Expectations Mount as Experts Pick Crimson

SPOKANE, Wash.—“We gon make them respect us.”

Those six words were tweeted by Cincinnati senior forward Titus Rubles last Sunday, just after it was announced that his men’s basketball team would face Harvard in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

He was speaking to the likes of Seth Davis and Doug Gottlieb, CBS analysts who predicted on Selection Sunday that the Crimson, at the No. 12 seed, would upset its fifth-seeded Bearcat opponents.

“I'm an Ivy guy and would love to see Harvard win a game, but it's not happening. They have no chance against New Mexico. Awful draw for them.”

Those were the sentences tweeted by Sports Illustrated writer Andy Glockner before to the 2013 Big Dance. Glockner’s words, of course, turned out to be anything but prescient—the Crimson beat New Mexico, 68-62, busting brackets and propelling Harvard into the national spotlight.

Clearly, something has changed.

Ever since Harvard upset the Lobos and advanced to the third round of the Tournament, there has been an increased focus on and fascination with the Crimson around the nation. The New York Times, Slam Magazine and SBNation have all written features on the team, and for many, Harvard’s No. 12 seed takes away nothing from its ability to take down Cincinnati on Thursday.

In other words, “no chance” has become “no doubt” for Harvard fans. Getting an invite to the Big Dance is now expected—getting a victory in the Tourney is now the real test of success.

This upward trend in expectations perhaps reached its pinnacle on Wednesday morning as President Barack Obama released his own bracket in which he predicted that the Crimson will sneak by the Bearcats and advance to the Round of 32.

“I think that’s pretty cool that he picked us,” said Harvard co-captain Laurent Rivard at Wednesday’s press conference in Spokane. “He probably took notice [of us] last year, he probably didn’t pick us last year [though].”

But it wasn’t just the experts that picked the Crimson to advance. According to ESPN, of the 6.97 million brackets that had been submitted to ESPN’s Tournament Challenge by Wednesday, 30.5 percent predicted a Harvard upset.

“I think [our program] is getting recognition, I think we have been able to attain a level of credibility with our basketball program,” Harvard coach Tommy Amaker said on Wednesday. “[But] we have always talked about [‘expectations’] being an external word and we are trusting our guys that we’re always going to focus on our internal word, which is the word standards. And that’s what we have done.”

While these expectations have brought increased media attention to the Crimson, so too have they brought increased pressure. The abundance of people—expert or not—picking the underdogs t has led to the Ohio team claiming it needs to prove it can win and, as Rubles said, “make” others “respect” the Bearcats.

When told of the President’s pick, neither of the Cincinnati co-captains, guard Sean Kilpatrick and forward Justin Jackson, showed any surprise.

“It’s nothing new, we’re used to it,” Kilpatrick said Wednesday. “We’re so used to being counted out throughout the regular season that now it’s something that [is] second nature…. We can only just really focus on what matters with us and the team in the locker room. We have been counted out all year and look how far we have gotten now.”

When the squads take the floor on Thursday, the typical roles of a second-round Tournament game will be reversed. The fifth-seeded team will come out with something to prove, perceiving themselves to be the underdog. The No. 12 seed, however, will step onto the hardwood looking to validate its hype and match the level of basketball it played in last year’s Dance.

In what will be one of the first games of the second round, it appears that this matchup will already show the madness so typical of March college basketball.

—Staff writer Juliet Spies-Gans can be reached at juliet.spiesgans@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @JulietSpiesGans.