Air Force was good at men’s basketball in 2007. Finished the year ranked 20th in KenPom. Got a top seed in the NIT. Made it all the way to the Final Four.
But there, they lost.
They lost to Clemson by a point.
I’ve been thinking about that Air Force team lately, and how our lives would be different had they won. On the one hand, West Virginia wouldn’t have won, which would have been sad, because I like West Virginia. But the implications are bigger than that. Air Force could have become a premier college basketball program. “Take flight” and all that. The Mountain West could have had that one more team necessary to usurp the Pac-12 during some bad Pac-12 years that were to come. Colorado Springs could have become the boomtown Denver has become.
But the implications are bigger, even, than those.
Think of the morale boost our armed forces would have experienced had Air Force won the 2007 NIT. I’ll give you a second.
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Ok, you envision that? You pick up what I’m laying down here?
There’s no way we would have lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had Air Force won the 2007 NIT. There’s just no way.
Remember that the next time someone tries to tell you the NIT is meaningless.
