If there’s ever any reason why college basketball is so often lauded as amongst the most exciting of sports is that it’s seldom that its annual national championship is ever decided in a decisive or completely unanimous manner. It doesn’t matter if a team goes undefeated throughout the regular season, they will inevitably run into a serious contender be it a team from another conference, or the Cinderella story that’s making a miracle run, or a team that hatched the perfect plan to counter them, or sometimes all of the above.
The 2016-2017 National Championship game seemed kind of lackluster in the sense that it featured two #1 seeds, in Gonzaga University against the oft-present University of North Carolina, especially since the Zags took down Cinderella in the Final Four when they took out South Carolina and UNC dropped Oregon who was having their own surprisingly deep run in the tournament. But few people ever want to see two #1s going at it for the National Championship, since that’s kind of the expectation, and sports fans typically want to see the unexpected, the Cinderellas, and the underdogs prevail.
But as is often the case with the National Championship, the game was definitely no snoozer, and despite the claims and the accusations that Gonzaga was a paper #1, meaning they didn’t really deserve their rank on account of playing in a weak conference, especially in contrast to their opponents who plays in the ACC against very strong basketball programs like Virginia, Louisville, Syracuse and Duke, they still showed up to play, and gave UNC tremendous resistance in a hard-fought, foul-plagued and ugly slugfest of a basketball game.
Seriously, ugly doesn’t really do justice to describe just how much of a clunker this game actually played out to be. Neither team could really shoot the ball, especially from the free throw line, and it’s completely pathetic and offensive to just how bad the kids of today are at shooting free throws. They’re called free throws, and not craps, because they’re very much a skill that can be acquired and mastered, and luck can be completely removed from the equation if practiced enough, but it’s obvious that players of today simply don’t practice free throws, at all, and it has turned the game into where fouling guys to send them to the line is a legitimate strategy, and it showed last night.
There were actually times when I thought one of the teams might have to forfeit the game because they would run out of players from foul outs, because they were so many fouls being called. But at the same time, Zag and Carolina players were marching to the line over and over again flinging up bricks and clinks and leaving points on the board unclaimed left and right, so it’s understandable to see why so many fouls were occurring. Gonzaga went 17/26 from the line, leaving nine points on the table, and UNC left 11 points on the table with 15/26 free throw shooting. Nine points would’ve easily cleared the deficit Gonzaga lost by, and 11 points would have eliminated all doubt for Carolina, had either team been remotely competent at hitting their shots.
But whatever though, if both teams didn’t suck so much at their free throw shooting, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the exciting conclusion to the game we viewers were given. The lead changed at least twelve times in the span of the second half, and at no point could either team manage to pull ahead by more than four points. The commentators hit the nail on the head that the frequency of whistles and violations lead to a game that was completely devoid of any rhythm, and a 20 minute half was somehow stretched out to nearly 90.
However, as fans love the best, the final minutes of the game were definitely the pinnacle of sports excitement, as the score was tight, and it came down to whose nerves would jitter the most, and who would make the crucial mistakes that would ultimately decide the game. And it really boiled down to Gonzaga’s Nigel Williams-Goss playing on a bad ankle deciding to take their final shot, only to be stuffed by UNC’s Kennedy Meeks, laying down a perfect block that even Dikembe Mutombo would shed tears of appreciation at seeing, before Carolina got the final baskets that would seal the game and the National Championship for the Tar Heels; again.
As much as I’m sure there are tons of people bemoaning yet another North Carolina national championship, I can’t say that I’m the least bit disappointed by the outcome of this game. I had no stake in either team, but so it’s nice to simply watch a contest between two competitors. Despite my expectation that Gonzaga would probably lose since they were playing against a team from a real conference, they still played with tremendous grit and toughness, and gave North Carolina a real battle.
Sure, it was uglier than a Pontiac Aztek, but the final two minutes of the game were still what sports fans want to see; a close score leading to some crazy shots, highlight defensive plays, and some camera-ready moments that lead to crowning champions. Dikembe Mutombo might have been happy with the way it finished, but Mark Price or Reggie Miller are probably not mad but disappointed that all these free throws were left on the table, but in the end it was still a classic game, and an exciting farewell to the college hoops season until next fall.
