Charlottesville, Va.-- --There are a couple of ways to handle life on the bubble. Ideally, you spend the waning moments of the regular season tweaking the ol' postseason resume - some grammatical polish here, an exaggerated accomplishment and three-syllable superlatives everywhere else.
Which makes what the Maryland men's basketball team has done especially confounding.
Essentially, the Terps have taken what was a pretty formidable resume and redacted all the highlights, underscored their weaknesses and then ran the whole thing through a paper shredder. A few times.
To: The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee
Enclosed please find what remains of our postseason hopes. In 1,000 torn pieces. Please pardon the tear stains.
With last night's 91-76 loss at Virginia, we can finally say with certainty the Terps do not belong in the NCAA tournament. They're inconsistent, have little depth, struggle against good teams and lack anything resembling a killer instinct.
And yet, perhaps most surprising, we'll continue to talk about the Terps' NCAA tournament hopes; we'll do this in part because of who they are and partly because of what college basketball this year has been.
By the time you reach the final game of the regular season, you can generally measure improvement with the naked eye. Just as easily, you can spot those holes that somehow grew into canyons. So it was in the opening minute of last night's game, when Maryland point guard Greivis Vasquez charged into the paint and fumbled away the ball. An eye blink later, Virginia was at the other end of the court, drilling a three-pointer. Uh-oh, Terps Fan thought. Here we go again.
And there we went.
For some reason, this bubble concept eludes the Terps. Generally, when you're on the doorstep of the NCAA tournament, you sense the goal is near. The past couple of weeks, even as analysts generously listed Maryland in the projected 65-team field, the Terps always felt closer to missing the tournament than making it.
And with each passing game, from Miami to Virginia last night, the Terps took their shoddy RPI figures, shook them up like Yahtzee dice, and no matter how many times they rolled, all we saw was RIP. RIP. RIP.
Now, one thing we've learned about Maryland basketball the past several years is that the Terps are predictably unpredictable. They lose games they're supposed to win. They win games they're supposed to lose. So this week in Charlotte, N.C., where the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament begins, there will be talk of the 2003-04 Maryland team, a young group that shocked most of the ACC by winning the conference tournament.
