By Kederick Wilson
Except for two people out of 5.9 million on ESPN’s bracket challenge, who would have thought this Final Four scenario. In this tournament, for the first time no number-one seeds or two-seeds are playing in the Final Four. Currently, this tournament has been the most-watched tournament since 2005.
This year’s Final Four features two traditional college basketball powers, University Of Connecticut (UConn)and University of Kentucky, who at the beginning of the season were not expected by experts to be in this position to play for a National Championship and two young-blooded programs, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Butler University, one of the schools could be the first non-AQ (AQ means Automatic Qualifiers, those are conferences that are guaranteed a certain number of spots for their teams in the tournament) school to become National Champions since University of Las Vegas-Nevada (UNLV) in 1990.
Connecticut (UConn) has 29 NCAA Tournament appearances, 4 Final Four appearances and 2 NCAA National Championships in their men’s basketball history. Before the 2010-2011 season, Connecticut was unranked in the ESPN/USA Today preseason college basketball poll and was picked by experts to finish 8th in the Big East Conference. Connecticut lost its last two regular season games, but won the Big East tournament and is currently on a 9 game winning streak.
Kentucky has 52 NCAA Tournament appearances, 14 Final Four appearances and 7 NCAA National Championships in their men’s basketball history. Kentucky is the youngest team in the tournament, only one senior. Last year, Kentucky lost five of their best players to the NBA. During the season, five out of their nine losses were by 4 points or less, but now the young team is coming together thanks to upperclassmen leadership in the tournament.
Butler has 11 NCAA Tournament appearances and 2 Final Four appearances. Last year, Butler lost in the National Championship game on a missed three-point shot. With the loss of only one star off of last year’s team, Gordon Hayward, Butler returns back to the Final Four with a veteran team who has more experience than any other teams left in the tournament. In early February, Butler was 14-9 and since they were in a Non-AQ conference they were endangered of not making the tournament. Since then, Butler has been on a 13 game winning streak.
VCU has 10 NCAA Tournament appearances and 1 Final Four appearance. Out of all the schools left in the tournament, VCU has the most enrolled students with almost 30,000 (29,168 to be exact). VCU is the most controversial school left in the tournament. During Selection Sunday, experts on ESPN and CBS questioned the validity of VCU inclusion in the tournament over UAB (University of Alabama-Birmingham) and University of Colorado. Until the tournament officially started, the experts for days would relentlessly whine about VCU getting into the tournament. VCU won the NCAA Tournament play-in-game and won 4 straight games in the tournament that shut-up the naysayers and even converted a few to their side.
In Vegas, Butler is a 2.5 point favorite over VCU and Kentucky is a 2.0 point favorite over Connecticut. I see Kentucky’s youth beating UConn and Butler’s veterans beating this year’s Cinderella team VCU. Kentucky beats Butler for the Championship because I just want to see Kentucky’s coach John Calipari finally get a championship.
Sources:
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/history/_/team1/5468
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/history/_/team1/7778
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/history/_/team1/6313
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/history/_/team1/7721
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/team/schedule/_/id/41/connecticut-huskies
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/team/schedule/_/id/2670/virginia-commonwealth-rams
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/team/schedule/_/id/96/kentucky-wildcats
http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/team/schedule/_/id/2086/butler-bulldogs
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