Basketball
drorzel | March 17, 2007I saw very little basketball on the second day of the tournament, because I had a meeting at 1:00 that ran until almost 3:00. I watched a bit of the second set of games between that and going to a faculty-student St. Patrick's Day event at 4:30, and then dozed off during the games after dinner.
Not much to say about the second day, though, They at least managed some dramatic games-- VA Tech rallied to squeak out a win, scoring the last twelve points of the game to win by two, and #2 seed Wisconsin trailed by almost twenty before rallying to win. Oregon squeaked out a win over Miami University…
drorzel | March 17, 2007A few days back, commenter igor eduardo kupfer compiled the log5 predictions for the first round, and tried to come up with a test of their validity. We didn't agree on anything, but for the sake of intellectual honesty, here's a breakdown of how those predictions fared, binned in 10% groups (so 0.5-0.6 collects those teams for which the winning probability was between 50-60%):
0.5-0.6: 2-2
0.6-0.7: 3-1
0.7-0.8: 4-1
0.8-0.9: 8-2
0.9-1.0: 9-0
(These records are approximate-- it's possible that I've misremembered a game here or there, but I've just come in from shovelling a foot of snow out of…
drorzel | March 16, 2007The first day turned out to be a little disappointing, from a fan's perspective. There were only two upsets by seed, and one of those was an 8-9 game. Other than that, the higher seed won all the games, and most of them weren't all that close.
CBS demonstrated a real gift for switching to a close game right before it became a blowout. They did this three times in rapid succession in the afternoon session, leaving Georgetown's thrashing of Belmont to look in on Old Dominion just as Butler started to pull away, then changing to Oral Roberts just as Washington State caught fire, and finally…
drorzel | March 15, 2007Maryland held off a tough Davidson team to win, 82-70, in a game that I saw basically none of. By the time the BC-Texas Tech game wound down to its uninteresting conclusion, Maryland had built up a fairly secure lead, and there were only a couple of minutes of garbage time left. I gather that Davidson shot the lights out from three-point range early, but cooled off in the second half, and the Terps were able to use their superior size to good effect down the stretch. But, as I said, I saw none of it.
Boston College beat Texas Tech in a game that managed to be both close and dull. This was…
drorzel | March 15, 2007While I am taking the day off to watch basketball all afternoon, I will not be live-blogging the first round, the way I have the last couple of years. I realize this is a huge disappointment to about two people out there, but since typing on the laptop got me crippling muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder, it's just not worth it.
I do, however, want to get a few thoughts out there on record, before the MAryland game tips off shortly, starting with the fact that I wouldn't be all that surprised to see the Terps drop their game this afternoon to Davidson. When they play well, they have the…
drorzel | March 14, 2007Posting has been basketball-heavy of late because, well, there isn't much else going on that I find all that interesting at the moment. More importantly, though, it's the Season of the Bracket...
I'm not the only one affected, of course, though many people who don't care about hoops have to find other outlets for the impulse to construct match-ups between various concepts, and arrange them in a single elimination tournament:
Locally, there's the Science Spring Showdown. I'll be announcing the first-round winners in the "Orbit" bracket on Friday, and while my decisions are final, they are…
drorzel | March 13, 2007... is blogging about basketball.
Of course, this was inevitable, because college basketball is inherently a liberal sport. There's no sports analogue for welfare and affirmative action better than the "atuomatic bid" system that allows small conference champions into the NCAA tournament, giving them the same chance at the title as teams from the power conferences.
College football on the other hand, is the quintessentially conservative sport, at least in the modern Republican sense of "conservative." Two teams are hand-picked from the power conferences to play for the "championship," while…
drorzel | March 13, 2007As threatened in passing earlier, I went through the NCAA Tournament field, picking the games based on the ranking of Ph.D. programs in Physics (I set the "Scholarly quality of program faculty is high" weight to 5, and left everything else off). I entered it on Yahoo, which provides a spiffy PDF version for those who want to see the full bracket.
The Final Four ends up being Maryland, Texas, Illinois, and Stanford, which would've made some sense about five years ago, but isn't really all that likely this year...
drorzel | March 13, 2007With the annual Office Pool Season now open, lots of people are queueing up to offer advice on how to fill out the bracket sheets for our national foray into illegal gambling:
Inside Higher Ed offers a bracket based on graduation rates, with a Final Four of Florida, Virginia, Michigan State, and, um, Holy Cross. Perhaps this isn't the way to bet...
If you'd like statistical backing for your bad picks, Ken Pomeror is breaking down the regions, predicting the West and Midwest today.
The New York Times offers two strategies for winning contests: 1) foolishly pick the wrong team, for example,…
drorzel | March 12, 2007There's been a lot of commentary already about how the NCAA selection committee short-changed the smaller conferences. Only six small conference teams got at-large bids this year, half the number from a few years back.
This actually understates the problem, though. Not only dis the committee take too few small teams, in a few cases, they also seeded them to play each other, rather than putting small schools against big schools. Take, for example, the 5-12 game in Maryland's region, which pits Butler against Old Dominion-- two small-conference programs who received at-large bids. Two of the…
drorzel | March 12, 2007So, the NCAA brackets are out. Syracuse got left out of the field, which is what Jim Boeheim gets for sneering at the selection committee in public. And also for not playing a game outside the state of New York until late January...
Maryland, at least, is in, seeded #4 in the St. Louis region, where they'll play Dave Munger's Davidson team in Buffalo on Thursday. They're doomed.
Why are they doomed, you ask? Well, for one thing, Davidson has a pretty good team, and is just the sort of program that Maryland might easily overlook.
More importantly, though, they're cited in the New York Times as…
drorzel | March 11, 2007The site was silent yesterday because Kate and I drove down to The City to surprise my grandmother and father (her birthday was yesterday, his is Tuesday), and see a Broadway show (about which more later, maybe). That means a slight delay in the accolades for some little guys, but fortunately only one automatic bid was handed out Friday:
Holy Cross: The Crusdaders of the College of the Holy Cross (a name that sounds like it ought to describe something other than a basketball team) beat Bucknell Friday to win John Feinstein's favorite conference. It's the first time in three years that they've…
drorzel | March 9, 2007Stealing a topic from sports radio: Dick Vitale is a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame. Should he get in?
Much as I hate the guy, I think I have to say yes. He's an absolutely terrible game announcer at this point-- more often than not, he's so busy babbling about other teams, other sports, and Jim Boeheim's hot wife that he forgets to actually comment on the game he's being paid to watch. But he is widely liked by casual fans of the sport, and has been instrumental in raising the profile of college basketball, so he probably does deserve recognition.
Of course, some people think…
drorzel | March 9, 2007Karma is a bitch.
I left work a little early yesterday, because I saw that both Maryland and Syracuse were playing at 2:00, on ESPN networks, and I was finished with my meeting in time to catch most of the second half. Not only did I get home to find that the Maryland game was only on pay-per-view, but both of them lost. Syracuse lost by six in a game where they shot 16-28 from the free-throw line (at one point, they were 9-20), while Maryland played a horrible game and lost to Miami. They did have a shot to tie, but really, there's no excuse for falling behind a 12-19 team by fifteen points…
drorzel | March 8, 2007This idea is stolen from Colin Cowherd, a pinhead on ESPN Radio, but even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn. I'm going to list a bunch of abbreviations below, and you tell me which are the initials of conferences in Division I basketball, which are agencies of the US Government, and which could be either.
For example, "MVC" would be the Missouri Valley Conference, which is a basketball conference, while "NACIC" would be the National Counter-Intelligence Center, a government agency. "ACC" could be either the Atlantic Coast Conference or the Air Combat Command.
The full list of twenty…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Lest it be said that I never say anything nice about anyone from Duke, let me second Dave's recommendation of Al Featherston's article about coaching consistency at the Duke Basketball Report. It being a Dukie publication, he goes on rather too long about the greatness of Mike Krzyzewski, but the opening point about how even the best coaches in the business can't avoid off years is excellent.
Lest it be said that I'm going soft on Duke, though, let me also link to Dave's most-hated Dukies post, with a bonus list of hated Tar Heels. Because nothing's as much fun as ragging on hateable players…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Two more automatic bids handed out last night:
Central Connecticut: The Blue Devils beat Sacred Heart in a battle of small Connecticut schools, winning the Northeast Conference title behind 25 points from Javier Mojica. The high-profile UConn Huskies lost to Syracuse yesterday in the Big East tournament, so Central Connecticut will be the sole representative for the state. Who woulda thunk?
Weber State: pronounced "Wee-burr" and best rememebred for upsetting North Carolina back in 1999, the Wildcats earned a bid to the NCAA's by winning the Big Sky tournament over Northern Arizona last night…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Three more automatic bids last night, earning three teams their coveted one-paragraph summary on Uncertain Principles:
Wright State: The shocker so far (for small values of "shocker"), the unranked Raiders beat #19 Butler to win the Horizon League title and a trip to the NCAA's. Though Butler is nationally ranked, they were co-champs with Wright State in the regular season, and Wright State won the tiebreaker and got to host the championship.
North Texas: The Mean Green assured that tehre will be at least one school witha color nickname in the field of 65, beating Arkansas State behind 24…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Four more automatic bids to the NCAA's were won over the last couple of days:
Creighton: The Blue Jays almost don't deserve to be thought of as a "little guy" any more, given that this is their seventh win in the last nine years. They did, however, have to beat a ranked Southern Illinois team to get the bid, so I think they still count.
Virginia Commonwealth University: If you want to be George Mason, you have to beat George Mason, which is what the Rams did. I saw the last two minutes or so of this one, which was one of the most impressive individual game-changing performances I've seen.…
drorzel | March 5, 2007The ACC Season came to a bloody and unpleasant end last night, with Duke's Gerald Henderson busting UNC's Tyler Hansbrough open with an elbow to the face in the final seconds of a Carolina victory. Henderson was ejected from the game, and will reportedly be suspended for Duke's first-round ACC tournament game.
(My take: looking at the replay, I think it's clear that Henderson was going in there intending to hit Hansbrough. It don't think he deliberately hit him in the face, but the way he came flying in from an angle disn't leave any room for him to not foul Hansbrough. It ended up worse than…