Tough To Survive And Advance When Your Players Are Strangling Each Other During Timeouts

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I am familiar with the Privateers' NCAA tournament resume. To do so I would also have to pretend that I knew that the University of New Orleans had Division 1 sports before last night, and no one would buy that I'm that knowledgable about college basketball even if I had Dickie V. selling it for me. Still - without knowing a single thing about their roster - I think it's safe to assume that it isn't built for the Madness of March. I try to refrain from counting teams out as Cinderella stories, but when you can't make it through the final minutes of a tightly contested play-in game without one of your players summoning the on-court persona of Spree...well, you probably don't have the mental make-up to run a six game gauntlet through programs more talented than you.

Having ice in your veins is generally a characteristic of all the teams that are able to outlast their original seeding, and New Orleans' blood was reaching a boiling point before they even had a number to call their own in the Round of 64. Sucks we didn't get a cheap, mid-tourney tangent out of a guy whose name perfectly fits his home city like Travin Thibodeaux, but playing with a "guard" that couldn't even protect his own neck wasn't lending itself to the type of chemistry that equates to long term success. The pressure only builds the further you go, which means that even if they advanced to the Sweet Sixteen it's possible that they all wouldn't have survived.