The Selection Sunday waiting game
— -- The idea was floated to John Giannini more as a joke than an actual suggestion, but the La Salle coach, just one year removed from sweating out Selection Sunday, jumped at it anyway.
What if, instead of revealing the top seeds at the start of the selection show, the broadcasts began with the unveiling of the last teams invited to the NCAA tournament. In other words, start with the bubble teams that got in?
"Oh my God, what a great idea!" Giannini said. "That's a humanistic and merciful suggestion. Unfortunately, the rest of America wants to know the 1-seeds but the people who have invested years of work, we'd sure like to be put out of our misery."
Selection Sunday is both the best and cruelest day of the college basketball season -- Christmas morning with all the trimmings for some, a Charlie Brown Halloween bag full of rocks for others.
"The best reality TV show ever," Saint Joseph's coach Phil Martelli has called it, and he's probably not far off. It's got all of the unpredictability of "Jersey Shore" mixed with the big reveal of "The Bachelor," fortunately without Snooki, Seaside Heights and group dates in Bora Bora.
The stories and tales from the day sometimes are almost as unforgettable as the games that follow.
Last year, their bus stuck in traffic on the way out of Brooklyn, Saint Louis players heard their name called on a bank of TVs at a New Jersey Best Buy.
In 2011, VCU player Jamie Skeen, so sure his team would be passed over, didn't even bother to wipe the buffalo sauce off his fingers to answer his suddenly vibrating phone when the Rams were, in fact, added to the field.
At 6 p.m. ET, teams and fans across the country will take a deep breath and wait to see how a season's worth of work is rewarded or rejected.
But the drama doesn't begin with the show.
It begins with the sheer effort of just getting to the start of the show.
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