I know they aren't much of a typical "cinderella", but I am pulling for Scott Drew and the Baylor Bears. Being from Indiana, the Drew's are a household name and I really like how he has built that Baylor program up.

Plus with guys named Tweety, LaceDarius, Ekpe, and Quincy, how can you not have fun watching that!?

Other than that, I'm pulling for Cornell. Another Indiana tie with Randy Wittman's son on the team.

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Baylor is completely outclassing St. Mary's.

doc,

i started doubting myself after talking to a few blue-hards before the game (about my comment that 75% would pull for the BigRed)...

but after waiting an hour and a half (and i was one of the earlyish birds who got there at 6:00 , others must have waited two plus hours unless they found a way to speeed it up) in the 35degree rain with thousands of other cornell "will call" lottery winners... i started to think that there may be a fiar amount of red.

then, when i got inside, and once the others behind me got in... to me, the blue-birds were a distant second.. very distant. i think my original assesment of 75% of the crowd rooting for cornell may have been accurate.

KU had solid blue behind their bench for sure. maybe a couple thousand there. and other than that it looked to me like only a scattering of blue. i think 40% of the crowd wore red. and quite alot were cuse fans who wanted to see cornell pull off the upset.

i say:

40%REd, 25%Blue, 20%Cuse(and others), 10%Yellow, 5%Purple

so maybe a little more than 255 for Blue, as i guess a FEW of the non-commiteds would root blue, so lets call it 26% ;-)

but, none of that really matters. KU is an extremely talented team. and they played like they had been there before. We had a several of our players who , i think, were just overwhelmed by the big stage and just didnt give themselves a chance to play well. notably Reeves and Jaques. I dont count Wittman in that number. I dont think he was bothered by nerves or lack of confidence or anything... he just didnt have a good game. he is a shooter, and you cant make all the shots all the time and he just happened to have a bad night.

and im not trying to hate on any of the cornell guys at all. i think it has to be almost expected that some of them would be overwhelmed and nervous. i mean , regardless of all the accolades and bandwagonjumpers and the idea that 8seniors is a big advantage and the "smarts" etc.... you only had to look at the program to realize that KU had at least 4 players that no one on our team could gaurd. Weirdly, i thought our only chance was to outscore them... but as it turned out, our defense was the best part of our game. oh well.

on the plus side, i thought Louis Dale was one of the best players on the court. and Foote had moments when he held his own with cousins, etc.

goodluck bluedudes... though im not sure i can say i'll root for you. i just get this arrogant vibe (not from you, doc, but from bluebloods in general) that makes it hard to root for you.

regarding the long wait in the rain....

i wonder if that was mainly due to the large number of tickets that Cornell had to divvy up... or was it that cornell had never dealt with something liek this and our Ticket folks were overwhelmed? or a bit of both.

Anyone know how other schools get tickets to their fans when there is a short window to do so? Cornell announced a Lottery on monday morning. must have ticket request form in by Tuesday, noon. Winners selected and announced by 10am Wednesday. tickets to be picked up at the CarrierDome on Thursday at 5:30. seat locations unknown until you get the tickets in hand on at the Dome.

how did blue-fellas get thier tix? Thier willcall window (as well as WestVa and Udub) was essentially empty.

When we finally got to the front of the line... there was one woman with one laptop computer. you told her your name, and gave your ID and she told you where the tickets were and another employee located the tickets which were mostly scattered out on four or five tables, presumably in some kind of "organized" fashion. It seemed to take one or two minutes to find each set of tickets.

Is this the best way?

I wonder if there will be a bunch of empty seats Saturday night?

I think i will go, but only because i dont want to fluch $74ish down the drain.

cinderellas out.

as it should be.

dook is still in... arent they a cinderella?

oldave, i think you are pretty close in your assessment. i would really go off loudness, not head count, in the %ages, and i think the cornell fans were great, the kentucky fans were great, and many of those others just weren't very vocal in the UK/cornell game. it was obvious though that the second game was "The Game", from how quiet the first was.

i thought the down time was pretty interesting. it alternates which team's cheerleaders and band plays. every time kentucky had the time, they did a super-recognizable thing (to UK fans) and got most of the UK fans involved. in cornell's time, 90% of the time it was really quiet and they were seemingly ignored (not a knock, just an observation). even though it had nothing to do with the game, i thought it pretty accurately summarized the whole situation. also, i am kind of curious what cornell does at home games. do the cheerleaders just go out and do their own thing, or do they get the crowd into it? seems if they had things to get the crowd into it, we would have seem them. i think the big red need to get on some fan centric cheers, it seems to go a pretty long way, keeping your fans engaged and excited in the dead ball periods.

on the tickets thing, i don't know how that all works. but i think each school usually only gets 500 or something. the rest are dished out somehow before hand. i bought my tickets long before seedings even came out on stubhub, there were tons of tickets there and on ebay (well above face value, but what can you do). anyway, if you are in section 107, start a "GO SUNY Oneonta" chant and i will stop by and say hello ;)

and yeah, there are definitely some overly cocky cat fans. i think it comes with the territory (of being a top program in anything). i grew up in Yankees country, and let me tell you... it can be much worse :)

i was looking for something else and stumbled onto this.

good times.

If we want to talk more recently, Florida Gulf Coast's Sweet 16 run in 2013 was pretty magical. My grandparents lived right in North Fort Myers, so I'm familiar with that area.

no doubt. that was magical. i definitely jumped on that bandwagon. fun team to watch

Definitely something to post before this year's tournament. I would be interested to hear which teams people choose.