Still Love The Blue-and-Gray

So the Tigers did not win last night. They won their Final Four game against UCLA by a wide margin--no small feat. Then, much to my surprise (but what do I know about basketball?), Kansas soundly beat UNC. So Memphis and Kansas met up last night for the championship game.

I told Peter that if I weren't rooting for one particular team, last night's game would have been an amazing one to watch. These teams were so well-matched, stats-wise and on the court. There were multiple factors contributing to our loss:

--the decision to review the 3-pointer (which WAS a 2-pointer but how often do they do a video review in college basketball?),
--Kansas's effective guarding of Rose,
--our inability to make 4 of the last 5 free-throw shots during regulation time,
--lack of substitution on the part of my favorite coach,
--Dorsey's stupid foul which took him out for the last 2 minutes of regular time and all of overtime,
--Andre Allen's suspension for failing a drug test just last week--what an idiot--

but the bottom line is that Kansas simply outplayed us. Given the way they played last night, it was an honor to lose to them. They were clearly an impressive force.

All that being said, I am immensely proud of the U of M this year. We were not given credit for being the great team we were--all year, the national naysayers were on us as though our success was some kind of fluke. Hopefully, they will be silent now, because the fluke-of-a-team with a fluke-of-a-coach went all the way to the National Championship final game and finally lost in OVERTIME to probably one of the very best college basketball teams of all time.

Hopefully, Chris Douglas-Roberts (first team All American!) and Derrick Rose will decide to stick it out one more year and bring us the glory next year. I doubt they will, because the big-bucks of going pro must be quite appealing. And the seniors will hopefully move on to bigger things and maybe be more successful than Tiger basketball grads have been in the past. We'll be watching and rooting for them all!