Kentucky Dominates Kansas to Win Men’s College Basketball Championship

I made a personal vow last night before the game to stay off Facebook if Kentucky won the national championship. A vow I'm proud to say I kept and continue to keep as of this writing. I'm not boycotting it altogether, I just want to give it time to push all the "C-A-T-S! CATS! CATS! CATS!" status updates to the bottom of my news feed after Kentucky's dominating win over the Kansas Jayhawks last night in the NCAA championship game.

I'll be honest, I don't follow college basketball that closely. The season starts in November, right in the middle of the NFL and college football seasons which takes up 100% of my sports focus beginning in late August. By the time football season ends with the Super Bowl in February, the college basketball season is 3/4 of the way over which is too late in mind to catch up on things I've missed.

With that said, I grew up around IU fans which in turn led me to not like two teams, Purdue and Kentucky. While I didn't attend IU, I have a few friends that did (and did my fair share of partying on it's campus). But my admittedly fair-weather following of the Hoosiers started in grade school with a good friend of mine who's dad had basically transformed his basement into an Indiana University shrine. One whole wall was covered in IU replica banners of their championship seasons, along with plaques that contained actual pieces of old courts, and photos of then-coach Bob Knight including one taken just after the infamous chair throwing incident.

However, I will give Kentucky credit. Led by Anthony Davis, Doran Lamb, and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, they pretty much owned Kansas from the opening tip on their way to a 67-59 victory and the eighth national championship in school history. I even had them picked to win the whole thing on one of my brackets in the office pool (allegiance to one school goes out the window when money is on the line).

What bugs me about the win isn't that Kentucky was that good, it's more the fans, particularly the one's in Lexington who decided to "celebrate" by setting fire to cars and destroying property after the teams win against Louisville on Saturday night. That night of revelry lead the Lexington Police Department to have additional officers in full riot gear on the streets to deter anyone from going absolutely nuts-o after last night's game. While no cars were tipped over and set on fire like after Saturday night, the Lexington Courier-Journal reports that "more than 30 'nuisance' fires" were started and a couple dozen arrests were made.

I'm all for celebrating your team's championship win, regardless of sport, but at what point does "YAY! We won!", become "DESTROY EVERYTHING!"? My guess is when ridiculous amounts of alcohol are involved. I'd hate to see what would have happened had they been on the losing end. I could be writing about burning houses right now.

I remember being beyond thrilled when the Colts won Super Bowl 41 a few years ago, but at no point did the thought even enter my mind to take my excitement to the streets of Evansville and set anything on fire. To each their own I suppose.

I realize that I may be stereotyping all UK fans based on a few "bad apples", so if you celebrated in a respectable way last night then congratulations, feel free to update your Facebook page accordingly.