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The centerpiece of college sports, the NCAA Basketball Tournament, concludes tonight in a game that clearly features the best two teams in the country matching skills to determine the National Champion. While every tournament has its twist and turns with upsets and buzzer beaters, this year’s tournament has wound through all the 2021 action to land us with a final that features a pair of top seeds, the Gonzaga Bulldogs and Baylor Bears.

Both teams are in search of their first ever National Championship, and Gonzaga is looking to become the first undefeated champion since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers. While Gonzaga has been perched atop the basketball rankings for nearly the entire season, Baylor had a dip when they were confronted with Covid-19 issues. Four of their regular season games were cancelled but still they won the Big 12 with a 13-1 conference record.

Despite losing to Oklahoma State in the second round of the Big 12 Tournament, they maintained a number one seed for the NCAA Tournament.

An argument can be made that Baylor is playing their best basketball right now, they have recovered from their regular season interruption and crushed the Houston Cougars on Saturday, 78-59.

While Baylor coasted to their weekend win, the Bulldogs had their most serious challenge of the year before edging UCLA with a near half court game deciding overtime basket. The three point win over the Bruins offers two sides to consider in Gonzaga completing their perfect season.

First, one of the knocks on Mark Few’s undefeated Gonzaga squad is that they have not been challenged, and how would they respond in a competitive game?

Between the time I completed my work with the Oakland Raiders and before I opened Qoxhi Picks in 1981, I worked two years in the marketing department of Home Savings and Loan. In 1980, one of our company spokespeople was legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. Home Savings was a major sponsor that year for the Daryle Lamonica Gold Tournament and my assignment was to accompany Coach Wooden for the two days he visited the event.

Two days with Wooden is akin to a four-year education at a top university. In my youth, I often found myself in the presence of people that just a couple years earlier were bigger than life in the sports world. Time spent with Johnny Unitas stands out, meeting Joe Namath and Jimmy Snyder while working for Al Davis was memorable, but nothing compared to my two days with Coach Wooden.

I would pick him up at the Marriott Hotel in the morning, be at his service all day, and drive him back to his hotel at the end of the day. During the two days I became more comfortable asking him about his historic run with the UCLA Basketball team and his philosophies in building the greatest dynasty in college sports history.

On a drive from the golf course to his hotel on our second day together we had developed a relationship where I felt permission to prod him while revealing that I had always had an interest in the handicapping side of sports. In that regard, I mentioned that his teams always seemed to overcome spots on their schedule where others would likely stumble. I mentioned a couple examples where they would win a huge game over Houston or North Carolina and while most teams would then be flat in their next game, particularly if it was against an overmatched opponent, his teams wouldn’t.

They could go from beating North Carolina to crushing Oregon State while seemingly not governed by the highs and lows of almost every other team.

Wooden smiled, and said, “That’s because I never had my boys focused on their opponents, but rather on themselves. If we played a tough game and lost, but my boys knew they had given their very best, I wanted them to sleep well that night. But, even if we won decisively, but one of my players knew he hadn’t given his all, I wanted him to wrestle with how he could allow that to happen, and even lose sleep over it.”

The NCAA Basketball season concluded with four teams from the Big Ten ranked among the top eight teams in the country.

The Pac 12, had two teams in the AP top 25, Colorado at 22 and USC at 23.

Then the tournament began and the highly regarded Big Ten lost eight of their nine participants before the field was reduced to the 32 teams still alive when the Sweet 16 tipped off. Meanwhile, the Pac 12, which began the tournament with UCLA eliminating the first of the Big Ten schools to fall, Michigan State, in the play-in game, represented one of the four Pac 12 conference teams to advance to the Sweet 16.

Any wonder why Brent Musburger coined the term “March Madness”?

In the Sweet 16 round, the only Pac 12 team to lose was ousted by a fellow Pac 12 squad when USC downed Oregon. Three Pac 12 teams were participants in the Elite 8, and tonight two of them are in action. While Oregon State lost last night to the Houston Cougars, USC battles top ranked Gonzaga in a contest set to begin at 4:15 p.m. Pacific Time and the later game tonight has UCLA up against top seed Michigan.

Oregon State did not go quietly into the night. They only made the field of 64 based on earning an automatic bid by winning the Pac 12 Conference Tournament, but the 12th seed Beavers upset Tennessee and Oklahoma State in first round action and surprised Loyola of Chicago in the Sweet 16. Last night, they trailed by 17 points at halftime against the second seed Cougars, then put on a furious second half rally that had them tie the game late only to fall at the end, 67-61. The six point loss was good enough to pick up a point spread win … Houston was favored by eight points.