Forget Duke-UNC, Your Game Of The Year Is Already In The Books

If you're one of those people that likes calling ESPN out on their bullpoop (and I am), look no further than this week's regular season-ending slate of games for a nice example of some good old fashioned self-serving hype. As you may have heard, Duke and North Carolina play a competitive game of basketball tomorrow night. If you haven't heard, you will and it will be in various volumes with various forms of histrionics. It will be considered the greatest display of basketball this college hoops season has to offer and will be a "great way to kick off March Madness" (you will hear this about 100 times). Actually it will be a lot like the last time these teams played... on ESPN. Or it will be hyped very similar to that Tennessee-Memphis game earlier in the season... on ESPN. But one thing it won't resemble, at least as far as media coverage or hype is concerned, is last night's UCLA-Stanford game, which was played with the national fanfare of a BassMasters Classic broadcast (actually, it would be lucky to have that kinda of coverage).

Before this game started, I thought it was the best regular season match-up of the year in college basketball. Better than Duke-UNC, better than Tennessee-Memphis. I thought UCLA was better than all four of those previously mentioned squads and Stanford was probably on the same level. Basically I was far more excited to watch this game than any other this season, even though ESPN made basically no mention of it on the 6 p.m. SportsCenter and buried the highlights on this morning's edition. Then I watched the game. And not only did all my preconceived notions on the match-up come true, but I can safely, unequivocally say that it was the Game of the Year (UCLA won by 10 in OT in case you were wondering) and that both teams have legitimate title aspirations.

The defense played in last night's game was absolutely smothering. With the exception of Russell Westbrook, whose speed is more absurd than I had ever thought, basically no players could get more than a couple open looks. Darren Collison was outstanding, scoring 24 points but worked extremely hard for every one. Brook Lopez, who made five or six ridiculous "wow" plays still was forced into 8-22 shooting. And despite that poor shooting night, Stanford held a pretty big lead for most of the game and probably should have won if not for a phantom foul call in the final seconds that allowed Collison to tie the game. It didn't have buzzer beaters or asshole fans or crazy announcers. It was just too incredible basketball teams giving each other, and the fans, the best they, and probably this year's college hoops season, has to offer.

But I'm not going to go too far into a recap of what happened. The reason for this post is to say is that both teams, especially Stanford, are going largely ignored on the national scale, mainly because the Pac-10 doesn't have a deal with ESPN. In order to watch the best conference in the country, we have to search our digital cable guides diligently, stay up till all hours and, in my case here on the East Coast, maybe not even get to watch the whole game (there is this weird thing with Comcast where they refuse to preempt local programming for these Pac-10 games, even though they are fully able to show them; the result is an hour of some retarded local highlight show and then picking up the Pac-10 broadcast for the last hour... seriously). And the result is a very real East Coast Bias, not necessarily in the NCAA seeding but in public opinion. Both teams are top 10 defensive squads, both have legitimate NBA prospects (some with outlet passes that can prevent AIDS), including Brook Lopez, who I think is the best player in the country not named Michael Beasley, and both have made remarkably quick work of some really talented teams in the Pac-10. You might have either getting knocked out before Duke and UNC because you haven't seen them play, but if that's the case you might want your 8-year old sister to fill our your bracket or something (she'll win, I guarantee it).

I'm not really sure what more to write on this, just that I wanted to put something down in words on how great a display of basketball that was last night. Even if few people were able to see it.