Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 21, 1992 TAG: 9203210323
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Jack Bogaczyk
DATELINE: DAYTON, OHIO LENGTH: Medium
In this event, TV timeouts last longer than the Blue Hens did.
More on those TO's later. In Friday's first round of the Midwest Region, 12th-ranked Cincinnati's defense brought Delaware's NCAA-best 20-game winning streak to a thud on the floor at Dayton Arena.
The Hens had so many turnovers, they thought they were on a rotisserie. In a tournament noticeably devoid of drama, Delaware's 85-47 drubbing was more of the predictable.
About now, you're expecting to read how none of the the biggest of the little guys belong among the NCAA's 64-team field. You won't. Every dog deserves its day. As long as Division I is too big - and there's the real problem - then most have-not conference champs will be first-round chumps.
Delaware won the North Atlantic Conference, which, as few know, also includes Hartford, Drexel and New Hampshire. Another NAC member is Vermont, which provided the NCAA Women's Tournament with its only unbeaten team - quickly bounced in round one as well.
The NAC has one of the 30 automatic bids to the men's tournament. Cincinnati is the champion of the new Great Midwest, which does not have a guaranteed reservation. In its convoluted way, this is the NCAA's system of justice.
The idea is to keep schools from rising from Division II to become third-world Division I leagues for a share of the $1 billion CBS is paying for seven years of March madness.
What games like Cincinnati-Delaware, Indiana-Eastern Illinois and Ohio State-Mississippi Valley State show is that Division I basketball needs a trim from its 300 schools.
Consider that since the NCAA Tournament grew to a 64-team field in 1985, not including two games Friday night, No. 16 seeds are 0-30 in eight tournaments. The 15th seeds are 1-31, the only victory by Richmond over Syracuse last year.
For every 13th-seeded Southwestern Louisiana that beats a fourth-seeded Oklahoma, there are too many lopsided laughers that are no fun to watch. And if the NCAA doesn't think a part of Division II basketball is better than the bottom of Division I, it should check out Virginia Union just about every year.
The better success by seeds 10-14 shows the disparity from even those players to the bottom seeds. And what does it say that at the end of a season so interesting because of its parity and uncertainty, the NCAA first round is marked by so many disaster shows on CBS?
Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins alluded to the mismatch misery when he called a timeout 2:02 into the game with Delaware leading 4-2.
"I wasn't upset," Huggins said. "I just wanted to make sure we knew we had a game today."
Huggins has plenty of time to deliver his message. If CBS has gotten a bunch of bad games - and the second round today and Sunday could be as good as the first 32 games have been ho-hum - it has also gotten longer commercial breaks of 2 minutes, 15 seconds.
"Depth won't be a problem in the NCAA Tournament," said North Carolina coach Dean Smith on Friday in Cincinnati, recalling the length of the breaks in the Tar Heels' win a day earlier. "I thought they had sold out to CBS and those TV timeouts were five minutes.
"It's 2:15, instead of 1:30 usually [in the ACC]. I was tired of talking to our guys. I didn't have anything else to say."
Asked about Alabama's lack of depth and how it will affect today's game against Carolina, Smith said Tide coach Wimp Sanderson "can just have 'em lie down over there during the timeouts."
That would be a bad idea. This tournament already has too many supposed sleepers.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.