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George Mason
03/30/06
by Clay

If you aren’t rooting for George Mason to win the NCAA Championship, chances are you don’t have a soul. Hundreds of thousands of words will be written before this tournament is finished, but few sentences will manage to capture the raw intensity and passion that millions of people across the country were rooting for George Mason with on Sunday afternoon. I know I probably won’t be successful because if you had told me a month ago that I would be rooting like crazy for George Mason University, I would have called you a damn liar. Somehow words are too inexpert of devices to make sense of this feeling. Yet, even still, there I was hoping against hope that somehow, someway George Mason was going to hold off the mighty Connecticut Huskies. And I wasn’t alone. There were millions of other people who felt the exact same way that I did.

As the cheers arose in the penultimate weekend of college hoops action in our basketball crazy land, did most of the cheerers know what city or state George Mason was even located in? Probably not. Could these people have named a single player on George Mason’s roster in the months of November, December, January, or February? Probably not. If George Mason coach Jim Larranaga had sat down beside these same people on a flight in any of the last eight years that he was coaching the Patriots would they have recognized him? Probably not. Forget basketball then, let’s try history. Would George Mason, the namesake of the university, even rank in the top ten most famous of the founding fathers? Probably not. Yet for one afternoon at the tail-end of March, George Mason University brought together millions of people who will never know one another yet were united behind a team they’d never heard of a month ago. Walt Whitman famously wrote that he heard America singing. Well, on March 26, 2006 I heard America cheering.

The operative word after this outcome is going to be parity. And the discussion about parity has its place. Particularly because UConn played their best game of the NCAA Tournament thus far and George Mason still managed to find a way to win. But parity only speaks to the talent on the floor and it absolutely ignores what is a profound disparity: the amount of attention paid to teams from outside the major conferences during the regular season. Trust me, I know about this from my days as a student manager at George Washington. While teams may occupy the same basketball division, the lifestyle within those divisions is remarkably disparate.

See, there are 334 Division 1 basketball teams. Of these teams approximately forty receive 95% of the attention. That leaves almost three hundred teams in the same division pursuing the sport they love with virtually no attention placed upon them. This was one of the main reasons I was so disappointed about Duke-UNC being shown on three different stations because there were so many other great stories and teams that weren’t getting even a single moment of attention. It’s interesting now to think about these two teams, UConn and George Mason moving in completely different college basketball worlds throughout this season. UConn played 34 games this year. Guess how many were on television? How about 34. Yep, every single game UCONN played. George Mason played 30 games before the tournament started. And six of those were on television…if you lived in Virginia. If you happened to live somewhere other than in the regional television network, there was exactly one game on a national network. Compare that to the sixteen nationally televised games that UConn had this season. How under the radar was George Mason this year? The Washington Post didn’t even see fit to assign a beat writer to them despite Fairfax, Virginia being about twenty miles from downtown D.C. In the eyes of television when this tournament started UConn was sixteen times the team George Mason was. Yet, when these two teams from such drastically different positions finally met on the court, the team no one knew became the team everyone loved.

Right now, some of you are probably saying, wait a minute, I didn’t cheer for George Mason and I have a soul. Chances are you are wrong. Somewhere along the road of America’s fandom you probably found yourself rooting for both the New York Yankees in baseball and the Duke Blue Devils in basketball. You enjoy rooting for the favorite because, generally speaking, favorites win. This is all the more disappointing because when it comes to cinema you cheered when Johnny Moxon and Billy Bob executed the oop-de-oop for a touchdown in Varsity Blues. Cried yourself to sleep the night you saw Jimmy Chitwood drain that jumper for Hickory High. Yet somewhere, along fandom’s long and sinuous path, you lost your way when it came to actual games.

Having said all that, we here at Deadly Hippos do recognize that some people had excuses which allowed them not to root for George Mason on Saturday and will allow them not to root for George Mason in the Final Four. To be fair I decided to go ahead and catalogue all these people in the United States who shouldn’t be rooting for George Mason to win the national championship or to win on Saturday. You fit the bill if:

1. You are a UConn, Florida, LSU, or UCLA fan.
2. You play for Hofstra and your name is Loren Stokes. One of the canons we hold dear at Deadly Hippos is that when someone punches you in the groin, you don’t have to be a fan of either that person or their team.

That is all. Everyone else needs to root for George Mason.

We are a country that prides itself on the fact that any child born in America today could grow up to be President. In an entirely different vein shouldn’t we also truly believe that any Division 1 college basketball team that makes the NCAA Tournament actually has a chance to win? Sure, we utter the cliché that any team could win but we don’t really believe that anymore do we? Not when odds-makers like Danny Sheridan put out odds that a team like Oral Roberts University has a 5 sextillion to 1 chance of winning the NCAA Tournament. Oh, we’ll laugh, and grin at the expense of the underdog in the NCAA Tournament. Pity poor Southern University at 5 trillion to one or the much more respected Davidson College checking in at a trifling 25 billion to one. And then one day George Mason at 4 million to one takes the court with overall favorite UConn at 4 to 1 odds and all of a sudden a million to one longshot seems like nothing at all. When all was said and done, UConn and George Mason had crystallized in three hours why we fans spend a lifetime caring. I’ve written all these words to finally feel comfortable saying this: UConn-George Mason was the best NCAA Tournament game I have ever seen.

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