In the 1980 NCAA Final Four, Purdue and Iowa were the losers in the semifinals — to UCLA and Louisville, respectively — meaning that the Big Ten rivals then played each other in the third-place game, while UCLA and Louisville met for the national championship.
"Welcome to the funeral," said Boilermakers center Joe Barry Carroll, who would be dubbed "Joe Barry Apathy" by New York Post basketball beat writer Peter Vecsey once Carroll got into the NBA. Yet interestingly, Carroll scored a game-high 35 points in the "funeral," in which Purdue buried (just can't resist!) Iowa 75-58 (in the championship game, Louisville defeated UCLA 59-54 — and worse yet for the Bruins, they were disqualified from their runner-up finish after it was discovered that some of their players were ineligible under the NCAA's draconian rules regarding "student athletes," thus elevating Purdue to second and Iowa to third in Walter Byers' Stalinist world of erasing history).
The third-place game would be played, with all due apologies to Count Basie, one more time — the following year, when Virginia, led by center Ralph Sampson (who went on to become, in a certain way but not in the most obvious way, the Pete Rose of the NBA when, as a member of the Houston Rockets, he slugged Celtics guard Jerry Sichting in the 1986 NBA Finals, much as Rose unprovokedly attacked Bud Harrelson in the 1973 National League Championship Series) edged LSU 78-74.
No doubt it was the attitudes of players like Joe Barry Carroll that led to the NCAA abolishing the third-place game — and while the game may be gone, it is not entirely forgotten, as as this item written in Bleacher Report a decade ago proves.
Nostalgia for the third-place game fits perfectly into the narrative of what happened after the Michigan/Wisconsin game last weekend.
The day after that game, Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins got into a spirited, to say the least, discussion on ESPN as to whether the incident should lead to the end of the post-game handshake line — Smith advocating its retention, Perkins favoring its abolition.
Yet even Smith did not offer the best argument for keeping the handshake line — and that is not to give in to mob rule (or, as Obi Wan famously cautioned Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, "Don't give into hate; that leads to the dark side"). The NHL hypocritically gave into mob rule in 1993 after someone pointed out that an inordinate number of bench-clearing brawls were occurring in games between teams in the same division, and as a result went to a moronic "balanced" schedule that made differences in talent between divisions far more noticeable — and it was hypocritical because we all know that the NHL has always condoned fighting, even though they don't have the courage to admit it publicly (the NBA also refuses to schedule more intra-division games because of one admittedly ugly yet totally isolated incident that happened almost 18 years ago).
Is it too much to ask for players to line up and shake hands after a college basketball game? After all, this has been done for literally decades after each round of the NHL's Stanley Cup playoffs — in a sport where, as noted above, actual fistfights during games are condoned in everything, but name (this practice was even mentioned in an episode of Blue Bloods).
Fostering an atmosphere of sportsmanship should not be seen as "woke" — or, as the late Morton Downey, Jr. liked to say, "pabulum puke."
And while they're at it, the NCAA should bring back the third-place game, too.
After all, contrary to popular belief, in Talladega Nights, Ricky Bobby's father did not tell him, "If you ain't first, you're last." What he actually said was, "You can be second, you can be third, fourth — hell, you can be fifth!"
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