On Any Given Sunday

The best advice you can give any college basketball team is to look both ways before crossing the street. If not, they might get hit by that bus speeding around the corner.

The National Football League is the sports entity that uses the phrase “on any given Sunday.” By that it is meant that on any Sunday any team can beat any other. We have absorbed weekly surprises often enough to recognize that premise is true. However, I think college basketball teams are even more prone to upsets and the premise that on any given day an unheralded team can beat a ranked team.

That’s why we never have an undefeated team make it through the regular season, a conference tournament, the NCAA playoffs, all of the way through to the title. There are always losses along the way, no matter how good the team, and the team just hopes it doesn’t get bushwacked in NCAA play when losing one game means you go home for the season.

How often do upsets of ranked teams occur in college basketball that we don’t see coming? Oh, like every day. Syracuse has one loss. The Orangemen lost to Notre Dame after the Fighting Irish lost their best player for the year. Murray State was cruising along at 23-0 until recently and had not lost a game at home in more than a year. What happens? Tennessee State comes to town and shoves the Racers around in their own gym. Now they are the once-beaten Racers. Just when you thought Harvard was going to dominate every team in the Ivy League the Crimson fell to Princeton.

Michigan State polished off Ohio State the other day. Baylor lost twice last week. It is the pronounced ambition of most sports entities to encourage parity so there is not much difference between the best team and the worst team. In college basketball, with about 340 teams in Division I, that’s not going to be the case. However, with so many teams, a large percentage of them have a decent shot at knocking off the best teams in their leagues in one game, as opposed to a playoff series.

We are only a few weeks away from the college basketball post-season, yet none of us can say there is a sure thing out there to sweep to the NCAA crown. Kentucky? Sure, we can see it happening, but you wouldn’t bet the bluegrass farm on it. Syracuse? Looking good, but not invincible. As usual, Duke and North Carolina are hovering near the top of the rankings, but they don’t appear to be the same powerhouses they have been off and on over the years. But if one or both of them squeaks through to the Final Four will we be shocked? Nope.

The bottom of the Associated Press Top 25 ratings has been like a game of musical chairs. Whenever the music stops after the weekend a couple of teams are left without chairs and drop to the also receiving votes category. Figuring out how teams will negotiate through the brackets once the NCAA tournament starts is a national mania. But really, how many people had Butler returning to the championship game last year and how many also had Connecticut as the other survivor team?

We play at predicting, but we have stumbled upon an event, an entire season really, that defies easy comprehension. There are probably 30 teams capable of reaching the Final Four this year. But it is also fair to say that every single one of them could lose at least one more game between now and then. And neither the teams nor the rest of us will say we saw it coming on that given night.