Written by Chris Chase at Fox Sports.com
Woof. That’s all you can really say about the Oregon-North Carolina national semifinal in Phoenix, if you wanted to say anything at all, thus risking the chance of retaining the smallest memory from a game everybody will hope to forget. How can a 77-76 Final Four game involving the ACC and Pac-12 champions, one a No. 1 seed and one of the most storied programs in college basketball history and the other a thrill-a-minute squad with a handful of stars, be such a dog? How could a game that came down to the final seconds and was tight for the final five minutes be so horrific to watch it should have come with a TV-MA tag?
Was it UNC, up one point, missing four free throws in the final six seconds?
Was it Oregon, down one point, failing to rebound two of those free throws in the final seconds?
Was it Jordan Bell, who had been so great off the glass in Oregon’s defeat of Kansas last week and was so again on Saturday, literally failing to touch anybody on those two missed free throws, treating the most crucial defensive rebound of his life like he was lined up alone in the final seconds of a 15-point loss – and then doing the same exact thing one minute later?
Was it an officiating crew that featured everybody’s least-favorite referee, Ted Valentine, clogging up the game with ridiculous whistles, ticky-tack fouls that disqualified star players and actions that suggested they believed the 77,000 fans in Phoenix were there to see them?
Teddy Valentine was a bad & obnoxious @NCAA official 30-yrs ago when I was in school. Surreal 2 see him in the @FinalFour . No better now.
— Rex Chapman (@rexchapman) April 2, 2017
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