It figures that the agony would continue to play out further.
After watching the entirety of the NCAA Tournament selection show last year only to find out it had come up empty, on Sunday the ASU men’s basketball team was one of the final squads to find out where it would play when sports’ most exciting postseason kicks off this week.
As they waited on the fifth floor of the Carson Student-Athlete Center, the Sun Devils even had to watch a clip shown during the telecast of Washington State’s Taylor Rochestie sinking them with a buzzer-beater during a game a couple of weeks ago.
But then the news came. This time, it was good.
After being excluded from the tourney last season, ASU players, coaches and their families and friends let out a collective sigh of relief as the squad was announced as a No. 6 seed.
The Sun Devils will tip off in sunny Miami on Friday against the Temple Owls, the No. 11 seed in the South Region.
Studying bracketology can cause massive headaches – and we have enough of those with thoughts of school starting back up – so we won’t try to evaluate whether the team should have been seeded higher.
One thing for certain, though, is that ASU heads into the Big Dance playing probably its best basketball of the season.
After losing three of its last four games in the regular season, ASU marched all the way to the Pac-10 tournament title game, before falling in heartbreaking fashion to USC. We won’t mention the free-throw disparity in that game that saw the Trojans make 21 trips to the charity stripe to ASU’s four. Oops, guess we did mention it.
But who would’ve thought? ASU is a basketball school.
There is a lot to be celebrated about the team’s trip to the Big Dance. Senior Jeff Pendergraph, who suffered through so much losing in the first two years of his career, will make his first trip to the NCAA Tournament. For someone who has taken so much in stride, you can’t help but be happy for the big guy.
But for all the excitement and all the promise, one thing about Selection Sunday made us none too pleased.
After the Sun Devils thumped UA in the quarterfinals of the conference tourney on Thursday, it looked like there was no way the NCAA selection committee could possibly grant the Wildcats their 25th-straight birth in the Big Dance.
UA gave a meager performance in a game it had to win, looking like a team that was NIT-bound. In addition to winning only one of their last six games, the Wildcats finished the season with only two wins on the road, and those were against the less-than-stellar Oregon schools.
After watching our archrival take a space in the tournament last year that belonged to the Sun Devils, seeing UA get invited to dance with a resume that was even worse this season is a bitter pill to swallow.
But that bitterness takes a backseat to seeing our beloved squad play in the most exciting tournament in sports. Let’s hit the dance floor.
