So How Did We Do?

Yesterday, we made some predictions about the NCAA tournament bracket. Let's see how we did, accuracy-wise:

• St. Mary's and Monmouth got jobbed out of berths, and Wichita State got tossed into a "First Four" game. Meanwhile, questionable major conference selections like Syracuse, Michigan (both of which we called out) and Vanderbilt got in.

Things You Will See On Selection Sunday

We at Sportsthodoxy boldly predict the following things will happen when the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament seedings are announced:

• A deserving mid-major that lost in their conference tournament (Wichita State, Monmouth, St. Mary's - pick one) will get jobbed out of a bid that is instead awarded to a less impressive major conference team (Syracuse, Michigan, South Carolina - pick one?).

Badger Badger

In the wake of last night's upset of undefeated #1 seed Kentucky, and the subsequent crumpling in disgust of brackets everywhere except the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region of North Carolina, I give you, without comment, this:

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:

Why UMass Was Rooting For a Meteor

There was one thing guaranteed in last night's UConn-Kentucky championship game: UMass fans were going to feel screwed regardless. 

Why?

DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON!

My initial instinct was just to write DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON about five hundred times, claim I'd hit word count, and hit publish.

But that would be wrong. Or at least, a little eerily reminiscent of The Shining.
So, let us take a moment, and some verbs, to consider the University of Dayton, which has advanced to the Elite 8 when nobody thought they'd be in the Big Dance to begin with.

DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON DAYTON ahem. Excuse me.

8 Things We Will See Moving Into The Sweet 16

• There are 2 AAC teams still alive in the tournament: UConn and Louisville. There is one ACC team: Virginia. Look for ACC fans to start pre-emptively claiming Louisville as one of their own, even though the Cardinals don't jump conferences until next year.
• Roughly 98% of the locals grousing about how all of the NC Triangle teams have been bounced from the tournament will mention Duke and Carolina. Some will mention NC State. Almost none will mention North Carolina Central, which, at 28-6, had the best record of any of the bunch.

Random NCAA Tournament Thoughts So Far...

A few stray observations from the tournament so far...

• A 5 seed is code for "you were in the Top 10 earlier in the year but you're playing like crap now".

Your Handy-Dandy SECOND Guide to NCAA Tournament Jargon

Last year, we published a guide to NCAA tournament jargon. As part of our ongoing outreach effort to educate, illuminate, and pre-write blog posts for GDC week, we are proud to present a further translation guide of bracketologist-to-English:

"A team no high seed wants to face" - A tournament team from a small (read: one-bid) conference that can play defense, shoot threes, and keep from turning the ball over. Teams like this have a habit of getting hot just often enough to send Kansas home in the first round once every five years; as such, this has become shorthand for "team that has a slim chance of pulling an upset so please watch the first-round games from Dayton". No team with this designation has ever gotten higher than a 13 seed.

Guest Post: How To Win A Large Portion Of A Billion Dollars

Every so often we turn the mike over to someone else, in part because we welcome other perspectives and ideas, and in part because anything anybody else writes is word count that we don't have to generate.

In that vein, we're pleased to welcome a contribution from game designer Rob Newns, who offers an interesting take on Warren Buffet's offer to pay a billion dollars to anyone getting a perfect bracket in this year's NCAA tournament. 

Because We Are Nothing If Not Timely...

Some thoughts on the NCAA basketball title game, courtesy of our own Sean Kiley...

So I don’t watch a lot of college basketball during the regular season. I just find regular season games to be boring as hell and all very similar. I have, however, in the past, taken the day off of work to watch the first day of the tournament. (I said I was “sick with March Madness.” I actually used that when I missed a class in college. The professor was Pakistani, and thought it was a legitimate illness until the other guys in the class started snickering.) I really think that the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is the best sporting event of the year. No seven game series, upsets galore, and kids playing their hearts out, living and dying with every lead change. I missed out last year, not having the time to watch most of the tournament. I’ve had two reasons to get into the tournament more this year:

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.

Random NCAA Tourney Thoughts

• Thus far, this is the year of the furious second half comeback that falls just short. Sorry, Villanova.
• Florida Gulf Coast should just bronze its program now. It will never get better thn beating a number two seed in the tournament after beating another 2 seed earlier in the year.
• New Mexico. Possible 1 seed. Not so much.
• Selection committee, get on ths - next year, we need an opening weekend matchup between Georgetown and Belmont. The high seed that always loses vs the darling upset pick tht never wins? Must see TV right there.
• Yet another reason to hate Duke - Ryan Kelly referred to the round of 32 as "the third round". Which it technically is, but NOT THE POINT.
• Not a good year for The Big East. But we knew that already
• Where exactly did those "Montana over Syracuse" nonsense picks come from, anyway?
• Hoping for LaSalle to make a deep run so they go diving into that classic Lionel Simmons footage.
• Notre Dame seems to have forgotten the "Fighting" part of their name. Or perhaps they didn't have room for it after they packed the green knee socks

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:

Your Handy-Dandy Guide To Teams That Think They Got Screwed Out Of the 2013 NCAA Tournament

Every year, there are teams that claim that they got screwed out of a spot in the NCAA mens' basketball tournament. These teams tend to fall into two categories: teams from big conferences mad that teams from little conferences made it, or teams from small conferences mad that teams from big conferences made it. The truth is, once you get to a certain level it's all a crapshoot anyway, and nobody who's on the razor's edge for an 11-seed play-in game has a hope in Hattiesburg of winning the thing. (OK. Except for VCU that one time). But still, people squawk, and as such, it's our responsibility to give you a little information on why.

Without further ado, let's meet the screwed.