By Chris Dufresne
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - There is talk of expanding the NCAA tournament to 96 teams, but why not shoot the moon and make it 150?
Nah, don't stop there. Let every school in to the pool, provided it can produce two peach baskets and a mascot.
And while we're at it: change Coke's formula (it worked well the first time), replace the ivy at Wrigley Field with honeysuckle and paint Notre Dame's football helmets candy-apple red.
Or, before anyone gets any more bright-red ideas, just leave fantastic enough alone.
The early hours of this year's basketball tournament proved that the system, at 65 teams, works - there's no need to build an office over the garage.
Friday's action couldn't hold Thursday's socks, but only because Thursday produced the biggest wasted workday in the history of 9-to-5.
Friday tried.
No. 13 -seeded Wofford almost beat Wisconsin, No. 12 New Mexico State gave Michigan State a scare and No. 15 Morgan State jumped to a 10-0 lead over West Virginia ... before losing by 27. Arkansas Pine Bluff, which won its play-in game against Winthrop, lost the play-out against Duke.
Friday's school of the day was No. 12 Cornell, which took out Temple en route to the Ivy League's first tournament win since 1998. Missouri and Georgia Tech, both seeded No. 10, pulled off mild upsets against Clemson and Oklahoma State.
Thursday, though, had us at the first sneaker squeak. Its 16-game package featured three overtime games and five double-digit-seeded schools pulling out wins, led by No. 14 Ohio's outrageous ouster of No. 3 Georgetown in the aptly named venue of Providence. Georgetown was the beast that had just knocked Syracuse out of the Big East tournament, and Ohio was the ninth-seeded team entering the Mid American Conference tournament, which it, somehow, won.
"A lot of people throughout the year kind of doubted us," Ohio's Kenneth Van Kempen, a 6 -foot- 10 senior center from the Netherlands, said .
Not "a lot" of people, Kenneth ... try everyone. But that was before a sprinkle of tournament pixie dust advanced Van Kempen and Co. further into Nether, Nether land.
Ohio didn't defeat Georgetown; it sent the Hoyas to the Sequoias, 97-83, and started the Big East on a bleed that would end at 1-3 on the day with the victory being No. 2 Villanova's double-overtime win over No. 15 Robert Morris.
The Big East earned eight bids into the tournament and - just think - an expanded tournament might have produced two more.
Villanova was vanilla-ova and needed overtime to hold off Robert Morris, which opened the season with a 40-point loss at Syracuse.
The San Jose subhub, which hosted West and East regional games, provided the most bang for your bucket.
In the morning, Danero Thomas of No. 13 Murray State hit the buzzer-beater against Vanderbilt that led to the Racers erasing the no-more No. 4 Commodores. Thomas said his game-winner was the opposite of no sweat.
"I work on it every day in practice," he said of the 15-footer that earned Murray State a Saturday date against Butler. "I probably shoot 200 to 300 shots a day."
Later, in the same gym, Washington's Quincy Pondexter shimmied down the lane and banked in a leaner with 1.7 seconds left to lift the No. 11 Huskies to an 80-78 upset of Marquette. Washington had trailed by 15 in the second half. There were rumors the Huskies might not have qualified had they not captured the automatic spot by winning the Pac-10 tournament.
Pondexter's shot hit close to home; he was raised in somewhat-nearby Fresno.
"Not only is it close to my home," he said, "this is the NCAA tournament. There is no other feeling like this. It's a moment I'll cherish forever."
Pondexter, a senior, was, in the end, running on fumes, passion and fear: "The fear," he said, "of it being my last collegiate game ever."
In New Orleans, Wake Forest ended Texas' dismal (after a 17-0 start) season in overtime, 81-80, on Ishmael Smith's pull-up jumper with 1.3 seconds left. Smith, a quick, 175-pound senior guard, was ordered to go Tyus Edney (coast-to-coast) on his final push but ran into traffic around the free-throw line.
"I knew I had to pull up," Smith said. "And thank God I made a big shot."
Earlier, Old Dominion had survived a final three-point rim-rattler to defeat no-luck Notre Dame, the Irish getting sent home the day after St. Patrick's Day.
Every team that survived sent another home.
Jimmer Fredette's 37 points lifted Brigham Young over Florida in double-overtime. The Gators had won 12 straight NCAA tournament games dating to their back-to-back NCAA titles in 2006 and 2007 , while BYU had not won in its last seven tournament tries.
Florida missed shots to win at the end of regulation and the first overtime.
"We had a second life or a third life, whatever it was," Fredette said. "You're playing for your life, you know."
Thursday's heroes came in all shapes and sizes.
Omar Samhan, St. Mary's 6-11 center, came up big, finishing with 29 points and 12 points in the 10th-seeded Gaels' win over Richmond. And Northern Iowa's small guy, 6-foot senior Ali Farokhmanesh from Iowa City, came up long by hitting the clinching three-pointer against Nevada Las Vegas.
"It wasn't planned or anything," Farokhmanesh said of his winning three. "I think we just went with it, and it worked out."
Not a bad start for a 65-team tournament. It's hard to think you could expand on that.