Great Expectations for All 16

What happens when the Sweet 16 is comprised entirely of storied powers? You get 16 teams all feeling the pressure to succeed. Ray Holloman takes an in-depth look at the expectations being heaped upon every team left in the Big Dance.

There is no room here for the little guy.

Were the Sweet 16 a country club, Tiger Woods might have to pull some strings to get a tee-time. Meanwhile Goliath might find himself picking splinters out of his warm-up-clad rear on any one of these rosters.

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Thanks for trying, Siena. Enjoyed the one-night stand, Cleveland State. We promise we will write, Western Kentucky. But gentlemen in suits that cost more than your head coach's salary will now escort you to the other side of the velvet rope.

The floor is now closed for the little fella.

Heck, sub-six foot point guard Sherron Collins may have to show ID just to get into the practice facility. Ty Lawson better hope his toes are in shape because he'll need to stand on all 10 of them just to get in. Spud Webb, please leave your tickets at the gate for a taller patron.

And, given this is the season of the steroid scandal, someone should check to see if March Madness spent its summer in the Dominican Republic.

For the first time in tournament history, every top three seed has advanced to the Sweet 16. In the Midwest bracket alone, every team or coach has won a national title since 1996. Thirteen of the 16 remaining schools have been to the Final Four and nine of them have combined for 14 of the 24 national championships awarded since the advent of the 64-team field.

So the little guys can sit quietly and watch their brackets turn to scrap paper like everyone else. After all, In a tournament with more chalk than an elementary school, you've only survived this far if you're so risk averse you store money under your mattress, look both ways, then up and down before crossing the road, and think picking out your clothes for the next day is simply spitting in the eye of fate.

But the only thing heftier than these oversized reputations is the burden of expectations each of these teams carry into the Sweet 16.

This is college basketball's highest-stake poker room. And the antes couldn't be any higher.

"This is do or die," said Lawson, the North Carolina point guard who has turned a nation of sportswriters into armchair podiatrists. "If you lose, you go home and it's the end of the season."

And if any of these teams lose, and be certain eight of them will before you get down to your weekend chores, there will be no joyous welcome home parades.

At most programs, a Sweet 16 berth is something to hang a banner for and talk about over beers years after the fact. For the 16 teams left, it's all but as worthless as a participation ribbon. Or a Grammy.

Your Cinderella in this event? Arizona, the 1997 national champion and the longest-staying current house guest in the NCAA tournament. It was a quarter of a century and four Final Four appearances ago the last time this team missed March Madness. Note to the Cinderella promotions board, Donald Trump may lose a few billion dollars, but he'll never be a small businessman.

And for a team that's already beaten a quarter of the top 16 teams in the Pomeroy Ratings, just being here rings as hollow as a beauty queen prattling on about world peace.

"We don't consider ourselves a Cinderella," forward Chase Budinger said. "We feel we can play with anyone and the label of Cinderella does not come to mind.

"This is a good opportunity to show people we're better than what they've been saying all year. We're rising to the occasion."



Top seeds have always had bigger targets on their backs than DeJuan Blair's rump, but even moreso this year after Pitt, Louisville and North Carolina each withstood stiff challenges in the opening weekend. Connecticut, meanwhile, marched through its first two opponents like they were Patton marching through a Risk game, but now the Huskies have a recruiting scandal simmering in the background.

"I'm really much more worried that I think [Purdue's E'Twaun] Moore is a terrific player," Calhoun said yesterday. "So I worry much more about that than I do about the other things ... We don't want to ever look back upon this and say we didn't give it our best.

Meanwhile, Memphis, the team Connecticut bumped from the top seed line, still has a chip on its shoulder that would rival the rain forests. The Tigers have the longest winning streak in the nation, topped only by the number of jabs thrown at the quality of opposition in Conference USA.

"Each round we go, more and more people pick us to lose," Calipari says. "Sometimes I don't know if it is their opinion or their hope, but they more and more pick us to lose."

Across from the Tigers, Missouri coach Mike Anderson is one round from equaling the school's best ever showing in the NCAA tournament. But that doesn't simplify Mizzou's mission as one might think.

"Right now we are in the hunt for something," coach Mike Anderson said. "I don't know what it is. We are in the hunt."

Purdue and Villanova, who meet Connecticut and Duke respectively, are two resurgent powers in search of a more modern signature moment that has happened since, say, the advent of the Macarena.

"I just made this mistake a couple weeks ago," Villanova coach Jay Wright said. "I was referencing the national championship team [in 1985] and just in general said, 'How old were you when we won it? And they all looked at me, and said, 'We weren't even born.'

"The final eight team [in 2006], believe it or not, in recruiting ... they don't really know."

At Michigan State and Kansas, two of the six schools still alive with national championships this decade, expectations of a Final Four are practically handed out with dorm assignments. The Spartans, who have a reputation for winning but with the general aesthetics of an offensive line turned ballet artists, and the Jayhawks, who answer with Collins' tailback speed and size, met earlier this year in a decisive victory for Tom Izzo's team.

"I was telling [my wife] that it was a little bit different making the Sweet 16 here than with Tulsa," Kansas coach Bill Self said. "At Tulsa there were parades and everything else going on and now it feels like that's what we are supposed to do."

Mid-majors in name only, Gonzaga and Xavier face the postseason like a high school student who only gets graded on the SAT, even if they're trying to build major programs independent of their mid-major conferences.

"When you add the fact that we're alive in the Sweet 16 this year, we've now been in the Sweet 16 three times in the last six years," Xavier coach Sean Miller said. "And that, I think, speaks for itself.

"It's so much more about your program than the name on the front of your jersey and what you stand for than whether you're in this conference or that conference."

The Bulldogs haven't returned to the Elite Eight since their Cinderella run in 1999 turned the small Spokane school into an NCAA tournament regular. But the Zags have grown from charming Cinderella to bracket buster in the wrong way. Mark Few's teams are known as much for their second-round exit as a second-seed in 2004 and their near-miss in 2006 with Adam Morrison as their '99 Cinderella turn.

But even college basketball's highest regarded programs are feeling the pinch.

Oklahoma has never won a national title despite four trips to the Final Four. Short of yanking every phone out of the wall, there's no better way to say goodbye to the Kelvin Sampson era than for third-year head coach Jeff Capel and player of the year favorite Blake Griffin to ride into the Final Four.

Facing the Sooners, Syracuse has capped a season of chaos with a memorable March run, including seven overtimes worth of Big East tournament play that didn't win the Orange a title, but should've won their conditioning coach a Nobel Prize. But star Eric Devendorf's suspension and constant on-court trash talking couldn't be more of a black eye on one of college basketball's most storied program if he had it tattooed somewhere. Which he may.

But the pressure may be most intense on Tobacco Road. For ACC rivals North Carolina and Duke, the 2009 NCAA tournament is almost a referendum on the programs.

At North Carolina, the Heels have produced back-to-back-to-back top-seeded teams and have two ACC players of the year on their roster, senior center Tyler Hansbrough, who, at least seems like he's been on every All-America team since the stitches came off the ball, and Lawson, this year's player of the year.

But the duo, as well as shooting guard Wayne Ellington and swingman Danny Green have yet to claim North Carolina's fifth NCAA tournament championship.

Yet North Carolina withstood a stiff challenge from LSU in the second round of the tournament before Lawson and each of his 10 toes walked all over the Tigers, making it hard to believe this is the same team that exited the last two tournaments in stunning fashion. Coach Roy Williams used a golf analogy to say he'd probably have preferred to leave the drama for the university's theater department -- "I've never thought it was great for me to triple bogey a hole," he quipped -- but if the Heels had a moment of panic it was over faster than Lawson could go end-to-end.

"I loved our toughness," Williams said. "I think this team has been able to handle a lot of adversity this year."



Meanwhile Duke returned to the Sweet 16 for the 10th time in 12 seasons. But it was the first trip since 2006, after a pair of humbling opening-weekend upsets, leading more than one analyst to write about Duke's return in tones that seemed like the results of the Blue Devils' last Sweet 16 trip were only recently discovered somewhere on a cave wall.

"That's also a sign of respect," coach Mike Krzyzewski said after Duke's win over Texas, "because they hate talking about what you have done."

But the Blue Devils' five-year absence from college basketball's final weekend has been a relative epoch in Krzyzewski terms. Senior guard DeMarcus Nelson became just the second scholarship player to play four years for Krzyzewski since his 1983 recruiting class not to play in a Final Four last season (the other was current assistant coach Steve Wojciechowski). Now Greg Paulus and redshirt senior David McClure could become the next. Should junior star Gerald Henderson leave for the NBA, what was once a statistical anomaly could be a trend.

Yet Duke has worn the weight of expectations as easily as their blue-and-white duds thus far. The Blue Devils survived a one-point scare against Boston College in the ACC tournament quarterfinals and another near-loss against Texas, a game that culminated with a Jon Scheyer moonshot of a save in the waning seconds to stave off the Longhorns.

"When we won today I was exhilarated and not relieved," Krzyzewski said after the second-round win. "That is the message I want to send to my players so they never feel that pressure. I told our Olympic team and I told our team, we need to play because of anticipation, not expectation. Anticipation gets you forward, expectation inhibits. I thought our team has done that, especially in the last few weeks."

But like everyone else, when Duke tips off against Villanova tonight, just two hours short of midnight, the stakes will be much bigger than just a game.

The competition will be historically large in the Sweet 16. And so too will the bets riding on it.