People who start their daily newspaper "fix" with the back of the paper refer to this time of year as "March Madness."
That certainly wold apply to the person who dreamed up the starting time of tonight's Villanova-Duke contest.
The two teams meet on the hardwood with a berth in the Elite Eight on the line.
And they will likely tip off sometime arond 10 p.m. That's not a misprint. The game will start about the same time the early news is starting.
I guess for students it won't much matter. The Main Line area around the Villanova campus wil certainly be buzzing. But for a lot of people a 10 p.m. start means they very likely will not be seeing the end of the game, or ecen the second half. A lot of people likely will hit the sack tonight without knowing who won the game.
And that is the best possibility. The NCAA indicates only the Villanova game will start 30 minutes after the end of the first game, Pitt vs. Xavier. Should that game go to, say, 6 overtimes like that recent Syracuse-UConn affair? Well, the Wildcats will tip off a half hour after that game eventually ends.
Then there's the possibility that the Villanova-Duke game also needs extra stanzas.
The best guess is that the game will probably end sometime between midnight and 12:30. But that's only if nothing weird happens and overtime does not interviene.
If you have an hour or two, I will tell you what kind of problems that creates for newspapers.
Not that it matters much. Big-time sports stopped paying attention to newspapers - and more importantly their fans - a long time ago. They dance to the tune called by TV. Maybe that's why they call it The Big Dance.
If TV told them they wanted a game to start at 3 a.m., that's when they would play. That's why there are such things as Monday Night Football, which now has morphed into Thursday and Sunday night editions. That's why the notion of a World Series game being played in daylight is a quaint - and distant - memory.
The fans - and their sleep patterns - really don't figure into that equation.
Enjoy the game, especialy the ending, if you happen to still be awake.
That certainly wold apply to the person who dreamed up the starting time of tonight's Villanova-Duke contest.
The two teams meet on the hardwood with a berth in the Elite Eight on the line.
And they will likely tip off sometime arond 10 p.m. That's not a misprint. The game will start about the same time the early news is starting.
I guess for students it won't much matter. The Main Line area around the Villanova campus wil certainly be buzzing. But for a lot of people a 10 p.m. start means they very likely will not be seeing the end of the game, or ecen the second half. A lot of people likely will hit the sack tonight without knowing who won the game.
And that is the best possibility. The NCAA indicates only the Villanova game will start 30 minutes after the end of the first game, Pitt vs. Xavier. Should that game go to, say, 6 overtimes like that recent Syracuse-UConn affair? Well, the Wildcats will tip off a half hour after that game eventually ends.
Then there's the possibility that the Villanova-Duke game also needs extra stanzas.
The best guess is that the game will probably end sometime between midnight and 12:30. But that's only if nothing weird happens and overtime does not interviene.
If you have an hour or two, I will tell you what kind of problems that creates for newspapers.
Not that it matters much. Big-time sports stopped paying attention to newspapers - and more importantly their fans - a long time ago. They dance to the tune called by TV. Maybe that's why they call it The Big Dance.
If TV told them they wanted a game to start at 3 a.m., that's when they would play. That's why there are such things as Monday Night Football, which now has morphed into Thursday and Sunday night editions. That's why the notion of a World Series game being played in daylight is a quaint - and distant - memory.
The fans - and their sleep patterns - really don't figure into that equation.
Enjoy the game, especialy the ending, if you happen to still be awake.
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