FanHouse Louisville

ST. LOUIS (AP) -With one final blowout, UConn grabbed the national title and a piece of basketball history.

Tina Charles had 25 points and grabbed 19 rebounds Tuesday night as UConn routed Louisville 76-54 and captured the Huskies' sixth national championship.

It wasn't just that Connecticut claimed another title. It was how they did it.

INDIANAPOLIS -- On his tippy toes, he might be 5-10, very easy to lose in the enormity of a football stadium where faces look like matrix dots and crowd noise drifts to the ozone. But no one strikes a larger pose in the Midwest today than Tom Izzo, public defender of the Big Ten's battered self-esteem. If trends and hipness start on both coasts in America, college basketball in the heartland also has been taking on an irrelevant, plodding look, to the point I stopped watching.

And I live in Chicago.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- There's no place like home for the Final Four.

Goran Suton scores 19 points and pulls down 10 rebounds and the Spartans hold Louisville under 40 percent shooting to knock off the overall top seed Cardinals 64-52 and advance to the final weekend for the fifth time in the last 11 years.

Only 90 miles from their campus, the Spartans will play Connecticut on Saturday at Ford Field in Detroit. A crowd of 72,000, the largest ever for college basketball's signature event, is expected for each game.

What happens when the Sweet 16 is comprised entirely of storied powers? You get 16 teams all feeling the pressure to succeed. Ray Holloman takes an in-depth look at the expectations being heaped upon every team left in the Big Dance.

There is no room here for the little guy.

Were the Sweet 16 a country club, Tiger Woods might have to pull some strings to get a tee-time. Meanwhile Goliath might find himself picking splinters out of his warm-up-clad rear on any one of these rosters.

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There are many positives about Rick Pitino. The man could recruit the ghost of Adolph Rupp into a Louisville uniform, his defenses could make a polar bear sweat, and his perfectly coiffed hair could survive a nuclear attack or a night out with Michael Irvin.

But, if he is to be judged by his Louisville Cardinals team, Rick Pitino is not the kind of man who believes in an early start.

Think sleep in till, noon, hit snooze and roll over, show up 15 minutes late to first period. College basketball season starts in November, but yet again Pitino's teams wait until the New Year's bubbly pops to really get rolling. Year. After year. After year.

So naturally after Saturday's win against Pitt and the nation in the mood for inauguration, these late-arriving Cardinals have been crowned again as national title contenders.

But despite the win over No. 1, Bono and will.i.am can stay in the green room. These Cardinals might not be for real.

The Scene: The no-BS biggest game in the history of Rutgers football starts out poorly. The Scarlet Knights fall behind 25-7 and look likely to get blown out. Same old Rutgers... except they scratch their way back into the game. Teel and Ray Rice plus a defense of swarming midgets manage to halt the Lousville advance and beat the lead back. Rutgers ties it at 25 and gets the ball back on its own nine with 5:28 remaining. The grinding drive features a critical third-down conversion from fullback Brian Leonard (who deserves a medal). Then Rice rips off a 20-yard run. Two plays later, Jeremy Ito lines up for the no-BS biggest kick in the history of Rutgers football.

The Event: Aaaaargh he missed!

The Video:



The Aftermath: Overtime. Wait... Louisville was offsides! Ito with a chance for redemption!

The Event, Take Two: Piscataway in tears of joy.

The Video: (and what video of Rutgers football would be complete without some pissed off New Yawka shouting "don't you f---ing miss it!" before the moment of truth)



The Aftermath: The world is momentarily agog for Rutgers football until the Scarlet Knights get clunked by Cincinnati. Rutgers still has a chance to horrify BCS fatcats by actually reaching one of the roped-off BCS affairs by beating West Virginia on the last day of the season, but fall short in overtime. A vengeful beating of Kansas State in the Texas Bowl still gives the Scarlet Knights their no-BS best season ever. Schiano turns down the Miami job in the offseason, and the Eastern Seaboard slowly wakes up to this thing called "college football."

Jeremy Ito's SHOCKING MISS/redeeming make, for gracing Rutgers University with the finest sporting moment it's ever had, for finally getting some goalposts torn down at Rutgers Stadium, for momentarily being disaster instead of joy, and for thoroughly pleasing Tony Soprano, you are the #2 moment of college football 2006.

The nice thing about having a Thursday game is that I have time to relax before the next game. While ever other college fan in the nation -- save the fans of the team that spanked my team -- is tirelessly following their team, I have some time to myself. I surely can't start covering the next week's game against Florida International. If I started talking about them now, I'll be out of information by Wednesday. So, instead, I watched some college football and, as I saw some of the big upsets and big games, I started doing some math that would put the Terps in a more favorable life.

After watching the beating Notre Dame took at home -- 47 to 21 -- I started to think about my own team's poor performance. Suddenly, the Terps loss doesn't look so bad.

Look at it this way: Maryland was an unranked team going into the stadium of #5 West Virginia. They lost 45 to 24, which is actually four points less than Notre Dame did. Notre Dame was ranked #2 in the nation and was playing against #11 Michigan at home. The #2 team couldn't beat a team billed as worse than them at home while an unranked team couldn't beat a team much better than them on the road. By the transitive property, Maryland is clearly a better team than Notre Dame.

OK, that's disputable. But it definitely makes the Terps' loss easier to swallow. Obviously, the Terps loss was not as bad as the Irish's, just because the Irish was playing a game they should have won going into it.

How about Miami? They got it handed to them in Louisville. Ever since seeing that FSU vs. Miami game, I realized that both Miami and FSU are overrated. They have speedy defenses but poor offenses. Miami lost to Louisville 31- 7. Both teams were ranked going in -- Miami isn't any more. Louisville was #12 and Miami was #17. That's a 24 deficit loss, which is three less than Maryland.

Also, Maryland has the same record as the Irish (2-1), although the Irish played three real teams where the Terps played one. Maryland has a better record than Miami (1-2) as well. That's not too bad.

So, what'd we learn here? Maryland is obviously a better team than Notre Dame and Miami. National Championship here we come!

Seriously, though, the Terps aren't the only team who got hurt this week. I can bet people will still be talking about Notre Dame and Miami as good teams later on, so the Terps should know that they can still compete after a bad loss. If they don't, they should check the math. It's never wrong.