Congratulation to our four conference champions crowned today.

• Loyola (Chicago) is being thanked by many bubble teams as they did not allow the Missouri Valley auto-bid to be stolen by Illinois State.  Loyola had a top 30 RPI and a road victory against Florida – so it would have been an interesting case.
• Radford claimed the Big South in dramatic fashion – by hitting a buzzer beating three pointer to win against Liberty
• Lipscomb managed to get up by 29 points at halftime against regular season champion Florida Gulf Coast, and managed to hang on to win the Atlantic Sun Championship.
• Michigan made me sad by taking down my beloved Boilermakers to claim the Big 10 auto-bid (although the Wolverines and Boilermakers were both already safely in the field).  But the Wolverines deserve some praise – they hit some amazing shots on offense, killed the boards, and completely shut down Purdue’s star guards – it was a pretty impressive victory for Michigan.

That being said, my friend Dave came over to watch the championship with me and cheer on our alma mater.  I think to be safe, Dave and I can not watch any of Purdue’s tournament games together, since that is the worst that I have seen Purdue’s back-court shoot the ball (to be fair, I am sure it was more due to Michigan’s tenacious defense – but why risk it).  Then again, it was probably also a blessing that Dave was here – it probably prevented me from saying a lot of bad things at my television set since my kids were still at swimming practice and would not have heard the bad words.

Tomorrow will see two more championships with completely different feels.

• The Southern Conference Championship will pit their top two teams against each other as #1 UNC-Greensboro (26-7) will play #2 East Tennessee State (25-8).  Pretty impressive to see a conference final have two teams that have combined to win 51 games.
• The MAAC Conference Championship is Cinderella’s dream – right now, #4 Iona is the top seed left in the semi-finals, and they find themselves down to #9 St. Peter’s 53-49 with about 7 minutes to play.   The second semi-final puts #6 Fairfield up against #7 Quinnipiac.  So, the top 3 seeds all went down in the quarterfinals.  And right now, the MAAC has a 50/50 chance that their champion will have a losing record this season – as winning the semi-finals and finals can not give St. Peter’s or Quinnipiac enough wins to get to .500.