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In response to West Virginia’s victory over Kentucky tonight, Daniel Strauss has a pretty good post up about team allegiances:
That’s the funny thing about sports team allegiances. I had a friend my freshman year who was a diehard Duke fan despite being an undergrad at the University of Missouri. Often on the college level, and occasionally on the major league level, we follow teams for reasons other than the fact that they represent where we live.
In the case of West Virginia, I liked the idea of them being a up-and-coming powerhouse (the exact opposite of Michigan which seems to be in decline these days). Maybe my West Virginia favoritism will grow so much that one day I’ll be wearing a WVa sweatshirt.
I don’t know why, but it’s always seemed strange to me how sports teams not only get personalities of their own, but that people root for them because of those personalities. Strauss’s is a perfect example. Even though he doesn’t have the traditional reason to like West Virginia, because of the University’s story in the context of the NCAA tournament this year, he’s rooting for them.
I’m the same way. The appeal of sports is as much about the unfolding story as it is my respect for the skill of the players.
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WVa is strange. They don’t have an offense, but they scored every point off 3-pt shots in the first half. They’re a great rebounding team, but Ky out-rebounded them 2-to-1. They’re big underdogs, but they’re up by 2 at the half. Strange. I had no hope for them at all. I expected Ky to beat them by at least 10 in the second half.
Then a miracle happens.
In the second half they began to rebound and defend even tougher and Ky struggled like freshmen (4 of the starters ARE).
In the end I think the biggest factors were that the WV players never gave up (they behaved like upper-classmen) and Huggins put them on a trapping 1-3-1 zone defense for the second half and it killed a lot of the individual efforts by Ky players. Team beats individuals. That really stopped Ky and Calipari didn’t have a response!
Incidentally, Kentucky’s Patterson is from my city and he played ball in high school with another excellent player who’s at USC now. They had the best high school team in the country and now they (O.J. Mayo & Patterson) will probably go on to the pros.
But Huggins showed his class and had a decent team to execute his plans. Who would have imagined they could shoot out the lights with 3-pointers? Amazing.
My baseball outlook was shaped by watching in Wisconsin as the Red Sox struggled year after year against Mo & Co. in utterly classic ALCS’s of the late ’90s & early aughts. At that time I never expected I’d move to NYC or become a great fan of a die-hard native Bombers-cheering nat’l security blogger who does (or hosts) some of the best liveblogging of the playoffs I’ve seen. (Mainly because there were no blogs then.) Weird how things work out.
Yeah I agreed with most predictions that Kentucky would dominate the game and move forward.