see a CAA team finally knock off an ACC team, and of course it was all the more special because it was Duke specifically -- the ACC team with more cachet and resonance among the marketers and consumers of college basketball than any other program. And no, I don't count 9-seeds beating 8-seeds as upsets.

It almost doesn't make sense to tell oneself that Duke lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, but lo and behold, it happened. Yet on the whole, I found this day disappointing. I referred to this earlier, but now I feel like going into a bit more depth about it.

I wonder if this is actually the way it is supposed to be. Teams get seeded for the purpose of creating some definition of who's good and who isn't. The higher seeds are what they are because they are, at least in theory, the better teams. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't use the word "upset" in the first place when a higher seed goes down.

And it's not all that uncommon to say that a lower seed beating a higher seed isn't actually an upset, usually because teams were poorly seeded. Take Butler-Old Dominion for example: no one would have called it an upset if the Monarchs had won today. But they didn't. Davidson, Penn, George Washington, Oral Roberts, Belmont, Weber State.

We call it "chalk" when the top seeds win, but at this hour, I can't help thinking about just how amazing it is that all four No. 1 seeds have never all made it to the Final Four. They're supposed to, and yet over all these years that teams have been seeded, it hasn't happened. Maybe now we're finally seeing the selection committee's aims become reality. Is that the point to some degree? Maybe it is.

It should be pretty clear by now that I enjoy mid-major and high-major basketball in equal measure, and occasionally in an unequal measure that favors the little guy. There are two overarching joys of the NCAA Tournament: the crowning of a true national champion and the chance given to smaller teams to play on the same floor as the big boys for 40 minutes on national television.

And even though David is supposed to beat Goliath, upsets have become so regular in the NCAA Tournament athat it feels strange to sit here tonight and recap a day on which there was only one slingshot to be found anywhere in the country.

"You have just seen the biggest upset in today's first round of the NCAA Tournament," CBS play-by-play man Kevin Harlan exclaimed at the final buzzer of the VCU-Duke game.

The emphasis really wasn't necessary for something that earned that title by default.