NCAA tournament had quiet Friday

— -- What's your favorite NCAA tournament cliché?

Guards win in the tournament? Maybe you prefer the fairy tale motif: Cinderellas, slippers, dancing and so on. Perhaps your favorite March tradition is the issuing of stern warnings to friends, or colleagues, or no one in particular, that they should never, ever count out Tom Izzo.

Yes, the NCAA tournament is always rife with cliché, and clichés always have roots in truth. But they rarely bat 1,000. Guards don't always win in the tournament. The Spartans don't always go to the Final Four. Occasionally, Cinderella forgets her invitation.

Only one March axiom can lay claim to universal application. Only one cliché has a perfect record:

You never know what you're going to get.

Case in point? The first Friday of the 2015 NCAA tournament -- a day so unsurprising, so madness-free, it ended up surprising us after all.