I’m a superstitious fellow when it comes to sports. We recently entered the year of the dog on the Chinese zodiac. I jokingly suggested to a friend that you should take as many dog mascot teams in the NCAA tourney as possible. I should have listened to my own advice. A team named the Retrievers that nobody had ever heard of, from UMBC, a school nobody had ever heard of, just pulled off a miracle.

I watched every second of this game. The Retrievers played like a team of destiny. They didn’t just beat a #1 seed in Virginia, they blew them out. It was kinda the old basketball cliche’ of UMBC hit their shots while Virginia missed theirs. It was a David vs. Goliath level performance. It’s insane to think that Virginia dominated the ACC regular season and tournament only to lose to a team that only made the tourney on a last-second shot.

We have had a lot of crazy first’s in sports of late.

• First Super Bowl to go to overtime + biggest playoff comeback. (Patriots)
• Buzzer Beater to win NCAA Tournament (Villanova)
• The 1st walk-off win in NFL playoffs that wasn’t a field goal. (Vikings)
• 1st walk-off TD in OT by Alabama to win NCAA Championship.
• Now we have the first 16-seed to win a tournament game. Sports are awesome. Unless you’re Virginia.

The Year of the Dog is Officially a Real Thing.

Gonzaga and Butler (both Bulldogs) both won their respective round of 64 games. As far as I can tell those are the only teams represented by dogs in the tournament.

*Teams named for wolves do not count because I said so.

Tennessee is represented by the volunteer but they have a Blue Tick Coon Hound as their mascot and they also won in round one.

What does this mean going forward? Are the Browns destined to have a great draft now? Is Georgia going to win the National Title in Football? All I know is that the dominoes have begun to fall…