To put this in proper context: UMBC had to beat a team they had lost to 23 straight times on their home floor just to get to the NCAA Tournament.
NCAA Tournament Friday 1st Round Game Thread
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That was a meaningless holiday tournament game after the team had traveled halfway around the world to play in Japan and then Hawaii. This happening in the tournament makes it bigger.
UMBC should just declare that they beat the #1 overall, declare themselves champions and head home.
To be fair, he has a very personal understanding of how overrated ACC teams are.
600 NFL passing yards, team with losing record in normal season making MLB playoffs (almost Texas in 1994, excludes 1981), sub 8 seed winning the Big Dance, rookie QB starting/winning Super Bowl, perfect home regular season record in the NBA?
Hmm.
I guess Amatuer winning the Masters then.
I also think an unseeded woman has never won Wimbledon, though two men have.
And lost to twice this year before that by a combined 43 points and needed a controversial overturn to win the one they did
Another player with a leg injury on a basketball court that doubles as a hockey rink. Saw this at The Dunk with PC/Seton Hall.
The 1 seeds have been ranked since 2004. The 20 point loss tonight is the largest margin of defeat for a number one overall seed. That margin may hold for a long time.
Getting punished (losing wins and scholarships) by the NCAA for having a guy do a paper for Fab Melo didn't help.
Meanwhile UNC has a 20 year academic scandal so huge that thousands of athletes are involved and it almost costs UNC its accreditation and the NCAA throws up its hands, doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong - SU should have been punished. But...uh.....come on now.
And SU has a great recruiting class coming in next year. And it doesn't help when guys with very little shot at the NBA leave early, like Lydon or Ennis or Richardson. Even if two of those guys stay and SU is a 28-30 win team.
Not a chance - he’s done a great job overall without many stud recruits. He does need to change the offense a bit - it’s prone to March issues, clearly
and
In response to the UMBC Athletics tweet at Seth Davis, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the UMBC bookstore:
How do they have "very little shot at the NBA" when all 3 were 1st round picks with $5m+ of guaranteed money.
"Conference pride" is the stupidest thing in college sports - I don't root for any of those other schools in bowls or tournaments, and I expect the same back from them, but five in the round of 32 is hardly overrated. Virginia losing reflects badly on Virginia, not the league.
Yeah, this is not even close to that. Contextually it's a bigger deal, and it'll certainly be a big fact going forward.
But there's a reason that Chaminade is often talked about as the worst loss in sports history—not just NCAA basketball history. That loss is up there with Rulon Gardner.
This was the Patriots losing to the Browns; shocking, but at least they're in the same league, vaguely.
Chaminade wasn't a D-1 team. Or a D-2 team. Or a D-3 team. They were 4 leagues below.
It was like the Patriots losing to not the Browns, not the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL, not the Tampa Bay Storm of the AFL, not the London Monarchs of NFL Europe—but someone like the af2's Richmond Speed, who you'd expect to be regularly crushed by all of the above, and couldn't even make the Arena League as a team. It's actually way worse than that, since the NCAA has more than 100 teams.
UMBC is a really, really bad loss, but Chaminade was a crazy, historically, epically bad loss that I've never seen anything even close to.
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That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the NAIA is. It is a different athletic organization... not a fundamentally worse one.
Most consider NAIA Div. 1 similar in athletics to NCAA Div 2.
The Chaminade loss was bad... but given the context, this is the biggest upset in Men's basketball history.
That's a little optimistic; it's probably a little worse than D-2.
But even if you buy that, it's still a worse loss; this was to a bad D-1 team, not a D-2/D-2 minus kind of team.
The 16-1 thing is going to make this memorable, but a) we knew a 16-1 loss was coming eventually; and b) this wasn't the same level of team; that Ralph Sampson team was viewed as an almost unbeatable national championship-calibre team, and that loss was an insane shock.
This feels kind of like Carolina losing to Weber State; a shocker, but within the norms of basketball.
The Sampson/Chaminade loss felt like if 1999 Duke lost to West Bumfuck Community College rather than to UConn.
I keep hearing snarks on the ACC being overrated. As compared to which conference? The Big 10 whose last championship was 18 years ago? The Big 12 who are tied with Mountain West with 1 championship in the past 30 years? The Pac 12? (hahaha)
To be fair to the NCAA (in this instance only - I don't advocate this in general!) there was nothing they legally could do once UNC shamelessly played the card that the sham courses were used and abused by non-athletes as well as athletes and so was therefore out of their jurisdiction.
And in my opinion the Chaminade game was a curiosity since it was essentially a per-season friendly. It would be the same if one of the blue bloods lost to one of those traveling exhibition teams such as Athletes in Action or the like in early November or if the Red Sox lost to BC or NU. It would make a headline but no one would really care much. UMBC was a BIIIG deal (not 1980 Olympic hockey big but big)
The comment was meant mostly in jest. I apologize for your bruised conference ego.
Still fun watching UVA go down last night.
The bolded portion is absurdly false.
The NCAA has the power to punish member institutions for lack of institutional control. UNC's actions are the textbook definition of this infraction. That they chose to look the other way and punt is an explicit admission that the NCAA was unwilling to apply an appropriate (severe) punishment.
Edit: Happy to discuss in one of the many NCAA threads rather than derailing this one.
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Well, you did say it twice in one night so I thought maybe you actually believed that nonsense.
On the UNC scandal this is what I going on. The University shamefully denigrated its own academic standards in order to protect its football and basketball programs, knowing that the NCAA wasn't equipped to go down the path of judging what was a legitimate academic class and what wasn't (despite this being an especially egregious case).
Didn't know you could de-rail a game thread for games already over but point me to a different thread and I'll take it up there.
Just post that you believe the ACC to be the best conference in college basketball in your next 4 or 5 posts and we're good...
On the UNC scandal this is what I going on. The University shamefully denigrated its own academic standards in order to protect its football and basketball programs, knowing that the NCAA wasn't equipped to go down the path of judging what was a legitimate academic class and what wasn't (despite this being an especially egregious case).
Didn't know you could de-rail a game thread for games already over but point me to a different thread and I'll take it up there.
We had a thread that covered this issue from the initial allegations made by Mary Willingham through the Wainstein Report and eventual NCAA (non) action, but I can’t seem to find it now.
I’ll look post the link later when I’m not on my phone. In the interim, check your pms.
I’ll look post the link later when I’m not on my phone. In the interim, check your pms.
A bad D-1 team isn't that far off from a great D-2 team. A couple things about Chaminade. They were good for a while, ending up 33-2 that year (28-3 the prior year). The beat HI that year. They beat a #12 ranked Louisville a couple of years later.
Plus they had played UVA twice in the prior three years. As mentioned before, UVA was coming off a tournament in Tokyo where Sampson didn't play. Finally, the game ended at 3:00 a.m. ET.
I see the UVA game a lot like a NBA playing its 5th game in 7 nights in Oct. Anything can happen.
This is a much bigger upset IMO. I'm guessing UVA was among the most picked winner among brackets.
But back to the historical context of UMBC. I'd put it on par with Sutton United defeating Coventry in the 3rd round of the 1989 FA Cup. Coventry was a perennial top flight team at the time (when they were relegated from the Premier League in 2001 only Liverpool, Arsenal and Everton had longer runs in the top flight) and Sutton Utd was, and always has been, a non-league squad.
The English Football League at the time (and now if you add in the Premier League on top of it) comprise the top 92 teams in England and Wales. Coventry that year would finish 7th that year, was 2nd at the time of the match and had won the FA Cup just two years before (albeit in an upset of Tottenham). Sutton, as I said, had never been nor would ever to-date become one of the top 92 teams so whilst Coventry might have been analogous to a 1 or 2-seed, Sutton was essentially a semi-pro team made up of teachers, bartenders and the like.
The English Football League at the time (and now if you add in the Premier League on top of it) comprise the top 92 teams in England and Wales. Coventry that year would finish 7th that year, was 2nd at the time of the match and had won the FA Cup just two years before (albeit in an upset of Tottenham). Sutton, as I said, had never been nor would ever to-date become one of the top 92 teams so whilst Coventry might have been analogous to a 1 or 2-seed, Sutton was essentially a semi-pro team made up of teachers, bartenders and the like.