Wichita State Shocks Seton Hall

"For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks-not that you won or lost-
But how you played the game." ~ Grantland Rice


Wichita State University's Basketball team showed America that the lowly Missouri Valley Conference belonged in the prestigious NCAA Tournament with an impressive 86-66 win over Seton Hall on Thursday. Seton Hall was seeded 10th in the East regional bracket, as opposed to Wichita State's 7th seed.

Even though Seton Hall was seeded lower than the Shockers, Media Basketball "experts" had been dismissing the smaller, less publicized Missouri Valley conference teams as irrelevant, as if they weren't in the same class with the likes of the Big East, ACC, Big 10, PAC 8, Big 12 conferences, etc. Indeed, Seton Hall was one of 8 teams from the Big East conference represented in the tourney.

I am an alumnus of Wichita State, but for the sake of the Missouri Valley Conference, I will be rooting for all 4 of the teams represented in the tournament from the Missouri Valley. Hopefully, they will attain some measure of credibility with the elitist sports media.

I watched the game via CBS online streaming video feed, and I have to say, if one had merely listened to the game rather than watched it, one might think that Seton Hall lost the game rather than Wichita State won it. The announcers at Big East friendly CBS were definitely biased in Seton Halls favor, and actually seemed almost heartbroken at Seton Halls poor showing.

Just for fun, I looked up what the New York Times had to say about the game, and it was, as I expected, reported as if it were a surprise that the upstart Shockers won so handily.

Here is part the first paragraph from the Times article:

"The seeding favored No. 7 Wichita State going into its first-round N.C.A.A. tournament game against No. 10 Seton Hall on Thursday at Greensboro Coliseum. But surely, Seton Hall had the resume to pull off this mild upset. It was the Missouri Valley Conference versus the Big East, after all."

(I just discovered how to change the color of the font, so I thought I would put that quote in Shocker gold)

The fact is that the game was well played on both sides. It was one of the cleanest and most sportsmanlike basketball games I have seen in quite some time. Wichita State simply out played the Pirates.

Wouldn't it be a slap in their collective faces if there was an all Missouri Valley conference final four?