Columnist Ron Kantowski: NCAA tournament isn’t perfect, but it’s close

Monday, March 21, 2005 | 9:03 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

With regard to the NCAA basketball tournament, some people see things as they are and say why; one man dreams things that never were and says why not.

It was RFK who said that, and I don't think he had March Madness in mind in that his alma maters, Harvard and Virginia, never really busted any brackets, the presence of 7-foot-4 Ralph Sampson notwithstanding.

But this is the time of year when another RFK (the "F" stands for free throw, the only shot I could ever make) laces up his high-top Cons and launches a two-hand set shot, hoping to draw iron on ways to make a great event even greater.

These are some of the suggestions I've either made in this space or taking up space on a bar stool:

I still think these ideas have merit, some more than others, so I'll stand by them, lest I start sounding like that Seth Davis guy on Cingular at the Half-cocked. Beginning with his Final Four pick of Syracuse and dismissals of Utah and Andrew Bogut and Texas Tech and the latter day Santa Claus (which is what a kinder, gentler Bob Knight is calling himself these days), this guy flip-flopped more often than ... well, do I have to say his name?

But you didn't need an Ian Eagle eye to appreciate that the opening weekend of the tournament produced some reality TV that would have had "Survivor" voted off the island even before Alabama.

There was little Vermont, with a star named Taylor Coppenrath and four guys who spend the off-season tapping sugar maples in the Green Mountains, beating Syracuse, just two years removed from the national championship. There was little Bucknell, with all those biomedical engineers, showing Bill Self and Kansas that there's no place like Oklahoma City to spring a colossal first-round upset.

Every place that CBS took us for a live look-in, there was something to look at, be it Cincinnati and back yard neighbor Kentucky tearing around the court in front of a frenzied football-sized crowd in Indianapolis or another one of those teams with a hyphen in its name making Milwaukee famous.

And it wouldn't surprise me if West Virginia and Wake Forest are still trading gravity defying 3-point howitzers somewhere between Morgantown and Winston-Salem, given the nature of their game that seemingly would not end -- not that you wanted it to.

I've never been much of an NCAA sympathizer, given the hypocrisy of a system that would have you believe the value of a college education is roughly equal to that of a network TV contract.

But I would think that even a forward thinker like Bobby Kennedy would concede that it does a pretty good job of putting on a basketball tournament.