Marquette cannot repeat NCAA magic

NEWARK

The last time Marquette encountered North Carolina in the NCAA Tournament, its coach famously cried tears of joy, and departed as a national champion.

Thirty-four years after Al McGuire's emotional moment in Atlanta, another variety of tears was in order for the Golden Eagles here Friday night.

Well, at least everyone would have understood if coach Buzz Williams went that route after his team got off to a spectacularly awful start in an East Regional semifinal and lost, 81-63.

Instead, the Marquette coach chose stoicism, dryly breaking down his team's first half implosion mostly in statistical terms. Fifteen points? Twelve turnovers? Zero assists? Twenty percent shooting?

"We were completely uncharacteristic in every facet of the game,'' he said before allowing himself this one bit of blunt commentary: "In the first half, we were pitiful.''

So went any hope of this Marquette team following in the footsteps of the 1977 squad.

Thursday, Mayor Cory Booker had joked the reason Newark is known as "Brick City" is "because of my outside shot.''

Truth is Booker would have been an improvement for Marquette, which appeared to take the city's nickname way too seriously. At one point late in the first half, the team was 4-for-26 from the field, with most of the 22 misses not close. The drought enabled North Carolina to score 17 points in a row.

By halftime it was 40-15, the lowest intermission score for a North Carolina opponent in an NCAA game since Pittsburgh had eight . . . in 1941.

(Strange but true: The Tar Heels went on to lose that game, 26-20.)

North Carolina kept it up, leading by as many as 32 points early in the second half before understandably getting a little bored and allowing Marquette back within 14.

But there never was a serious doubt that North Carolina, the bluest of college basketball blue bloods, would hold off the Golden Eagles, a team that relies heavily on former junior college players but was unable out-scrap the favorites.

True, Marquette was the lowest seed among the 11 Big East teams in the tournament and was the underdog Friday night. But there was no excuse for laying an egg of this magnitude.

"Very frustrating,'' guard Darius Johnson-Odom said.

The trampling left the conference with a single team in the Elite Eight: conference tournament champ Connecticut.

It hurt just a little bit more that it happened on familiar turf, on the court used by Seton Hall in the first NCAA game ever held in this city.

The Prudential Center was full -- and colorful -- for the big night, even though community and arena officials privately had hoped Syracuse might make it this far because of its large metropolitan area fan base.

There is no telling how the Orangemen would have fared as a Big East representative here. But Newark had to settle for the one it had. Now it's gone.

The conference has taken more abuse than it has deserved for its NCAA flop. But there is no denying the results thus far have been disheartening.

Williams, a colorful, talkative Texan, has been compared to McGuire, a colorful, talkative New Yorker, but he went out quietly.

He did gamely point out Marquette's 51.5 percent shooting in the second half and its eight assists to six turnovers in the final 20 minutes. But he didn't pretend that was enough.

"To beat a team like that,'' he said, "you have to be that way from start to finish.''