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This story about Duke and North Carolina at the 2019 Final Four begins with a tennis connection.
I cover tennis at another Twitter account — @mzemek — and at a site called Tennis With An Accent, which you can follow at @accent_tennis during the next few months, and on the web at tennisaccent.com.
You probably know that Chris Fowler and Tom Rinaldi, among others, spend roughly half the year covering college football and much of the other half covering tennis. Fowler used to cover college basketball at ESPN before replacing college hoops with tennis at the Australian Open and then the tennis version of March Madness, the two big American tournaments in Indian Wells, California, and then Miami.
In the sports commentary or sports content industries, some people cover one sport 12 months a year, but plenty of other people cover two or three sports per year, halving the year into two subsections. College sports — football itself, or football and basketball as a combination — often form one half of that recipe from September through January or March. Some of the people who cover college football or basketball in late autumn or winter then follow baseball in the summer. Others follow golf, and others follow tennis.
My yearly sports calendar — like Fowler’s — has featured a mixture of college football and tennis this century, the main difference being that I will focus more on college basketball in March. (This year, I tried to juggle the two as much as possible.)
Why say all this? Merely to mention that my exposure to tennis and college basketball is considerable.
You might think they are completely different realms, and to a certain degree, they are. However, they do share one very strong and deceptively simple trait: They are heavily dependent on the shape and content of a bracket.
Yes, every once in a while, a team laughs at a tough bracket. The 1997 Arizona Wildcats beat three No. 1 seeds — Kansas, North Carolina, and Kentucky — to win the national championship. They are the only team to pull off that feat since the NCAA Tournament was first seeded in 1979.
Auburn beat Kansas, Carolina and Kentucky to make this year’s Final Four.
Some teams can simply spit in the face of a rough draw. It happens. Yet, most of the time, the nature of the bracket matters a lot. Tennis, not just college basketball, reveals this.
Virginia is fortunate it didn’t have to play Michigan State before the Final Four this year. Florida State was unlucky to draw Gonzaga and get a 4 seed instead of a 3. Purdue was fortunate to get a 3 instead of a 4. Wisconsin could not have gotten a rougher draw, having to play a semi-road game against 12th-seeded Oregon in San Jose. Michigan would have loved facing LSU as the 3 seed in its region instead of Texas Tech, a far worse matchup.
On and on it goes, and tennis illustrates this as well.
Do you avoid Rafael Nadal in your quarter of the bracket? Do you avoid Roger Federer in your half of the bracket? Do you play a clay-court specialist in the early rounds of a clay-court tournament, or do you luck out when that clay demon is ambushed by a powerful server with a hardcourt-based game who matches up a lot better with your strengths? Tennis doesn’t have strictly-seeded tournament formats the way the NCAA Tournament does. In other words, 1 doesn’t play 16 in the round of 16 at every tournament (or even most tournaments). 2 doesn’t play 15 most of the time. Seeds play in ranges.
In tennis, seeds 1-4 can play seeds 13-16 in the round of 16. Seeds 5-8 play 9-12. The combinations vary. If you are seeded 1-4, you will play seeds 5-8 in the quarterfinals. If you are seeded 1 or 2, you can’t play 3 or 4 until the semifinals, but you can play the No. 5 seed in the quarters.
When the French Open and Wimbledon arrive — it won’t be too long before they do — you will want to see which players are in the same quarter of the draw (quarterfinal matchups) and which players are in the same half of the draw (semifinal matchups). If Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic face tougher opposition in the semis, they might be more taxed for the final, and if they face easier opposition in the semis, they might be fresher for the final, getting a small but real piece of crucial leverage.
Brackets matter. Draws matter.
This brings us back to the 2019 Final Four, and one basic reality for Michigan State and Tom Izzo: NO NORTH CAROLINA.
In 2005, Michigan State ran into a brick wall named Sean May. He and Raymond Felton and the rest of a loaded UNC team cruised past the Spartans to deny them a spot in the national championship game. Four years later, Michigan State faced what is probably Roy Williams’ best UNC team ever, the 2009 juggernaut which roared through Detroit en route to a national title.
In 2006 — to offer merely one example — the only blue-blood at the Final Four was UCLA, and that was not an overwhelmingly powerful UCLA team. That group was fortunate to escape Gonzaga in the Sweet 16 (one of the great collapses in NCAA Tournament history from the Zags), and it succeeded not because of talent, but because of how integrated and cohesive it was, especially on defense.
Had Tom Izzo faced the 2006 Final Four field with one of his Final Four Michigan State teams, he probably would have won it. The same could be said for the 2011 Final Four, where the highest seed was No. 3 Connecticut.
It has been Izzo’s great misfortune that at the six different Final Fours he has entered and failed to win (winning only in 2000 against Wisconsin and Florida), he usually had to play a powerhouse team.
In 1999, it was the ridiculously stacked Duke team with Trajan Langdon and Elton Brand, and a bunch of other NBA-level players.
In 2001, it was Arizona with Gilbert Arenas and Jason Gardner, among others.
In 2005 and 2009, UNC, as previously mentioned, got in Izzo’s way.
In 2015, Duke’s one-and-dones shut down Izzo.
Only in 2010 did Michigan State not lose to a heavyweight with more talent: Butler. However, had MSU won that game, it would have faced none other than Duke in the title game, so even then, a giant was in Izzo’s path.
Thanks to a win over Duke in the Elite Eight, however — and thanks to Auburn clearing out the blue-bloods in the Midwest Regional — Michigan State arrives at this Final Four without the goliath capable of squishing MSU like a bug. Roy Williams won’t have A-level ballers ready to make Izzo’s life miserable. This time, Michigan State is the most proven team at the Final Four. Izzo is the only coach with previous Final Four experience at this Dance.
The absence of Carolina and Duke at the Final Four magnifies the enormity of the opportunity for Michigan State.
Any tennis player who expected to play Federer or Nadal in the quarterfinals of a big tennis tournament but then watches Roger or Rafa fall victim to a huge upset knows exactly how excited Michigan State must be.
Brackets still matter, in college basketball or tennis.
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