Basketball Preview: Madness In Swing With Selections
Prepare your brackets, everyone: It's Selection Sunday. Guy Raz speaks with NPR's Mike Pesca about the college basketball teams — and players — to watch as the clock ticks down to March Madness.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Today is selection Sunday, and that means the NCAA Selection Committee is about to unveil the 65 college teams that'll fight for the Division I men's basketball title.
Now, the top teams are all but assured, but it's not guaranteed that they can survive all the way through the brackets to make the Final Four in Indianapolis this year. NPR's Mike Pesca is feeling the March Madness already. And, Mike, I know you've been pulling all-nighters to put together your own brackets. So tell us who is going to win.
MIKE PESCA: Yes, well, my bracket all depends on the quality of the uniform. So you don't want to go by mine. But I you know, who's going to win? Let's just talk about maybe Kansas will win. Maybe Kentucky will win. They're two really good teams.
Other good teams include teams like Syracuse, and in fact, what I was looking at, if you consider the top teams, four of the top teams in this tournament are four of the five winningest teams in the history of college basketball.
Now, one of the five winningest teams is the University of North Carolina. They won the championships last year. They were terrible this year and will not be invited to any post-season play, lest they stink up whatever tournament they're invited to.
But Kansas, Kentucky, Syracuse, and Duke - Duke being the fourth, these are all teams that have won an NCAA championship in the last 12 years. So it really could be any of those, or it could be another one of the quality teams like Ohio State or even, you know, a somewhat obscure team like Texas A&M or Baylor.
RAZ: So Mike, any players expected to go to the NBA, you know, after this season? Is there anyone in particular you're looking at?
PESCA: Well, sure. Some of the top players in college are guys like John Wall, the freshman at Kentucky who will probably be a one-and-done player. Now, one-and-done means they'll play a year of college but then go on to the pros.
He's a small guy. I haven't seen quickness like that since Allen Iverson played college ball at Georgetown. And he just gives up his body. He's pretty much faster than everyone he's ever encountered, but at the end of a drive, he'll invariably slam into some 6'10" guy and then pick himself off the ground. He wears these compression sleeves and these bike shorts. Sometimes it looks like he's put together with duct tape out there because he's a fragile, little guy and he's against these huge guys.
Another upperclassman who'll probably go to the NBA is Evan Turner of Ohio State. In the last couple days, Turner has just here's the clich� that I like taken his team on his shoulders. But he really has. He hit a 37-footer two days ago to advance in the Big 10 tournament. And then against Illinois, he took his team into double overtime and outlasted them. It was just, just an incredible effort, and we'll probably be seeing that effort at the next level.
RAZ: Who are some other players we should be watching in this tournament, Mike?
PESCA: Well, one guy is Sherron Collins, who is not one of these one-and-done guys. He's a senior at Kansas, and if Kansas goes far in the tournament, he could retire, or he could leave school, as the guy with the most wins in college basketball.
Now, I know a lot of people who are Memphis fans are going to say, hey, wait a minute, didn't a bunch of our players have the most wins ever? But the NCAA stepped in and they vacated entire years worth of Memphis wins because of some violations. And since this all circles around, the coach of Memphis at the time was John Calipari, and he is now John Wall's coach at Kentucky. He wasn't sanctioned, but a couple of the teams he used to coach were.
RAZ: Mike, let me ask you about women's basketball for a moment because the Yukon Lady Huskies are being compared to UCLA under John Wooden in the '60s and '70s. I mean, this is a program that's already considered to be legendary, and they're set to defend their NCAA title.
PESCA: Yeah, Yukon has won 72 games in a row, and the previous record was 70, which was set by a previous incarnation of the University of Connecticut. There is another great time on the West Coast, Stanford, but Yukon and Stanford have already played, and Yukon blew them out.
And up until yesterday, there was a third team in the mix, Nebraska, almost equidistant between the two actually that's a little closer, Lincoln's a little closer to Storrs if you're geographically inclined but Nebraska lost yesterday. So Yukon does loom large in this tournament. Who knows if anyone could beat them? Who knows if anyone can get within 10 against them.
RAZ: Now, Mike, some people argue that the Lady Huskies are so good that this is actually bad for women's basketball. What do you make of that?
PESCA: I understand because if you watch a Yukon game, you can tune in to marvel at how good they are, but they're not close games, right, so that's not dramatic. But at the same time, I think as an advertisement for excellence, you can't do better than Yukon. And like a lot of other coaches say, these teams tend to go in cycles. So, right now Yukon is dominant, but soon, Pat Summit(ph) in Kentucky or Stanford or some other team will recruit that one or two players and knock Yukon off the pedestal.
RAZ: That's NPR's March Madness correspondent, Mike Pesca. Mike, thanks so much.
PESCA: Oh, you're welcome.
Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.