Midwest Breakdown

Almost a year since my last post, and I haven't watched nearly as much college basketball this season as I have in previous years, but Championship Week gave me the itch, so I'm going to try to keep this going throughout the tournament, then keep this going a bit better next year, or find a way to consolidate all my basketball writing into one place (in case you don't know, I have a Celtics/NBA blog called Rhymes With Hondo).

So, to that end, I'll be breaking down each of the four regions, one per day, for the next four days. I'm not necessarily going to go team-by-team or even game-by-game. I don't actually have a format in mind. I just want to rap a little bit about some of the stuff I've seen.

Might as well start in the Midwest region, home of the tournament's top overall seed, the Kansas Jayhawks:

* Kansas was my pick to win it all at the beginning of the year, and I'm standing firm. Frankly, I haven't been overwhelmed by what I've seen of the Jayhawks, but no team has really impressed me this year. I'll mention the other contenders' flaws when I write about them and their regions, but, in a bit of foreshadowing, I like the Jayhawks' veteran leadership. Not that Bill Self's club is terribly long in the tooth -- the Morris kids are sophomores and Xavier Henry is a freshman -- but it does have Sherron Collins, the person not named Mario Chalmers who is most responsible for Kansas' win in the 2008 national championship game. (Remember his steal/three combo that cut a seven-point lead to four with less than two minutes to go?) Collins gives Kansas a definitive place to go with the ball in crunch-time, and that sets them apart from other title contenders. Kentucky and Syracuse have shown recent chinks in the armor in that regard (more on that when I tackle their respective regions), and I'm not convinced that Duke's Jon Scheyer is the same caliber of player in terms of both scoring and creating for others. On the two-line, Ohio State's Evan Turner and West Virginia's Da'Sean Butler have proven over and over that they are as "go-to" as can be, but their respective supporting casts aren't as strong as Collins'.

* Not that the Jayhawks won't have plenty of competition on their way to Indianapolis. Many analysts feel that the selection committee didn't do the tourney's top team any favors by giving them the toughest draw of any of the top seeds. In addition to Ohio State, which some felt heading into Sunday would have had a chance at a #1 seed if the Big11Ten final was played earlier (a notion somewhat dispelled by the fact that the committee gave Duke the third overall seed and make Syracuse -- which had been in line for a #1 for months -- the fourth overall), the Midwest also has the tournament's top #3 seed (Georgetown), top #6 (Tennessee), and a #5, Michigan State, that was on everyone's short list of national title contenders at the start of the year.

* I think Georgetown is the team most likely to trip up the Jayhawks. The Hoyas had kind of an up-and-down year, caused at least in part by playing a conference schedule which included four road games at teams ranked in the top ten at the time. The Big East was loaded this year, and so every team played some degree of a killer schedule, but it doesn't get any tougher than a slate that included two games against both Syracuse and Villanova, plus road trips to West Virginia and Pittsburgh.

Georgetown entered the Big East tournament losers of four of their last six, then played their way to a 3 seed by beating South Florida, Syracuse, and Marquette, before losing at the horn to West Virginia in the championship game. There's something of an unwritten rule among bracketologists to be wary of a team whose low seed is a result of a late stretch of strong play. I'm choosing to ignore that in this case, because I feel Georgetown's ascension was a result not of hot shooting and the like, but a real transformation. Early in the Hoyas' victory over Syracuse in the Big East quarters, ESPN's announcing crew noted that coach John Thompson III was riding his guys more than usual, and he kept it up throughout the tournament. His charges responded, most notably point guard Chris Wright, who took charge of the offense in a way that reminded me of Derrick Rose at Memphis two years ago.

My favorite Wright play of the four games actually came after he made a stupid one; giving a foul in the final minute of the championship game with his team tied with West Virginia (he must have thought the Hoyas were behind). After the Mountaineers hit two free throws, Wright simply took the ball, powered past the very powerful Joe Mazzulla, and banked in an off-balance shot. Butler would break Georgetown's hearts on the next trip, Wright's was a new-found confidence, one we hadn't consistently seen and one his team desperately needed.

Not that he's alone in Hoya grey. Far from it. The marvelously-skilled Greg Monroe is the perfect big man for JT3's Princeton-inspired offense, and is garnering a lot of attention from pro scouts despite the fact that said system doesn't exactly showcase big guys doing the kind of things NBA types like to see out of post players. There are question marks surrounding Austin Freeman -- he's been good, but not as good as he had been, since he was diagnosed with diabetes at the beginning of the month -- but he's the kind of player who can put on a virtuoso scoring performance any time he steps on the floor. Depth is a concern, but with Jason Clark (42.6 percent) and Hollis Thompson (42.4 percent) knocking down threes and Julian Vaughn doing the dirty work inside, Georgetown has a rotation that should be able to compete with anyone.

* I'll have my game-by-game predictions up before the tip day of, but one trap I'm pretty sure I won't be falling into is picking Georgia Tech to win anything more than their first round matchup with Oklahoma State. I haven't seen enough of the Cowboys to say whether they have enough size to counter the Yellow Jackets' bigs or the pressure defense to take advantage of GT's shaky ballhandling, but Georgia Tech looked about as unimpressive as a team can look on its way to the ACC championship game. (I actually tweeted the following during their quarterfinal win over Maryland: "If it's possible to hurt your NCAA chances in a win over the #19 team, Georgia Tech just did it.") I kinda think the committee agrees with me a little bit, awarding the Jackets only a ten seed despite their run to the championship game. While I was occupied with the A-10 and SEC finals today during Tech's late run against Duke, their inability to protect the ball against the Terrapins (25 turnovers) and their struggle to beat a very underwhelming NC State team doesn't have me very high on their chances to advance past the first weekend.

* This region has a number of teams that are more or less one-man bands. As mentioned, Turner carries Ohio State, but not as much as Greivis Vasquez carries Maryland. And while Houston beat UTEP in the Conference USA championship game despite getting only 13 points from Aubrey Coleman, the Cougars belong to Coleman, the nation's scoring leader. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch those two go at it in the first round.

Along those same lines, the Midwest bracket is something of an artistic masterpiece by the committee. There's something about it that is symmetrical, yet perfectly diverse about it. Thoroughbreds in the top and bottom half of the bracket (Kansas and Ohio State). The hot, trendy pick to make the Final Four (Georgetown). The struggling power conference team (Michigan State), the slighted power conference team (Tennessee), and the gritty, grind-it-out mid-major (Northern Iowa). Multiple teams dependent on a single individual player. Two teams (UNLV and San Diego State) from a relatively obscure, but strong this year, conference (the four-bid Mountain West. And two or three teams (New Mexico State, Houston, and maybe San Diego State) whose victories in their conference tournaments cost Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, and Illinois their bids (since Utah State, UTEP, and UNLV got at-large invitations that the Aggies, Cougars, and possibly the Aztecs wouldn't otherwise have gotten).

There's a lot going on here, and there are a lot of teams I simply cannot comment on because I haven't seen them play. For now, it suffices to say I've got Kansas coming out of the region and ultimately winning the whole thing -- the latter by default, really.