In terms of sports, this time of the year is my favorite, handsdown. There's no other thing I would rather be doing than sit and watch as many NCAA basketball tourney games as I can. Because of my work schedule and a death in the family this past week, this year's tournament has not started with it's usual oomph. I did not get my tourney picks in time, so I can't see how my picks would have stood up with everyone else's. I only saw a few games on the tournament's first day because of our return trip back to town, so I'm looking forward to the games after work this weekend.
Since we drove down to South Texas Sunday afternoon, I missed one of the biggest games this season. Texas A&M Corpus Christi, new to the Southland Conference this year, was in their first conference championship game, and had a shot for an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. I had my brother periodically text message me to update the game's score. Although I am not an alumnus of this university (UT-San Antonio, '97), the success that this team has had this year is a big thing for the Corpus Christi area.
This was the first year that A&M-CC was able to join an NCAA Division I athletic conference. The basketball program is in its eighth year and had struggled to get quality opponents to play them, much less make the trip down to Corpus Christi. Even though they beat Florida State in Tallahassee last season, this year they played, and lost, against three perennial winning basketball programs, two of them '07 NCAA tourney teams: lost at Purdue 79-61, lost at UNLV 67-57, and lost at Mississippi State 96-72.
I feel that the team deserved a better seed than the 15th they received. Considering that they had received votes in the last two AP polls, I hoped they would get at least a 14th seed or even a 13th seed. But at this point, tournament newbies can't really complain can they?
This season was full of firsts for A&M-CC. They won the regular season championship in their inaugural season to the conference. Then they won a conference tournament championship and a spot to the Big Dance all in their first season as newcomers to the conference. I hope that this will be the first of many conference championships and the first of many visits to the NCAA tournament in the years to come.
They'll have more than their hands full with Wisconsin, but this fan will be chanting what the student section at Islanders home games chant: A&M-C-C! A&M-C-C! A&M-C-C!
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