Monthly Archives: March 2009

A Brief Introduction

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Opening Thoughts 

The big day has finally arrived.  It’s like Christmas without the credit card bills.  The games tip in about 30 minutes, and the stragglers are frantically pumping their picks into the contest at the last minute.  Once again, we have set a record for number of entries in the contest, 465.  Of those 465, a whopping 132 are first time entries.  Good luck to all the contest rookies!

Let me take a moment to say that it is never too late to request a private group or to join one.  Private groups have no impact on the overall standings.  They are just a means of tracking a smaller group of contestants more quickly and easily.  So, if you have been invited to join a private group but have not done so yet, you still can.  If you would like to request a private group, just send me email.

Name Game

One of my favorite aspects of the contest is reviewing the clever aliases many of you come up with.  With that in mind, I would like to being this year’s contest commentary with a few aliases that I feel are worthy of retort.

  • Braden “It’s on like Donkey Kong” Murray – What does that mean, exactly?
  • Chad “The Night Owl” Wright – A man after my own heart.
  • Clint “Give me one win!” Haydon – No gimmes.  Make the putt.
  • Kathy “Love This Time of Year” Dickerhoff – Me too.
  • Chuck “IU was robbed by the cmte” Sage – No. IU was robbed by Kelvin Sampson.
  • Nathan “is that the money I’d save with Geico?” Inskeep – Cue the music…”I always feel like, somebody’s watching me…”
  • Toby “Prisoner of Gravity” Risner – Aren’t we all?
  • Jason “Inigo Montoya” Dailey – Prepare to die.
  • Vanessa “1st will be last & last will be 1st” Sopke – Not in this contest.
  • Christopher “Michigan Finally Made It” Randazzo – Enjoy it while it lasts.
  • Andrea “im gonna beat my daddy” Little – In your dreams.
  • Kelly “I pretend like I know how to pick ’em” Renier – Don’t we all?
  • Cody “Da Wabbit Swayer” Boswell – Be vewy, vewy quiet.
  • Justin “The Juice Is Loose” Dailey – I think they make a pill for that.
  • Andrea “I’m in it to win it” Bauschek – Is there another reason to be in it?
  • Jeremy “How many kids do I have” Elmore – More than me.
  • Brian “My days of basketball are over” McBride – Sad, isn’t it?
  • Fess “Last Place Again?” Bryson – If you insist.
  • John “i wanna be like jeff when i grow up” Lederman – Flattery will get you nowhere.
  • Jim “BasketCase” Burris – You said it.
  • Lilly “I don’t know what I’m doing” Richardson – That seems to be a common sentiment.
  • Tim “Where’s the IU button?” Glassley – It’s labeled “Esc”.
  • Jonathan “I Love Your Blog” Barndt – Gee, thanks!
  • Bethany “I like Blue…So I picked Blue Teams” Davis – If you win…
  • Scott “I.P. Knightly” Whitlow – Too much information.
  • Maggie “I have a sports betting problem” Hayes – You’ve come to the right place.  No betting here.
  • Tim “The Procrastinator” Darnall – Better late than never.

And now, the Jason Bourne award for most clever alias goes to my three favorites.

  1. Jason “Gimme the Rock and” Roehl – Knowing that most folks would mispronounce his last name with a long O sound, this is incredibly clever.
  2. Kory “Hoops! I Did It Again” Wilcoxson – Kory will received an autographed mugshot of Britney Spears.
  3. Brock “Obama” Zagel – No comment necessary.

Other Quick Awards

  • The Definition Of Insanity award goes to the man who keeps using the same losing strategy year after year, Bob Hillman.  Bob picked all 32 lower seeded teams to win in the first round.  Yes, this guarantees that you get all the upsets correct.  However, the average number of first round upsets per year is seven.
  • The Upset Stomach Award, sponsored by Prilosec, normally goes to the person who picked the most first round upsets.  However, this year we had three contestants pick 32, 31, and 30 first round upsets, respectively.  I have decided to discard those due to their sheer irrationality.  Therefore, this year’s award goes to Dave Barndt and Matthew Hand, who each picked 24.
  • The Playing It Safe Award goes to those contestants who picked all 32 favorites to win in the first round: Ted Barger, Tina Buchanan, Elizabeth Davis, Luke Gilbert, Rick Morgan, Matthew Myers, and Callie Jo Shepherd.
  • The Going For The Jackpot award goes to six folks who made the rarest pick of the contest, a first round victory for Robert Morris over Michigan State.  The winners are Anderson Cooper, Bob Hillman, Bronson Hillman, Wazzu Spike, Ben Watkins, and Kelly Wright.

Obligatory Statistical Observations

Contest veterans know that there are certain observable historical trends in March Madness that fascinate me.

  • No seven seed has ever made the Final Four.  This is bad news for fans of Boston College, California, Texas, and Clemson.
  • No team has ever lost the first game in which it played in its own conference tournament and gone on to win the national championship.  It may shock you to discover that this iron law eliminates tournament favorites Pittsburgh, UConn, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
  • Only three times in the 64 -team era have all four 12 seeds lost in the first round.  In fact, it is much more likely that at least two 12 seeds will win at least one game.
  • Speaking of Pittsburgh, the last time the Panthers advanced past the Sweet Sixteen was 1974!
  • 22 of the last 30 national champions have been 1 or 2 seeds.

Ok, time to watch a little hoops!  I’ll be back with the midday observations and awards around dinner time.

The Absurdity of the Play-In Game

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It is normally not my practice to publish commentary this far in advance of the start of the tournament, but I feel a certain compulsion to share a brief rant on one of the more peculiar absurdities of life – the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Play-In Game.

A bit of history is in order.  The DIV I Men’s Basketball Championship has as its humble beginning a field of eight teams vying for the not-so-coveted title.  Through the years, the inexorable advance of both time and American corporate greed expanded the field to sixteen, then 32, then 40, then 48, and then finally 64 teams in 1985.  At 64, the NCAA seemed to have reached the magic number, the perfect balance between competitive relevance and profit motive.  The field remained at 64 teams for 16 years.

But then came the dawning of the new millennium, and with it, the strangely inexplicable addition of a single team to the field of 64.  The party line, undoubtedly, is that this 65th tournament bid was created to allow one more “little guy” the opportunity to go to the big dance who might not otherwise have been invited. 

Hogwash!

As far as I can tell, this game has no purpose beyond making one more at-large bid available to the whimpering masses of bloated power conferences who regularly complained of the injustice of sending only seven teams to the tournament instead of eight.  To right this egregious wrong, the NCAA selected the two conference champions least-deserving, in their opinion, stripped them of their automatic-bid status, and sentenced them to this farce in Dayton, OH.  Tomorrow night, in the presence of their adoring fans and what must be an underwhelming TV audience, Alabama State and Moorehead State will battle for the dubious honor of becoming the cellar-dweller of bracketdom, the 64th and final seed in the yearly epic, the winner of the game that absolutely no one cares about. 

The reward for victory in this nonsense is certain death at the hands of the tournament’s top seed, a 30-plus point annihilation on national television.  Is this supposed to be good for the school’s reputation?  For the program?  Is this supposed to boost morale?  Hardly.  These poor schmucks are the sacrificial lambs tossed to the lions so that Arizona can keep its streak of consecutive tournament appearances alive.  Perhaps the fine folks of Alabama State and Moorehead State consider themselves fortunate to even be considered.  Perhaps they hold on to the impossible dream of cementing their place in the pantheon of March Madness lore by becoming the first 16 seed ever to topple the mighty number 1.

Forget it.

It is not going to happen.  No 16 seed, much less the last 16 seed who had to play a game just to bea 16 seed, has ever won a tournament game.  I know it is chic to say, “Some day, it will happen,” but folks, come on – it is never going to happen.  Ever.  The 16 seeds are the Trekkian red-shirts of college basketball, the expendable characters necessary for the introduction to the episode, but wholly irrelevant to the dramatic conclusion.  Some will protest, I am sure, with stories of Hampton and Fairfield and how close they came to pulling it off.  These are merely aberrations sprinkled in the drama to keep it interesting – to keep us watching.  The truth is that nothing short of a forfeit resulting from unspeakably tragic circumstances will ever be enough to overcome the statistical impossibility of a 16-over-1 upset in March Madness.

Which makes this play-in debacle all the more absurd, but hey, what do I know?  I am sure you will all be riveted to your TV sets tomorrow night.  And if the victor miraculously should prevail against Louisville, they will achieve their basketball immortality, and I will sharpen my knife and fork for a healthy plate of crow.

Cynically,

The Wizard of Whiteland