The Thursday and Friday of the NCAA Tournament are personally my favorite two days in sports. There’s just something wonderful about turning on the TV at noon eastern — usually in my case at like 11:50, where I’ll watch the last 10 minutes of “The Price is Right” — and then just having basketball on all day until well after midnight.
In truth, the majority of games that are played across those days will end up being forgettable. That’s not to say that they’re mostly blowouts and just a couple tight
games, but sometimes even close games don’t end up being memorable beyond the last couple minutes that you watch of them. However, the games you remember, you’ll sometimes end up remembering forever.
From buzzer beaters to upsets, there’s almost certainly several First Round games from over the years that you can remember, whether they involved North Carolina or not. In honor of the next two days, that’ll be the subject for our question of the day. What are your favorite memories from the First Round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament?
As far as UNC is concerned, I have to say, there aren’t many standout memories that I have. A lot of the time over the years, the Tar Heels have been a #1 or similarly high seed. In those instances, a lot of those games end up wins over lower seeds that are precursors to longer runs that feature other, more memorable victories. The game I probably have the clearest memory of — for purely positive reasons, at least — is the 2009 win over Radford. That’s not for any one particular moment, just for how clean and easy it was, ahead of a run that would end up featuring a lot of clean and easy wins.
However, if we’re talking just the first round in general, then there’s obviously quite a lot of memories. We’re a UNC blog, so obviously we have to mention the wins by Lehigh and Mercer and the other teams that have taken out Duke hilariously early. In a similar vein, there was UMBC beating Virginia to become the first ever #16 seed to take out a #1.
Then, of course, there are other dramatic games and upsets. A big answer for many people may be Bryce Drew’s buzzer beater for Valparaiso against Ole Miss, but personally, I don’t remember watching that one live, even if I might have.
The game for me that lives the strongest in my memory didn’t quite feature a buzzer beater, but did feature some unbelievable dramatics. The one for me that I’ll never forget is Vermont upsetting Syracuse in the 2005 NCAA Tournament. The names “Taylor Coppenrath” and “T.J. Sorrentine” will forever live in my head, even without them going on to memorable pro careers, just for what they did that night to upset the Orange.
Plus, it was still the era of that particular CBS scorebug, which is the one that’s still used in the games of my dreams.
That’s mine, but what about you? What are your favorite First Round memories, UNC or otherwise?
