The Men's Selection Show

The NCAA lacrosse selection show on ESPNU reminded me of a line from the BBC show Blackadder

It started badly, it tailed off a little in the middle and the less said about the end the better. But apart from that it was excellent.

Really, it wasn't dreadful. It was...let's go with "interesting."

I'm not sure why it took an hour to reveal the 16 teams. It was the biggest waste of time since the writers of "Dallas" killed Patrick Duffy's character, and then realized one year later that the show stunk without him, so they brought him back and pretended that Victoria Principal had dreamt the whole thing.

Or, if you're going to take an hour, don't show an *updated* graphic near the beginning that names the teams with the most current consecutive NCAA tournament appearances. Talk about spoiler alerts: That was mind-roastingly incompetent.

The folks at Navy and Georgetown knew right away their fates. The graphic showed Navy with five consecutive appearances; funny, because they entered the day with four. Meantime, Georgetown was not on the list. Since they entered with the second-longest active streak, even the most oblivious Hoyas fan had to know something was up. How brutishly insensitive.

The true measure of the show's haziness was that it was impossible to tell which teams were playing where in the quarterfinals. And that was sort of a big deal for fans around here, considering one of the quarterfinal hosts is the Naval Academy. It took Johns Hopkins SID Ernie LaRossa to tell people who was going where for the quarterfinals.

I turned off the show before it ended (deadlines), so I'm not sure if anyone from the NCAA selection committee made an appearance to answer questions. (Though I don't think anyone did.)

That question-and-answer segment is one of the strongest parts of the CBS basketball selection show. Last night, Lacrosse Committee Chair Tim Pavlechko, a senior associate AD at Bucknell, answered questions about the tournament selection process on CBS College Sports.

About Georgetown, he said this:

"We were very committed to staying tryue to our selection criteria...When you get to strength of schedule, that's where we had a huge bundle of schools, so we had to go to our secondary criteria...And when we went to that, we ended up with Georgetown, unfortunately, not in the tournament despite their outstanding year."

ESPNU wasn't a completely lost cause last night. Quint Kessenich is sharp and opinionated and his forthright-ness is very good for the sport. ESPNU has some very good game analysts--Kessenich and Matt Ward in particular--so here's hoping the first round games and quarterfinals go smoother than last night.

Because right now, ESPNU is the equivalent of Duke pulling the hugely snotty move of leaving the field after the National Anthem in the championship game last year. They wanted to make a big entrance. To which most fans said, we're not here to see you. We're here for lacrosse.

By Christian Swezey |  May 5, 2008; 6:42 AM ET
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Posted by: VA Terp | May 5, 2008 5:45 PM

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