True Confession: Why I'm Rooting For Duke

Confession time: my bracket got blown up in the first game of the NCAA tournament (No, I'm not counting the nonsense in Dayton). I'd picked Iowa State as a dark horse for a Final Four run, based on their remarkable, unflappable drive to the Big 12 championship and their ability to rally from double-digit deficits. So naturally they got ambushed by the University that Ate Birmingham and went out 40 minutes into the whole shebang.

Twelve Things We Learned From the NCAA Tournament Bracket

There are certain things we learn every year on Selection Sunday: who made the cut, who didn't. What teams got screwed by their seeding and which ones got an easy path to the Sweet 16. And then there's the deeper learning, the true lessons imparted by the deeper subtext of the bracket itself. To wit:

The All Big-N-Where-N>10 Final Four

Remember when that was a thing? When the Big 10 was so dominant that we were looking at the possibility of an all-Big 10 Final Four? When it didn't look like anyone could stop the conference from unleashing the sort of dominance one normally sees in back issues of The Incredible Hulk.
That was, what, a week ago?
The Big 10 still has one team alive and in the Final Four. So does the MVC, and nobody's talking about that conference as being a star-spanning empire of destruction. The Big East - the much-maligned, collapsing in on itself Big East - might have 2. Hell, we may have a rematch of the Big East championship game in our futures, depending on whether Duke can slow Louisville down today.
All of which just goes to show that the desperate hunt for storylines and deep analysis, the quest to find Deeper Meaning and hastily impose saleable narratives, tends to make you look kind of foolish down the road. "Big 10 Dominance" was a great hook for a couple of days' worth of clickthroughs, but we're living in an age where that stuff lives forever online instead of getting wrapped around fish or dropped in the bottom of a birdcage. Perhaps a little less hyperbole and a slightly slower rush to superficial conclusions might serve the evolution of the medium better.
Then again, clicks. And I hear "Wichita State Could Win It All!" is the new hotness.

Still More NCAA Thoughts

• OK, now Florida Gulf Coast can bronze their program.
• Who here picked LaSalle to be the last Philly team standing in the tournament?
• Who here still had anyone from Philly still standing in the tournament?
• Imagine what Khalif Wyatt would have done if he'd had both hands working.
• On the other hand, you probably did have Marshall Henderson listed as first out in your "insufferable beyond belief" player elimination pool. Who's next - Craft or Plumlee?
• Can we get a Florida Gulf Coast story, just one, that doesn't mention that the coach is married to a former swimsuit model? Please? We haven't hit Easterbrookian levels of creepiness with this one yet, but it's getting close.
•  So Ben Howland is out at UCLA despite his track record, and the guy who beat him, Tubby Smith, is likely out too despite, you know, winning in the NCAAs. Sad to see that winning the prestigious CarQuest Bowl provides more job security than that, but hey, we already knew the football guys had a better deal. 
• Is there even still a CarQuest Bowl out there? And what does it say about the bowl landscape that I can't remember?
• Can we please let the tournament freaking end before the annual "Were will Shaka Smart/Brad Stevens/coach of mid-major team that made a run be coaching next year gets turned up to a boil? Stop anticipating next year's games and enjoy this year's, people.
• Is there any sportswriter out there who saps the joy out of a thrilling game faster than Darren Rovell? The absolute last thing I care about during tourney time is whether a team is paying for their own uniforms or not. Breaking that sort of story is not like breaking Watergate; it's a desperate cry for attention from the undersocialized nerd at the corner of the party who's decided to dominate the conversation by overwhelming everyone else there with obscure Star Wars trivia. Even if you like Star Wars, you still want to pour a drink on that guy's head.

Get Those Damn Mid-Majors Off My Lawn

So this year's narrative is "mid-majors had a bad day so they don't deserve high seeds!" Which is, of course, arrant nonsense. Plenty of teams from the quote-unquote "power" conferences - and by "power" I mean "plays football" - have gone down like slabs of beef as well. But a couple of uncharacteristic performances - VCU getting run out of the building? Wichita State hitting 7 3s in a row? - have got the BCS cavemen yammering to beat the band.

Why Your Team Won't Win the NCAAs, Part II

Picking up where we left off yesterday...

Team: Duke

Why Your Team Won't Win The NCAAs, Part I

Right now, there are 67 teams that think they can win the NCAA basketball tournament. (Harvard, on the other hand, thinks they can just buy the entire operation, and so playing in it is kind of pointless.) There are reasons each of these teams thinks they can pull it off, ranging from the perfectly logical ("We're Duke") to the perfectly specious ("Our mascot could eat their mascot"). That being said, only 1 team can be crowned the winner, which means everyone else will fall by the wayside. Here's a look at the reasons some of your favorite squads are doomed:

Midnight In the Madison Square Garden of Good And Evil

We shall not see their like again. But at least Rollie cleaned up a bit

As I've mentioned elsewhere, rooting for a conference is a lot like rooting for a law firm. For all of the protestations of tradition and competition and everything else, it's a business partnership and nothing more. When the first rumblings of dissolution shook the Big 12, nobody remembered that it had been built on the still-warm corpses of the Big 8 and the Southwest Conference. Coach K might have ranted against Maryland leaving the tradition and the rivalries of the ACC, but once upon a time Duke bid the Southern Conference a hasty farewell. And Louisville, well, Louisville basketball's been a part of 6 different conferences over the years, not that anyone's rushing to hand a nine-figure TV deal to the Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. 

That being said, I find myself sad that the old Big East is dead.

Your Handy-Dandy Guide To NCAA Tournament Jargon

And nary a triple bye to be seen

As we get closer to the NCAA's annual bake sale and Kickstarter disguised as a basketball tournament, the media's fancy turns to thoughts of brackets. Mock brackets, bracketology (which really ought to be the study of the things that hold shelves up), last in the bracket, first out of the bracket, what would it take for someone to use some brackets to pin Joe Lunardi to a wall until, say, August - you get the idea. And with that come certain words that everyone feels compelled to use in conversation to show that They Know What They Are Talking About. As a result, the next week or so will be filled with enough college basketball jargon and ill-informed speculation about who's in the field of 64, no, 65, no, 68 to choke a moa. Most of it will, of course, be used incorrectly.
With that in mind, here's our quick guide to the phrases you'll be hearing a lot and what they really mean:

• Bad Loss - A loss to a team of vastly inferior talent, which supposedly gets counted against you by the tournament selection committee. Bad losses include losses to schools with directions in their name (that aren't North Carolina), losses to schools from small conferences, losses to teams whose conferences don't have broadcast deals with ESPN, and losses to teams who get bused in so that they can pick up checks to fund their athletic departments for the rest of the year.
• Bid Stealer - A worthy team from a traditional one-bid league who loses in their conference tournament but gets selected to go anyway, reducing the number of available bids for big conference teams who did stupid things like lose to Boston College. Implied in the name is that the teams in question don't actually deserve their bids, which is why when you get a Lehigh beating a Duke in the first round, it's like a goddamn national holiday.
• Body of Work - A team's entire season, generally referenced to support the tourney case of a major conference team who has been good but not great, and especially not lately.
• Bubble Team - A team whose record is generally good enough to attract attention from the selection committee but not good enough to merit automatic inclusion. Bubble teams come in two varieties: big-conference teams who've tripped over themselves multiple times, usually against teams they should have beaten like a drum, and small-conference teams with gaudy records who can't get anyone from the big conferences to play them. Speculation about bubble teams largely exists to keep fan bases of teams with no chance in hell of winning the thing engaged before the reality of an NIT bid and a second-round game at Niagara sink in. 
• Cinderella - Low-seeded team, generally from a smaller conference, that knocks off a big name or two. Much beloved of the media in the early rounds, when they make a good story. Much less beloved in the later rounds, because they keep knocking off teams guaranteed to draw higher ratings and have more fans travel. In a perfect world, all of them except two lose before the round of 16, where the two survivors will play each other and the victor promptly gets steamrolled by a team from Michigan. An instance of multiple Cinderellas causes panic in television executives, who have not yet figured out that their camera technology can make anyone look like a superstar, even a guy from George Mason, for a thirty second promo.
• Cutting Down The Nets - What winning teams in the tourney do to get a souvenir, because the stuff they're soaking the tourists for on the concourse is way too expensive for college students to afford.
• Don't Sleep On This Team - Because it's made up of guys who are probably much more comfortable on the basketball court than being used as mattresses, even after they underachieved this year.
• Good Win - A win over a strong team, which theoretically impresses the selection committee. Also known as "The three games Duke throws away in conference per season".
• Hot Team - A bid to look at a team's recent record only when trying to judge their tourney-worthiness. Generally marshaled in support of teams that lost to someone from the MEAC before conference play.
• Last Out  - The four teams sitting just outside everyone's made up tournament bracket. The fact that they are called "Last Out" conveniently ignores the fact that since they're in a mock bracket, they were never actually "in". Inevitably includes one of the following: Temple, Dayton, or Southern Miss
• Need To Make Some Noise In The Conference Tournament - A team with a decent record who can pretend to be better than they are by winning a couple of games over conference bottom-feeders to get the winning percentage up. Usually, there are between three and six teams in any given conference tournament that need to make some noise, which leads to second-round eliminations for some of them and what the sound engineers of my acquaintance call "not making noise".
• One Bid League - A league whose talent level is considered so low that only the conference tourney champion will get an NCAA invite, and then only because it's the rules. Generally, you know if a league is in one bid territory if the league name could apply equally well to either a a prog rock or an Americana band.name. (Doubt me? Try this: "Let's have a big Branson welcome for the Missouri Valley Conference!" Alternately, "Playing the hits of Pink Floyd, ladies and gentlemen, the Horizon League!")
• One Seed - The team on the "top line" of a bracket. The subject of fevered speculation over whether they will be the first top-rated team to lose to a 16-seed when they go down 6-4 after two minutes of play, before turning on the jets and running the SWAC champion out of the building.
• Play-in Game - Alternately, a game before the round of 64 between two teams that are there because they have to be, and this is a way of getting rid of them before they annoy Kansas, or a game between two underachieving major conference teams added to the tourney to give their conferences an extra water pipe hit of that sweet tourney cash. Designed expressly to irritate the crap out of the guy responsible for putting together the office bracket pool.
• Pod - A grouping of teams within a bracket that actually isn't grouped, designed to allow higher seeds to stay close to home. In reality, an explanation for why Dayton will be playing New Mexico in East Rutherford, NJ in an South Regional Game at 2 and Arizona will be playing Missouri in a West Regional Game in East Rutherford, NJ at 5.
• Regular Season Champion - The team with the best conference record during conference play. That, and a couple of bucks, will get you a cup of coffee, but not an automatic bid (unless you're in the Ivy League).
• RPI - The mystical statistic that theoretically determines how good a team his. Roughly equivalent to WAR in baseball in that it's a rough estimate built of assumptions, unlike WAR in baseball in that the fan base at large has embraced it because they see in it an easy way to lobby for their favorite team. The lower the RPI the better. Not to be confused with Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, which has never qualified for the NCAA tournament. RPI is easily gamed through schedule shenanigans, as the Missouri Valley Conference demonstrates every year. The strength-of-schedule component's also spectacular at rewarding schools in big conferences, even if they get stomped regularly, and penalizing schools in small ones.
• S-Curve - The model used for seeding teams in the tournament, familiar to anyone who's ever done an online fantasy baseball draft. In theory it results in the fairest matchup of teams in the tourney. In reality, there are so many secondary rules about teams from conferences not playing each other before a certain round and "protected" sites for higher ranked teams and whatnot that the S-curve is really more of a Final Tzadee Curve.
• Strength of Schedule - Theoretically, how good the list of teams a team played is, with a side of "how good were the teams they played". In reality, a way to get rewarded for getting your head beaten in by Florida twice a year.
• Triple Bye - What certain high seeds in certain conference tournaments get as a result of having a weird number of teams in their conference after being raided by The Conference Formerly Known As The Big East. Generally, a team with a triple bye doesn't have to play in its conference tournament, they just have to wait around for all the other teams to knock one another off, then accept the conference's automatic bid.

Team From State Starting With "K" Wins NCAA Title

And so endeth possibly the blandest NCAA tournament in recent memory. In the end, the chalk talked. A few untimely absences (Fab Melo, Kendall Marshall) maybe made Kentucky's road to the title a little easier than it might have been, but really, nobody works the system better than John Calipari these days. Come play for me for a year, we'll win games, and I'll turn you into a lottery pick - what kid in his right mind would refuse that? You go 29th in the draft, you wash out of the league in a couple of years, you've still got plenty of cash to go back and finish up that degree with. It's a no-brainer.
But yet this year, ratings be damned, seemed ultimately dull. Too many of the close games were close because one or both teams spent the second half clanging shots off iron. Too many games turned into throttlings. And while it was fun to celebrate Norfolk State and "We messed up people's brackets", all the bracket-messing-up was essentially gone by the end of the first weekend. Hell, even the usual frenzies of "how's your bracket? how's your bracket" seemed muted this year; everyone knew the answer. You picked Mizzouri or Duke, you were screwed. You picked any other high seeds, you were generally fine for a good long way.
So congrats to Kentucky, and hopefully the fires will be out soon. (Seriously. One report from a Lexington, KY police scanner indicated that the cops were just letting the small fires burn, because they were stretched too thin already to deal with every minor act of arson). Here's wishing its players well at the next level; when interviewed they generally seemed like decent folk as well as transcendent talent, and it's a cinch they're not sticking around. And already, no doubt, the Joe Lunardis of the world are putting together their first brackets of the 2013 tournament, because it's not enough to enjoy what just happened; we need to be on the way to the next thing already or else we risk becoming irrelevant.
Of course, if you keep rushing away from the things you've built up as important, that's a way to get irrelevant, too. But don't tell Lunardi and his ilk. They've got a 15-2 game a year from now to make a completely random guess at, and to someone other there, it matters.

How To Beat Kentucky

Is it cynical to suggest that in all the "how do you beat Kentucky" analysis going around ahead of the Final Four, the best answer is the one that's not being spoken: Wait a few years and have the NCAA force  Calipari's former employer to vacate the wins?