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Wednesday, March 10, 2021
OT - 2021 March Madness thread
It seemed as if the dream of a perfect season might end for the Gonzaga men’s basketball team in the West Coast Conference tournament on Tuesday. But Gonzaga found a rhythm in the second half—the Bulldogs were down by 12 points at halftime—to maintain a spotless record by securing an 88-78 win over BYU in the title game.
Gonzaga (26-0) will now enter the NCAA tournament with an opportunity to match college basketball’s last perfect season, achieved by Indiana during the 1975-76 campaign. Per Zags coach Mark Few, the team has embraced the history attached to this moment.
Lance Reddick! Lance him!
Posted: March 10, 2021 at 08:47 PM | 121 comment(s)
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My final four:
Gonzaga, Florida State, Baylor, Houston -- Zags over Bears in the title game
Crazy #### from my bracket:
#14 Abilene Christian over #3 Texas in first round. BYU to the elite eight. No Big Ten team makes it past the Sweet 16.
Also fun that Rick Pitino makes the tournament this year with Iona and Kentucky and Louisville both are left out.
after so many decades of absolute beatdowns of overwhelmed foes - with him keeping the regulars in even in the final minutes of games with his squad enjoying a 30+ point lead - it's a bit refreshing to see Geno and "positive" for once be in the same sentence.
(obviously I wish no harm to his health. he's a dick #crossthread but I still hope he comes out of this safely, so he can have much more time to weigh his future playing time decisions for his dominant teams.)
if you're bitter that he didn't take his team's best players out of a game, send in a goon to take his best players out of the game for him.
I think this kind of thing is usually loser talk. Being roasted by Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi is an honor. I have a friend who "guarded" Allen Iverson in high school. I assure you, his greatest athletic achievement is being able to tell people that an NBA Hall of Famer lit him up a couple times a season for multiple years.
and then - it's over. the players on the losing team already have plenty of "honors" and stories to tell about it for decades to come.
from 2019:
“The majority of coaches in America are afraid of their players,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said on a conference call Tuesday.
“The NCAA, the athletic directors and society has made them afraid of their players. Every article you read: ‘This guy’s a bully. This woman’s a bully. This guy went over the line. This woman was inappropriate.’
“Yet the players get off scot-free in everything. They can do whatever they want. They don’t like something you say to them, they transfer. Coaches, they have to coach with one hand behind their back. Why? Because some people have abused the role of a coach.”
.................
Auriemma makes more than $2 million annually in base salary alone - but it's the players who get to "do whatever they want."
hmm, if that's true - I wonder why they don't want to get paid?
the guy's a dick, proving that not only men's college basketball coaches qualify for that designation.
And unlike with Greinke, I'm comfortable calling it a permanent state in Geno's case.
This was not the year to have no training camp. Duke never gelled, and the offense was a sludge factory all year. I hope Duke's backcourt (Steward and Roach) return. They were sloppy with the ball, but are aggressive, fun players. Not sure if Matthew Hurt will go pro....he's probably a second-round pick, but hey, Ryan Kelly bounced around the NBA for a few years, so Hurt might go for it.
--
i wanna do a self serving whine about georgia tech for a sec.
they're a 9 seed, which i think is a little low given how the ncaa likes to reward play later in the season (they began the season with terrible losses to bad teams, that might have been partly because gt adopted a no contact practice regimen design to lessen covid transmission risks that result in some really awful gametime defense)... and drew loyola of chicago. the top 8 teams in kenpom are all one or two seeds, loyola was #9. ridiculous.
on the bright side, at least tech's acc poty is going to miss the game.
sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
As an Illinois alum, I have the same complaints. GT and Loyola of Chicago are really good teams for the 8-9 seeds. I am not looking forward to playing either of them. I can at least kind of see why GT was placed where they were, as I believe the committee takes player availability into account.
But still a tough draw.
But, yeah, I felt for Illinois (who I do have in the final).
If that is the case, then that does not make sense either.
The 'sell the Big 10 short' bracket strategy is looking pretty good so far. Michigan State goes down in the play-in game last night (not too surprising) and Oral Roberts takes down Ohio State (stunning) today. The Buckeyes' Washington was incredibly anti-clutch in this game, playing hero ball in the final minutes of both regulation and overtime, missed crucial free throws and clanked two buzzer beaters.
Loyola-Chicago is a top 10 team in KenPom. Big time underseed.
needs more adam emmenecker
and noone who knows who andrew harrison is, knows who he is as a result of anything he's done in the NBA.
Andrew Gaze
Alaa Abdelnaby
Andrew DeClerq
Jimmer Fredette
Casey Calvary
Shea Seals
Tyus Edney
Luke Maye
Isaiah Hicks
Blake Stepp
2) If they are back to calling it the first round, have they gone back and redone all the stats to indicate as such? Things like "this team has never made it to the second round" were all messed up b/c of that 1st/2nd round nonsense.
3) If we're back to calling this the first round, has NCAA finally admitted the play-in games are a bust? Nobody cares, b/c everyone procrastinates in filling out their bracket, and most people only care b/c of the gambling aspect.
4) [i'm going to cross post this in the nba thread, so forgive the redundancy]. What do you call a 3 point attempt where the defender is kinda sorta close to the shooter and puts a hand up, but the shooter is able to take his true/natural form? Is that an "open" three? A lot of times it's from a catch-and-shoot but not always. I feel like the biggest difference between the NBA game and NCAA is that NCAA will sometimes pass up this shot. It's very frustrating b/c I'm not exactly sure why they're even camped out at the 3 point line if they're not going to take that shot. Instead, they'll drive into traffic without a premeditated plan-b and either reset the offense or force up a bad shot.
I remain disappointed that they have the lowest auto-bid teams play each other and the last at-large bids play each other rather than the lowest auto-bid teams play the last at-large bids.
Nearly every last at-large team has screwed the pooch multiple times in their chance to really secure the bid. As a result, I think they deserve the chance to be upset by a team that had to fight tooth and nail through their conference finals to get there.
I guess playing like that would #### up the rest of the bracket by giving the "worst" team in the field a chance to slot themselves in as the 48th best team. Regardless. I'd be far more interested in 16 vs. 12 games than I am in 16 vs. 16 and certainly more than two mediocre power-5 teams trying to figure out who can screw up least.
A 16 vs 16 game gives those teams a chance to win, which they don't have in the real tournament. But I feel like there's still more of an accomplishment to get into the real tournament and go up against a big dog.
There's something egalitarian about a 16-seed getting to face a #1 that they'd never be able to schedule (not even as a buy game) and hey, once in forever, they actually get to win.
the reason why 14, 15 and 16 seeds are more likely to upset 1/2/3 seeds nowadays is exactly because those terrible conference champions have to play each other to get in.
i was against these games, too, for a long time and for the reasons that have been stated, but if you like seeing huge upsets on the first day of the tournament, this is how the sausage gets made.
This isn't even remotely true. The play-in games amongst conference champions is always 16 seeds only, so it has no bearing on the 14s and 15s and the only 16 seed to ever win wasn't one of that year's two 16 seed play in winners.
...which means they'd have been a 15 seed without the play in games.
their near-upset of No 1 Michigan in 1985, in the first year of the 64-team bracket and the last year with no shot clock, may have contributed to the Wolverines losing a close second-round game to Villanova - which later shocked Georgetown and the world in the title game.
my sister also is an FDU alum - and has a daughter who had recently graduated from UMBC in 2019 - which is that No 16 seed that stunned/demolished Virginia in the first round that year - and how many people have that lineage?
the challenge with the play-in games, which are either to gain an 11 seed or 12 seed, depending on how many fluke conference champs there were - is that I think 2019 was the first time in that decade of games that neither play-in winner knocked off the better seed. not unusual for them to win a second game as well, and we even have had a play-in team make it to the Final Four.
as an FDU guy, I wish that wasn't the case, because then I could plausibly claim that they should go back to 64 teams - and screw those middling big-conference teams. but their track record is just way too good.
FDU beat Florida Gulf Coast in a 2019 play-in, which might have been the first time the Northeast Conference ever "won a game" in March Madness (although the league champ has put a scare into the big boys for a while sometimes over the years). ESPN Bracketology this year had the conference tournament favorite penciled in as a 15 seed, but they blew it in the final.
While, I still thinks it's an oversell to suggest that it has made upsets more likely in any significant way but I was clearly wrong that it has no bearing on the 14/15 seeds.
However...
I was right about this! So I'm doing a victory lap right now (and we can ignore my BYU to the EE pick).
@SportsCenter
·
1h
15-seed Oral Roberts
14-seed Abilene Christian
13-seed North Texas
13-seed Ohio
This is the first time four teams seeded 13 or worse have reached the Round of 32 in a single NCAA Tournament.
I don't think their track record is weird. While I would love to see more mid-majors who win regular season championships but get upset in their conference tournament, the 6th or 7th place power 5 team is almost always going to be better. In a single elimination tournament, that 16-12 SEC team can get a little hot, benefit from an upset or pull a single upset themselves and go a long way.
If we have to have extra teams at all l, I would convert it to a brutal reality-TV 8-team elimination tournament, playing every day: quarters on Monday, semis Tuesday, final Wednesday,
The exhausted winner then gets zero (0) days off before playing the #1 overall seed on Thursday.
(and Ohio was located in Ohio)
"As we play the Fighting Illini, we ask for special help to overcome this team and get a great win. We hope to score early and make our opponents nervous. We have a great opportunity to convert rebounds as this team makes about 50% of layups and 30% of its 3 points. Our defense can take care of that."
Yeah, they were criminally underseeded as noted early in this thread.
for a mid-major program, reaching the Sweet 16 is enormous in terms of publicity and prestige for recruiting purposes. and there are 3 or 4 days of said publicity before you have to play another game.
so you don't want to be an 8 or 9 seed and then face a 1 in Weekend 1. and not really a 10 seed, either and likely face a 2.
landing an 11, 12, or 13 slot, then, is the way to go in this respect. you tend to get a 3 after a 6, or a 4 after a 5, or a 5 after a 4 (and occasionally it's a 12 vs a 13).
that said, the rare 8 or 9 like Loyola that knocks off a 1 like Illinois gets an exponentially larger benefit. it's just not likely in most cases.
Scanning Kenpom, it looks like Loyola and Wisconsin were the two most underrated/underseeded teams in the bracket. Kinda sucks that they landed in the 8/9 seeds, as it would be very difficult to like them against any #1. I would have been giddy advancing them in my bracket if they were a 10.
The two seed actually does slightly better in getting to the Sweet 16 than the 11, but it's very close and the 12 seed is right there, too. All of those seeds are more than twice as likely to get to the second weekend as the combined probability of the 8/9 winner. It's strange that the 8 seed does so much better than the 9 really, I basically consider them equals, but the eight has done significantly better.
In that case they'd be even more underseeded. The better question is would you have rode them far if they were a 6/7 seed. From what I saw today, the answer for Loyola would have been heck yes.
and stranger because the 9 was 72-68 vs the 8 in Round 1 in the modern era, entering this tourney.
Michigan ain't gonna last much longer either...
passion is good - to a point.
he's, well, a bit out of control. needs a tall cup of decaf and a reminder that he's 48 years old.
and yes, a pitiful display by the Big 10. noticed Illinois lost by 13 to Baylor in December and beat Ohio U (not St) but 2 points. wondered if all the slobbering was warranted. no longer wonder.
For some damn reason, someone did it during a game against Northwestern this year where Illinois was losing by 15 at halftime, but ended up winning by 25. Then it became a laughable tradition afterwards; doing that every game was way more embarrassing than losing in the 2nd round.
Loyola lost to Wisconsin by 14 and also lost to Richmond and Indiana St. Illinois, while shorthanded, also beat Michigan by 20 in Ann Arbor. You can cherry pick individual games all you want, and for any other team besides Gonzaga this year you can stupidly project that out to mean anything you want.
Loyola is good - they're probably going to the Final Four again; at least Illinois didn't lose to an online evangelical school.
I don't like Clark, the Iowa freshman. She goes down to the floor like a central american soccer player. She does draw a lot of contract with aggressive drives but she apparently cannot drive to the hoop without landing hard on the floor every time.
the WNBA should be a degenerate's paradise.
. . . or to Oregon State.
This is pretty odd. As 66/67 noted, nine seeds win their first round game just over half of the time. However, in terms of getting into the Sweet 16 and beyond, the eight seeds reach further rounds at double the rate of nine seeds (9.3% of eight seeds reach the sweet 16, vs 5% of nine seeds, etc). I can't figure out if this is random statistical noise, or if there's some kind of bias in the way the committee seeds 8/9 games. It seems to me that nine seeds usually go to middling teams from major conferences - low variance teams that have completely proven that they're the 35th best team in the land, give or take. Maybe there's more variance within eight seeds - less proven teams from smaller conferences who might punch way above their weight, or might be terrible?
Their fate was out of their hands in Rd 2 vs Rutgers, which had the choice of advancing or - what they did, in the final few minutes.
am struggling to see what makes them any threat to Baylor - which looked raggedy tonight, but against better competition, and closed well.
And it'll be interesting to see how successful Chris Beard is at lifting Longhorn roundball out of its generations-long doledrums. From UA Little Rock to Texas in 6 years is a pretty decent career trajectory.
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