1’s and 3’s, Please
The top seeds held serve, while the two seeds double-faulted in tonight’s Sweet Sixteen match ups.
Thabeet Goes On – UConn’s Hasheem Thabeet put thabeetdown on the Purdue Boilermakers, who have never beaten a 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. So far the Huskies certainly are the most impressive of the 1 seeds, although I still contend that they will not overcome the iron law and win the championship. (For those who have been sleeping, the iron law is that no team has ever lost the first game in which they played in their conference tournament and gone on to win a national championship.) CBS is really trumpeting the fact that the two times Connecticut has won the title, they played in the West regional.
This game was the Pitts – Horrendous shooting, both from the field and the foul line marked the game that ecks-zavier should have won. Instead, they ecks-zitted with no ecks-cuse beyond their ecks-traordinary penchant to make bad mistakes at the worst possible time. Pittsburgh finally broke its tournament curse of four Sweet Sixteen appearances without a win, but I am firmly convinced that this brawl-ball team has zero chance of winning the whole thing.
Oh – Ver – Ate – Ed (clap clap clapclapclap) – The Duke Blue Devils continued their recent tournament trend of over-seeding and underachieving, being absolutely blown out of the gym by Villanova. A quick look at the Carnage Report shows that this was not what the contest expected, with nearly 25% of our contestants picking Duke to advance to the Final Four. This is a game in which Duke simply was not competitive. Villanova’s impressive win sets up a Big East showdown with Pitt for a trip to the Final Four.
Paper Tigers – What a bizarre game the Missouri vs. Memphis, Tigers vs. Tigers matchup turned out to be. At one point, Mizzou led by 24 points…in the second half! They then proceeded to do what most teams do with a 24-point lead. They stopped playing the way that got them the 24-point lead and started playing hold-the-ball-and-pray-you-don’t-lose. Why do teams do that? When has that ever accomplished anything other than allowing the opponent to mount a comeback? Wake up, people. Dance with the one that brung ya. Folks, Mizzou did their best Indiana Pacers imitation in the last 10 minutes of this game. They could not have tried any harder to lose this game. Tentative play, horrendous free throw shooting, stupid fouls, the whole bit. Play like that will not get the job done against UConn, but speaking of fouls…
Where did they get these guys, the NBA? At one point in the second half of the Missouri-Memphis game I wondered aloud if the referees had been recruited from the ranks of the NBA officials. How many times did a shot go up, and the zebras waited to see if it went in before blowing the whistle? I’m glad you asked. TOO MANY. This is one of the many reasons I stopped watching the NBA altogether. The bail-out call is an idiotic insult to the game and the fans. If I could figure out how to do it, I’d invent a whistle that wouldn’t blow more than 0.5 seconds after a shot is attempted. If it’s a foul, it’s a foul, whether the shot goes in or not. The late whistle spoils the integrity of the game. In the end, it didn’t matter, since Memphis couldn’t hit a free throw to save their lives. Ok, enough of that soap box.
Just a few awards tonight, since there were just a few games.
Round 3 Halftime Awards
The Hey, You Got Your Peanut Butter In My Chocolate Award goes to Ralph Forey, whom I finally have identified as the guilty party in the “who broke my contest standings ticker?” caper. I don’t know how many of you actually use the standings ticker (there is a link on the home page and on the standings page), but I noticed from day one that it was not working properly. The bottom row of the ticker wasn’t working, and I could tell it was starting over before showing all the rankings were displayed. I couldn’t figure it out, since I hadn’t changed the code. Then I noticed that, oddly, Ralph’s score was alwaysthe last one displayed, no matter what position he was in. Further investigation revealed that Ralph set his alias to “<Enter Nickname Here>”. For all the programming geeks out there, the ticker works by extracting all the data from the database and shoving it into an XML stream. Ralph’s alias was interpreted as an XML tag, and an undefined one, at that. Kaboom. Thanks, Ralph. Next year I put a filter in the alias input to strip out angle brackets.
The Fantastic Four Award goes to 15 contestants who picked all four of tonight’s games correctly with original picks: Abbi Collins, Amy Dailey, Brent Thacker, Caleb Davis, Christopher Randazzo, Devan Bailey, Holli Heffner, Jeff Little, Joe Jenkins, Matthew Moritz, Mike Boger, Neal Cunningham, Richard Stickney, Scott Booher, and Wyatt Sprague. Winners will receive an autographed photo of Jessica Alba.
The Detroit Lions Award goes to 10 contestants who picked all four of tonight’s losers to win, thus going 0-4: Anderson Cooper, Coda Snyder, David Vandre, Isen Schafer, Margaret Dean, Maria Randazzo, Mike Desch, Pete Klinker, Ramona Wicht, and Vanessa Sopke. Winners will receive Detroit Lions season tickets, a $12.99 value. By the way, those who lost all four games tonight due to the fact that they failed to re-pick a team they had already lost in an earlier round do not even get a dishonorable mention.
The Best Name Change Award goes to David “I have no hair left to” Brush. ‘Nuf said.
The Better Late Than Never Award goes to John Lederman for failing to keep track of what time zone he is in. John tried to enter his re-picks just before 6:00 PM…central daylight time.
Parting Shots
The game to watch tomorrow is Louisville vs. Arizona. A win by Arizona is worth a whopping 20 points to the folks who picked them – a 9 point scategories bonus plus an 11 point upset bonus. If this statistical impossibility happens, it could really shake up the standings, especially considering how many folks have picked Louisville to go all the way.
Another interesting development I see in this year’s contest are the number of Final Four and Championship picks that are legitimate contenders that qualify for a scategories bonus. Scategories bonuses carry increasing significance in later rounds of the contest, since they are multiplicative – 3 times the point value for the game. A scategoriesnational champion pick is worth 30 points! To put this in perspective, 109th place is within 30 points of the leader right now.
More games, more commentary, and more awards tomorrow night. Stay tuned!
The Wizard