March Madness is one of the most exciting times of the year for the sports community. What brings madness to March is the 64-team NCAA tournament for college basketball. This tournament ranges from the best of the best college basketball teams to ever be assembled, to some of the more unknown programs in college basketball. One of those dominant teams were the 2019 Duke Blue Devils. This Duke squad had four future NBA players in their starting five, and three of them would be top ten picks in the 2019 NBA draft. Everyone that followed college basketball that year was sure that it was Duke’s year to win the tournament, however Michigan State, who were the underdogs in that game, managed to pull through and defeat the dominant Duke squad to advance to the Final Four. Teams who are heavy favorites lose every year in this tournament and that is what makes it absolute madness.
Hayden Battjes, 20, of Grand Rapids, filled out his own bracket, but for him the bracket hasn’t gone well so far.
“It hasn’t been looking too great,” he said, however his National Champion Kentucky is still alive as the Sweet Sixteen kicks off this week.
Both Michigan and Michigan State were placed in the same region of the bracket, so it is very possible that they will match up in the Elite 8, which many Grand Rapids Community College students are hopeful will happen. Battjes himself is a Michigan fan and has been happy with the way they have played so far. But he is not confident in Michigan’s chances in a possible matchup with the two-seeded Spartans, “I think MSU would win that game,” said Battjes. For context, Michigan has to get past the one-seeded Auburn Tigers in the sweet sixteen, and Michigan State would have to win their sweet sixteen matchup against the Ole Miss Rebels.
The Collegiate interviewed a student who had a much different opinion on this potential MSU versus Michigan matchup in the Elite Eight. Braylen Outwater, 19, from the Grand Rapids area, has a few March Madness brackets of his own.
“My Michigan State bracket is doing pretty good. It’s like top 200 thousand out of millions of people, so not bad,” said Outwater.
Michigan State is Outwater’s favorite team in college basketball and he has been very pleased with the way that the Spartan’s season has been going. When asked about how he felt about MSU’s chances of winning the tournament, Outwater said, “We have one of the deepest squads in the nation, which not many other teams have.”
He has a lot of confidence in this MSU team to make a deeper tournament run than previous years, but when he was asked how he felt about the possibility of MSU and Michigan playing against each other in the Elite Eight he was very certain that MSU was not going to win, “I don’t think we can beat that Michigan team three times in a row, especially since they would have to beat Auburn and they would have so much momentum going into that game against MSU,” Outwater said.
Despite the uphill battle for Michigan to make it to the Elite Eight, as they would have to take down the top team in the country, anything is possible in March Madness. MSU certainly has no walk in the park game considering Ole Miss, who is the sixth seed, took down North Carolina, who is known for tournament success, and MSU barely beat them in overtime earlier in the season. Ole Miss cruised past North Carolina and then beat down on Iowa State who was a three-seed. These games could go any way and who knows what the matchup will be in the Elite Eight, but just the fact that there is a possibility of MSU and Michigan playing each other for the first time in NCAA tournament history is very exciting to all MSU and Michigan fans.
