Morry Gash / AP

Wisconsin-Milwaukee coach Bruce Pearl leads one of the NCAA Tournament's true Cinderellas —  a rarity this year, writes NBCSports.com's Mike Celizic.

After the first round of the 2005 edition of March Madness, all we were reading, hearing and talking about were upsets and glass slippers, from Milwaukee-Wisconsin to Vermont, and UAB to Bucknell.

Then they played the second round, boiled the stew of 65 teams down to a Sweet Sixteen, and when the smoke cleared, just about every Cinderella wannabe was road kill and what you had left were the same usual suspects we see every year.

Six of the survivors are guys with championships — Texas Tech’s Bobby Knight, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Arizona’s Lute Olson, Kentucky’s Tubby Smith, Louisville’s Rick Pitino, and Michigan State’s Tom Izzo. Two others, Oklahoma State’s Eddie Sutton and UNC’s Roy Williams, have seven Final Four appearances and 76 tournament wins between them.

So much for all that work you put into breaking down the match-ups. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort if you had just filled out your brackets by ignoring the team and going first with the coaches who had won a title and then with Sutton and Williams. If you had done that, you’d have lost only Syracuse and UConn along the way, and you’d still have half the remaining field alive and kicking.

Slide show   March 27 See images from the wins by Michigan State and North Carolina on Day 8 of the NCAA Tournament.

Sort of takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?

After the first round, I was all set to write about how exciting college basketball was becoming, with new contenders sprouting like weeds all over the sport’s landscape. But after just one more round, I’m left with the same old cast we see every spring.

And all I can say is when is somebody new going to break out of the pack of also-rans and inject some true excitement into the game. This isn’t March Madness; it’s March Blandness.

Sure, there are eight coaches who haven’t been within sniffing distance of a title, but even there you have Washington, Illinois, Wisconsin and Villanova, all of whom have had decent programs; Villanova even has one championship. That leaves Milwaukee-Wisconsin, Utah, West Virginia, and N.C. State. And even there, the Mountaineers are a Big East team and N.C. State is from the ACC, and it’s never surprising to have teams from those conferences make noise.

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