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Basketball got it right
Northern Arizona men's basketball coach Mike Adras, you need to have your voting rights taken away.
After Connecticut defeated Butler on April 4 for the national championship, Adras voted Ohio State as his NO. 1 team and had Kansas as the No. 2 team.
Adras may be a good coach, leading the Lumberjacks to 82 games over the last five seasons, while winning back-to-back Big Sky Conference regular season titles.
But he needs to stay in the gym and away from his computer. Maybe he used the same guy Steve Spurrier used in voting Javon Snead over Tim Tebow in a preseason All-SEC football team. Maybe he spent too much time with Paul Bunyan splitting timber.
Adras is one of 31 voters. The other 30 correctly voted Connecticut No. 2. Butler finished No. 2 in the poll.
Kentucky, which eliminated Ohio State, was third and Kansas fourth, followed by Ohio State.
Virginia Commonwealth, which lost to Butler in the semifinals, finished sixth.
I can understand a little shuffling among spots three through eight.
But Connecticut won it on the court and Butler advanced to the finals.
That's the way it was supposed to be done, even if the game was far from a championship contest.
The vote by Adras is not unprecedented. One coach in the final USA TODAY football poll selected TCU No. 1 after Auburn beat Oregon in the BCS national championship game in January.
Utah coach Kyle Whittingham voted his team No. 1 after the Utes went unbeaten in 2008. Florida won the national championship that season.
I have no problem with either of those. The BCS is a joke and until you have a playoff system the championship is not being won on the field.
Just take a look at the final college football standings.
The BCS had Auburn No. 1 followed by Oregon, TCU, Stanford, Wisconsin and Ohio State.
The final AP poll had Auburn, TCU, Oregon, Stanford, Ohio State and Oklahoma.
And three people actually voted TCU No. 1 in the AP poll.
TCU was not the best team in the country. But, hey, they were undefeated. They did not get a chance to play for the championship. That's not their fault. Ohio State got that chance.
Connecticut was the last team standing at the end of a great tournament and rightly deserves the Sports Illustrated commercials proclaiming them to be the best.
If you want to get really dicey about it, Kentucky was probably a better team at the end of the season than Ohio State.
But you can leave that kind of discussion for college football. The college basketball champion was decided on the court the way it should have been decided.
Maybe college football will figure that out one day. |
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