So far, Atlantic 10 is a deserving perfect 10 in March
by Mike Lopresti, USA TODAY Sports
DAYTON, Ohio — One question to Butler and Xavier, on the way out the door of the Atlantic 10 to the waiting Big East limo.
Sure you want to leave?
This league is the lion of March so far, winning NCAA tournament games so quickly, even the commissioner of the conference is having a hard time keeping up.
“We’re what, 5-0 or 6-0?” Bernadette McGlade asked over the phone Friday, minutes after La Salle finished off its stunner of Kansas State.
That’d be 6-0. As in nobody has lost yet. The 32-team third round this weekend will be 15.6% Atlantic 10.
“They’re showing the world what I’ve been watching all year,” she said.
So Saint Louis has won, and VCU has won and Butler has won and Temple has won and La Salle has won twice. Wonder if the basketball masses who filled out brackets understood how good the Atlantic 10 was this season?
“I think they do now,” Temple forward Jake O’Brien said in the locker room Friday, after the ninth-seeded Owls held off eighth-seeded North Carolina State.
The weekend might be another kettle of big fish and not so much fun for the A-10. Temple is staring at Indiana, Butler at Marquette, VCU at Michigan. But hasn’t the point already been made?
This is a better indication of the parity of college basketball than any one Cinderella team could be. An entire top portion of what would once be called a mid-major league has come marching through the first days of the tournament in perfect order, something neither the Big Ten nor the Big East nor the ACC could do.
How many of the six wins were truly upsets? La Salle over Kansas State. That’s it. A genuine indicator of what college basketball has become in 2013 is that nobody should be especially surprised by this.
“They felt bad about losing to Butler and Saint Louis,” … [For more on So far, Atlantic 10 is a deserving perfect 10 in March, click here.]
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