Regional NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

One of my friends was gracious enough to get us tickets for the regional Sweet 16  games in St Louis last week. Luckily she had a pretty good connection which resulted in amazing seats. As you can see from the pictures, we were in the third row from the press seats. We were surrounded by “celebs.” Most notably Magic Johnson but Steve Maruicci (current Detroit Lions coarch) and Tom Izzo’s wife were all within a couple seats of us in the Michigan St section. We also had all the players families around us. So not bad seats at all.

The games were interesting. I had never been to a tournament game nor a college basketball game that MU was not playing in. A couple things surprised me about the game: (1) the players all looked much bigger than on TV when your at court level (2) the crowd never really gets into the game (3) they didnt serve beer but it is a NCAA game (4) 75% of the fans in the Mich St – Northern Iowa game were wearing purple but the crowd never got loud and intimidating like I was expecting before the game. I expected them to be going crazy when they started on an early run but nothing sustatined to try to rile up the Mich St players. (5) Ohio St does not travel well; or at least didn’t for this game because their section was tiny and I saw little red through the arena (6) not sure if attendance was down but they should of had this game at Scottrade since the attendance was only 13k for Friday’s games. There was a Blues game on Sunday so maybe this was impossible. Also, I would have expected a ton more fans and a better atmosphere if Kansas would have made it like they were expected.

The games themselves were both interesting and close. Ohio St got some bad calls and a cold streak in the 2nd quarter by Turner hurt them. Turner rebounded at the end but couldn’t pull it off. Northern Iowa was clearly over matched and lacked in talent but they were able to hang around because of some timely 3′s and the play of the their big man.