Northwestern Turns Unwatchable Slog Into Overtime Thriller

The NCAA tournament does not care how a team wins its game, only that they win.  If they play one of the worst halves of basketball possible or an opposing player temporarily forgets that basketball exists in a limited amount of time and does not extend infinitely past the temporal limits of human experience or if the broadcast is temporarily halted to show us a message from Buckingham Palace but they still win in overtime then they still get to live another day.

Northwestern and FAU played the first half they had been placed in some sort of TruTV prank show where they replaced the baskets with narrower novelty rims from carnival games that made it all but impossible for a ball to successfully pass through the hoop.  Their game kicked off Friday's slate of games, so for several minutes, this was the only thing on TV: Northwestern and FAU players fruitlessly running back and forth across the court shoving each other and then missing layups until the Owls' seven-foot center got to attempt a couple of free throws.  For Northwestern fans, this was normal and something that regularly happens when the football team is accidentally shown on national television and America is forced to bear witness to the team's Iowa cover band aesthetics on their way to a plodding 17-13 win against Nebraska.

When it's 20-19 in the first half

The first half looked alarmingly like it was following the formula for a Northwestern loss, which was for a team to commit all of its resources to stymieing Boo Buie and for the rest of the Northwestern roster to miss open shots.  The Wildcats, though, stayed in the game with some ferocious defense.  I missed the last several minutes of the first half because I realized too late that my television provider's ads about being able to pause live television on their app only work if I am in my house and not trying to watch the game at work with my finger hovering over the delightfully anachronistic "boss button" that still exists on the official NCAA website and has moved from showing a generic pie chart to, I assume for its 2024 edition, a whole bunch of fake AI bullshit.

The NCAA Tournament's 2045 Boss Button

Things looked far better in the second half.  The 'Cats started to cruise, Boo Buie started to take over as the best player on the floor, Ryan Langborg and Brooks Barnhizer began to hit shots even as Bill Raftery slandered Barnhizer's mustache growing ability, and it looked like Northwestern would easily win.  But then the game started to turn towards FAU.  Things fell apart after Nick Martinelli was whistled for a flagrant after Vlad Goldin put his face right where Martinelli's elbow happened to be while he was going for a rebound; after that the 'Cats couldn't get anything to fall and FAU took a late lead before Barnhizer heroically tied the game on a last-second layup.

Something happens to Northwestern's tournament opponents in the last second of close games where they feel compelled to forget everything they've ever known about basketball.  In 2017, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis, who had been unstoppable in the second half of that game, inexplicably fouled Northwestern's free throw expert Bryant McIntosh with his team up one with 14 seconds left.  On Friday, Johnell Davis had the ball with with seven seconds left and the game tied but sort of casually loped up the court and dribbled around before launching a hopeless 27-footer into three Wildcats allowing the game to go to overtime. 

Surely there's room somewhere for Northwestern to create an art installation dedicated to its basketball program's greatest work of art: the Ryan Langborg overtime.  I am very sorry to casual readers who might get a little lost in the technical basketball terminology I am going to use here to describe what happened because it's the only way to convey it, but Langborg went absolutely nutso in overtime on Florida Atlantic.  He didn't miss a shot.  He drained threes as the twenty four second clock was losing it's last tenths of a second.  He outscored the entire Florida Atlantic team singlehandedly.  The 'Cats just kept taking 29.999 seconds to hit shots; the Owls couldn't respond, lost, and then their coach pulled up stakes to the University of Michigan.  I knew it was over as soon as Boo Buie hit one of the most preposterous shots a person could take in a high-level basketball game. 

"BOO BUIE, MAJOR SPLASH" 💦#MarchMadness @NUMensBball pic.twitter.com/VauGhv0iyv

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 22, 2024

Northwestern has yet to lose its opening game in its three appearances.  They also have yet to advance past the second and this year face toughest opponent the tournament could offer.

TOURNAMENT VIEWING

The NCAA Tournament is one of the great sports TV events, especially the opening rounds with several games happening at once, the potential for incredible upsets, and introduction of this year's class of Midmajor Oafs and NCAA Tournament Guys.  You can find complaints about the current state of men's college basketball: the combination of one-and-done NBA talents with the chaotic movement of players means that there is almost no continuity among teams although it is very difficult to argue that the reasons this is happening which are to allow players freedom to leave their programs and make money are bad.  Player movement has also led to more upsets and the delightful phenomenon of any player who stays with a program for more than a year seem like tenured faculty or even the relatively new phenomenon of a midmajor Upset Hero resurfacing on another program; the ability to see Max Abmas in a Texas jersey and remember him as an enjoyable NCAA Tournament guy is one example, and I'm sure there were a large number of people who sort-of remember Princeton's Sweet 16 run last year pleasantly startled to see Langborg pop up on Northwestern shooting the flaming He's On Fire basketballs from NBA jam.  

NIL has also brought us the incredible brand-new phenomenon of Round One NCAA Guys immediately filming horribly janky phone-camera commercials in hotel hallways, a sports commercial type that is already creeping up the rankings toward the hallowed ground of car dealership commercial where the athlete says the dealership's slogan in unison with a chorus of local children.

The most important thing that makes the NCAA Tournament elite television, though is the fact that it airs during two work days where the appeal of college basketball games between schools you don't care about and have never heard of goes from compelling to irresistible.  There's absolutely no reason to watch a game between like Louisville and Oral Roberts on a beautiful spring weekend but if that is what is happening instead of looking at TPS Reports or whatever it is the most important thing going on in the entire world.

This is why it is crushing to see every close tournament game devolve into unwatchable bullshit.  I know this is not a novel complaint, but the introduction of the referee review is in my opinion a catastrophe.  There is nothing less interesting than watching a bunch of people in stupid-looking shirts squinting at a little television monitor for five minutes while you see the same replay of a ball maybe glancing off some pixels that might be a guy's pinkie 45 times in a row.  There is no reason to ever hear the most unwelcome sound in all of sports: the voice of Gene Steratore.  I have nothing against Steratore himself, but the only you ever hear from him is when the game has gone to the Referee Shadow Zone, the announcers are trying to parse Basketball Molecules, and you are about to see the same insurance commercial for the exact number of times where your brain is no longer able to process the Insurance Iguana without turning you into a werewolf.  

As we've seen across sports, the lie that video replay can actually reveal objective truth instead of revealing a series of finer parsable concepts of truth based on the interaction of pixels at split-second increments beyond any human being's ability to perceive them is one that has turned referee decisions into the boring version of forensic analysis done on those CBS procedurals about crimes people do in the Coast Guard and turns a series of basketball games into a Pentagon briefing.  Also it hurts the viewing experience that basketball coaches no longer have to wear ridiculous formalwear because it is much funnier watching people have tantrums while wearing ill-fitting, sweated-through suits than in athleisure.

The cutting edge of Coach Fashion is a television detective who is being shoved out of an interrogation room

NORTHWESTERN STILL HOPING FOR "THE UPSET"

Northwestern's reward for winning this game is a matchup with UConn, last year's champions and this year's overall top seed that is coming off a 39 point evisceration of the Cowboy Hat School.  The Huskies have only lost three games this entire season and, at a time when basketball rosters are as fluid as they have ever been, emerged as one of the most dangerous threats to repeat as champions since Joakim Noah's Florida teams managed to do it seventeen years ago.  It is hard to imagine there are too many people outside of Northwestern sickos who have picked Northwestern to advance on their brackets.

If your historically shitty basketball team makes the tournament and you care more about winning your bracket than picking your team to win it all, then I am sorry that is the acme of cowardice.  Also, if Northwestern makes some sort of miracle run then you have an enormous chance of winning the online bracket as all of the other brackets having Northwestern advancing far will be disqualified since 90% of them are from sportswriters legally prohibited from collecting prizes

The Wildcats have what appears to be an impossible situation in front of them against an unstoppable basketball machine.  But the appeal of the tournament is that on any given day, these are still college basketball teams and capable of playing an absolute stinker at the worst time.  There's one person in Brooklyn who knows Northwestern can win this one and it's Boo Buie.