Everyone Together Now: We Were Wrong About VCU

Raise your hand if you had Virginia Commonwealth in the Sweet 16. Now, all zero of you out there, go ahead and put your hand down.

OK, so there were probably a few people out there that took Shaka Smart‘s squad to the third round, but let’s be honest, those people were in the minority.

The team that shocked everyone by making the NCAA Tournament field has now won three games in this year’s tournament, and is two wins away from a trip to Houston for the Final Four.

Along with Jay Bilas, I was ripping the selection committee for including the Rams in this year’s field of 68, especially considering that teams like Alabama and Virginia Tech were left out of the Big Dance.

A week later though? The committee’s decision has been justified, and Bilas and I (and a whole lot more people) were absolutely positively wrong.

And perhaps it’s not just the fact that VCU has won three games in the last five days, but it’s the way that they’ve won them. The beat USC in what was a pretty ugly play-in game. Then they turned around and easily took care of business against Goeorgetown, winning 74-56. And today? Oh, only a 94-point outburst in route to another 18-point victory, with the victim this time being Purdue.

So a team that we didn’t think belonged in the tournament has won their first three tournament games by 13, 18, and 18. And that, my friends, is what we like to call being motivated.

Smart’s bunch has sent an emphatic statement to the college basketball world, and they are clearly on a mission to prove their doubters wrong. So far, so good.

In the game against the Boilermakers today, it honestly didn’t even seem like the game was as close as the score indicated down the stretch. VCU absolutely took it to the second best team in the Big Ten in the second half, and almost made it to the century mark in the process. Bradford Burgess scored 25 off the bench while snagging eight rebounds as well.

But it hasn’t just been Burgess. It’s been Jamie Skeen. It’s been Brandon Rozell. It’s been Joey Rodriguez. This team just has so many options they can go to in the flow of the game that they are really going to present some problems for either Notre Dame or Florida State. Or anyone else in the tournament, for that matter.

Think back to way that VCU’s fellow Colonial team George Mason played in the ’08 tourney. They got on a roll early by beating proven powers (Michigan State and North Carolina), and then played very loose in their Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games, knocking off Wichita State and the top overall seed UConn during that stretch. After winning those first two games, they knew they had nothing to lose in the Sweet 16 and beyond. That’s the perfect mentality.

Whose to say that the Rams couldn’t do the something similar in this tournament?

They’ve already proved they belong. So they don’t have to worry about proving the doubters wrong anymore. They can simply play the game like they’ve played it in the first two rounds and see if they can make a memorable post-season run.

If this VCU team could somehow make a trip to the Final Four, it sure would make the critics look pretty ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time.

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