The soul of college basketball – and the madness of March – is alive and well in the mid-majors

The NCAA tournament might be college basketball’s most high-profile showcase of the desperate, win-or-go-home style of basketball that makes March one of the most special times of the year.

But before those games, before millions of people fill out their brackets and start putting their faith in schools they’ve never heard of, potential Cinderella stories battle for their basketball lives.

In front of loud crowds in small gyms, the madness is already spreading – and the soul of college basketball is wonderfully, mercifully, alive.

Take, for instance, the Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) tournament, contested over the last few days in Washington, DC’s CareFirst Arena – the 4,200-seat arena in southeast Washington that is sort of the little cousin to Capital One Arena in Chinatown where the NBA’s Wizards and NHL’s Capitals play.

The CAA is expected to send just one men’s team to The Big Dance that tips off next week, the champion of the conference tournament that earns an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. That means after all these games, after all these months of ball, a tournament berth came down to how a team played on one long weekend in the nation’s capital.

What that led to is some of the most frenzied basketball in the college game, the kind of hoops that can only come from players who aren’t sure they’ll ever get to dribble a ball competitively ever again if they lose.

Each foul is so hard it makes you cringe. Every loose ball is met by three or four bodies spilling onto the hardwood to try and capture it. The big fear about college sports these days is that the amount of money pouring into major conference sports is going to rob the game of the passion that makes it special, especially at these smaller schools. There are concerns that the best players from these teams will just go to bigger schools, chasing Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) dollars – and when they leave, those smaller schools’ fans will go with them.

Here, in front of a crowd of diehards that made a couple thousand people sound like a jet engine, those larger worries couldn’t feel further away.

The opportunity and cruelty of tournament basketball

The team that was expected to be the CAA representative in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament next week was Towson.

The Tigers finished their regular season 16-2 in the conference, two games ahead of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. They brought the conference’s player of the year, Tyler Tejada – as well as its sixth man of the year and coach of the year, plus another all-conference player – into this tournament.

A semifinal matchup against the conference basement dwelling University of Delaware on Monday evening seemed like a recipe for an easy path to Tuesday night’s final – even if the Blue Hens had absolutely decimated William & Mary on Sunday to keep their season alive.

Delaware finished third-from-last in the CAA, winning just five conference games. They lost their last regular season game to UNC-Wilmington by 30 points. Maybe that’s why, as the Blue Hens jumped out to a 13-point lead early in the second half, the noise coming from the Towson end of the arena was tinged with disbelieving screams.

The momentum swung wildly. First, it was Towson, making a little run to get back into the contest and injecting their fans with life. But the pesky Blue Hens wouldn’t let the Towson crowd relax – a few big threes, some defensive stops and suddenly the lead was back to 11 with seven-and-a-half minutes to play.

The diminutive Delaware contingent couldn’t possibly muster the kind of noise the Towson fans were putting out. But when each shot went down and the Delaware lead stayed improbably solid, they hollered all the same.

They threw their hands in the air when senior John Camden, the second team all-conference forward fresh off scoring 36 points in the game of his life against William & Mary, kept hitting shots and staring daggers at his bench with intensity etched into his face. They screamed in bewilderment when Niels Lane, the University of Florida transfer, soared high above the basket to slam home an alley-oop on the stroke of halftime.

The soul of college basketball – and the madness of March – is alive and well in the mid-majors

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