Mailbag: UVA hoops still gets hell for UMBC, but Purdue’s loss to a 16 got nothing

It seemed that when UVA played in the tournament in 2019, there was so much coverage/rehashing of the loss to UMBC throughout the tournament. I did not notice nearly the same attention paid to Purdue losing as a 1. Not saying it was not mentioned.

Maybe I am wrong, not a big deal, but thought it was interesting.

Did you notice the same or not?

Russell

Yeah, no, I didn’t notice anything near the level of talk about Fairleigh Dickinson beating Purdue last year as we saw with UMBC beating Virginia back in 2019.

It’s been five years, and we still hear from the national media about UMBC, as much as, if not more than, what happened a year later.

I know because every time I hear it, I say out loud, what happened in 2019 doesn’t happen without UMBC in 2018.

How much of this is, UVA and Tony Bennett are boring, bad for basketball, Pat Forde is a dick?

Hey, fun fact: the women’s championship game between Iowa and South Carolina on Sunday, the one that outdrew the men on Monday night, was the highest-rated college basketball game since, wait for it, wait for it, the 2019 national-title game between Virginia and Texas Tech.

It’s hard to imagine that 19.6 million tuned in that night to see Texas Tech.

Maybe, just maybe, the TV folks should have hyped the Fairleigh Dickinson angle a little bit more. Maybe more than the paltry 14.8 million that watched Purdue-UConn would have jumped on to see what was going on.