The code on the end of the URL should obviate the need for a password, but if it asks: oiqhejr9pjogf03

UConn got screwed being a 4 seed. Facing Pitino is scary but they should be able to beat Iona on sheer talent and athleticism, if nothing else.

my alma mater, Fairleigh Dickinson University - or "Farleigh" Dickinson, according to online previews of this game by the Indianapolis Star and FanDuel, sigh - absolutely obliterated Texas Southern in this play-in game.

in the last 5 years, of the 10 play-in game winners, 3 of them are Texas Southern and 2 of them are FDU. go figure.

FDU was a slight underdog, but they got off to a 14-2 start, led by 16 at halftime, and never relinquished a double-digit lead in spite of being rated by the committee as the worst team in the tournament.

Texas Southern had one win against a tournament team - Arizona State - which by bizarre chance is playing in the nightcap tonight on the same court in Dayton.

they also are the shortest of the 68 teams - and now they take on Purdue's 7-foot-4, 300-pound center on Friday in a 1 vs 16 matchup.

brilliant head coaching hire by FDU for the season: bring in the coach of a Division II powerhouse 20 minutes away from Hackensack, he takes his 5-8 and 5-9 guards with him (and a third good player), and see what happens.

fullcourt presses, excellent 3-point shooting and foul shooting, as well as great ball movement.

no one is picking Purdue to win it all because if their star gets in early foul trouble in any game, they are quite beatable.

but not by FDU, of course.

that said, one of my sisters attended that very same Division II school before herself transferring to FDU and graduating from there.

her daughter was one year out of her alma mater, University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), when they pulled off the greatest upset in the history of March Madness college basketball a few years back - first and only 16 seed ever to beat a 1 seed (Virginia).

finally, Friday will be the 35th anniversary of a 1 vs 16 Purdue-FDU matchup on St. Patrick's Day as well (ok, Purdue won by 15. but still).

Maintaining a proper diet for your beloved pet dog is essential for their overall health and wellbeing. As much as we love to pamper our furry friends with treats, it’s important to ensure they are receiving the right nutrition in their daily diet. Nathan

Good point, Kirstie. The Huskies do need to be careful about what they eat before their big game. Nathan.

I have gone to so many different colleges, and not a one of them made the tournament. Bah.

First big upset of the tournament: Furman beats VA by one in a wild ending.

Go Gauchos! (UCSB). Nathan

Terps survive. Not expecting a miracle vs Bama in next round.

And Arizona gets bounced by Princeton. A lot of surrender cobras in the Arizona fan sections.

It's impressive how Arizona's ability to lose first-round games to much worse seeds transcends administrations.

second straight year a Jersey school wins a 15 seed vs 2 seed matchup.

St. Peter's had 8 out of 12 of its Cinderella Elite 8 squad players from last year transfer to other schools.
NONE of the 12 players made it to the NCAA tournament (St. Peter's was a 10 seed in its conference tournament but scored two upsets to reach the semis before falling short.

Welp, my bracket had Arizona losing to Gonzaga in the title game, so . . . I guess I'm not beating the zillion-to-one odds against a perfect bracket.

games in Sacramento on Saturday:

Missouri Tigers vs Princeton Tigers
Northwestern Wildcats vs..... UCLA Bruins (or UNC-Asheville Bulldogs)

in the wild - go with the Tigers, I assume

but a Bruin has a height advantage over a Tiger. could be a gruesome battle

Nothern Kentucky got that dawg in them

halftime score

No. 16 FDU 32, No. 1 Purdue 31

Purdue's second and third best players are incredibly bad for a 1 seed.

Farleigh Dickinson isn't even a *good* 16 seed.

Pitt v Iowa State a demonstration of the worst kind today. That was a disgrace.

THE INTERNET NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS

100% of brackets are about to bust.

Didn't Purdue F around with FDU like 30 years ago in a 1 v 16 game before?

Burning the whole clock when they're down 3 feels like bad coaching.

You really feel for Matt Painter, but it's a great story.

So Purdue loses to a 15 in 2022 and a 16 in 2023. That's gotta be the worst two-year run in tournament history.

14, not 15

in completely unrelated news, about 90 minutes ago, purdue's 125 lb wrestler, matt ramos, pulled one of the biggest upsets in the last 50 years in the NCAA semi-finals.

Didn't Purdue F around with FDU like 30 years ago in a 1 v 16 game before?

see Post 3.

I was at McSorley's for the first one, and yeah I watched this one at home. time marches on.

and still incredible hoops history surrounding that sister.

and the Purdue coach lost the coaching challenge by about 20 points. I knew that the FDU coach is a genius - did not realize that the Purdue guy is an imbecile.

thanks!

I knew that the FDU coach is a genius

I can only imagine how brilliant the Merrimack coach is.

FDU lost 67-66 to Merrimack in the irrelevant conference final game, surrendering the lead to a far more motivated team (for obvious reasons) in the closing seconds.

but I suspect that guy also is a good coach.

but I suspect that guy also is a good coach.

But is he a genius?

he took a job at a school that still doesn't qualify as a D-I March Madness contestant.

so, possibly not.

CLINCHED

Penn State has clinched its 10th NCAA Wrestling National Championship in the last 12 events //

It’s the 11th in school history //

It’s the 10th for head coach Cael Sanderson //



This is PENN STATE. WRESTLING lives here.#PSUwr

— Penn State WRESTLING (@pennstateWREST) March 18, 2023

I knew that the FDU coach is a genius



I can only imagine how brilliant the Merrimack coach is.

....

FDU lost 67-66 to Merrimack in the irrelevant conference final game, surrendering the lead to a far more motivated team (for obvious reasons) in the closing seconds.

but I suspect that guy also is a good coach.

The FDU coach was so smart that he didn't bother wasting any of his team's energy during the regular season, when they were ranked around the 300th best team in the country. That way, he could get his matchup with Purdue, hypnotize their coach into not getting the ball to Edey, beat them, and then all of the remaining games will be easier.

you must be a lot of fun at parties !

look, it's objectively a cool Cinderella story. so why #### on it? does that bring you some sort of joy, or satisfaction? what's your point?

if you don't find anything pleasant about this stunning upset, then it's ok to just - well, pass.

Howie, we get it. You're delighted by the upset by your alma mater. I don't blame you (though his comments denigrating his next opponent, to the camera, after the play-in game were classless, so it's not all pleasantness).

But you proclaimed the guy a genius based on a single victory against a team that played like dogshit. You have to expect some pushback.

Win or lose, Iowa's getting exposed by having only one player of creating her own shot off the dribble. And when Clark can't get penetration, their offense suffers. Their lack of athleticism is getting exposed too.

Markquise Nowell, K-State's PG, is my favorite kind of NCAA player. Knows the game backwards and forwards, owns the court whenever he's on it, probably too small to play in the NBA. He's a dazzling passer, a great dribbler, and a classic floor general. Fun player.

I always find myself rooting for K-State in both football and basketball. Good programs, but not quite successful enough to be hateable. I think it’s their color scheme, and I thought it was cool that Bill Snyder was there for a million years, retired, then came back and got the progra, right back where it was.

(though his comments denigrating his next opponent, to the camera, after the play-in game were classless, so it's not all pleasantness)

Are we really pretending that we're offended by this? He wasn't even denigrating them, he said he thought his team could beat them. It's no different than any other coach saying "don't count us out!" or "we think we've got a chance!" At any rate, you can't counter "you must be fun at parties" by getting all scoldy at something as mild as this, it just proves the allegation that you're no fun at parties.

Anyhow, congrats to the SEC and Big East for sending 3 teams each to the Sweet 16. The much-vaunted Big XII managed 2, not an embarrassment but perhaps a disappointment, given that they had 4 teams with top-4 seedings, more than any other conference. The B1G, as usual, didn't do much, with only Michigan State remaining out of 8 teams to start out.

Are we really pretending that we're offended by this? He wasn't even denigrating them, he said he thought his team could beat them. It's no different than any other coach saying "don't count us out!" or "we think we've got a chance!" At any rate, you can't counter "you must be fun at parties" by getting all scoldy at something as mild as this, it just proves the allegation that you're no fun at parties.

First, I think he was claiming that Darren was no fun at parties, but it's possible he was including me as well.

Second, I would never argue that I was fun at parties. I didn't dispute that.

Third, no, that's not what he said. He said the more he looked at them on tape, the more beatable they looked (now, as a Purdue fan I can say that he was exactly right, particularly if he was looking at the tapes chronologically). But it absolutely was an insult to their next opponent, something you never see coaches doing.

You want to say that stuff off-camera, Go right ahead. He absolutely should have been telling his team that. Or, if you want to say to the cameras, "We can play with anyone in this tournament," "we're here to win," etc., that's good too. But saying to the camera that the team you're about to face isn't really that good is kind of disrespectful, which is why the coach was saying on Saturday that he wished he hadn't said it.

Finally, is Howie really in any kind of position to scold others on their festivities merriment score?

I don't think what the coach said was disrespectful or insulting. It might have been unwise, except his team backed it up and they won.

I really don't want to encourage ultra-bland statements by overreacting and suggesting what he said was bad. Just because most coaches are so bland and paranoid about bulletin-board material doesn't make it insulting or disrespectful. He... GASP! ...told the truth. And, hey it looks like he was 1000% correct.

He didn't say they were cheaters, bad people, or even bad at basketball. There is no insult in saying basically "the more I look at it and think about it the more I think we can beat them". How is that insulting? Are we not allowed to have confidence? Turn it around and have a #1 seed coach say it about a #16 seed team. It is not an insult. It is punching down, sure, and maybe a little classless in that circumstance, but it is not an insult to say you think your team can beat their team.

I really don't want to encourage ultra-bland statements by overreacting and suggesting what he said was bad. Just because most coaches are so bland and paranoid about bulletin-board material doesn't make it insulting or disrespectful. He... GASP! ...told the truth. And, hey it looks like he was 1000% correct.

Bulletin board material is, and always has been, arrant nonsense. If you can't be motivated to play your best for winning's sake, particularly in the NCAA tournament, you don't belong there.

But have you ever heard a coach say anything like, the more I look at them, the less impressed I am, which is essentially what he said? It was disrespectful, which is why the coach regretted what he said in his interview on Saturday (even after he was proven correct).

And spare me it's OK because he was correct line of thinking. If your sister invites you over to see her six-day old infant, you don't get a pass on "Hey, that's an ugly baby" just because he's looks like Ernest Borgnine.

The B1G, as usual, didn't do much

Umm, what?

Over the past 20 or so years, the Big Ten has outperformed against their seed expectation. In fact, they've outperformed that by more than any other conference, and it isn't particularly close.

But have you ever heard a coach say anything like

That doesn't mean it is disrespectful. The reason coaches don't say stuff like that is because it is bulletin board material (which you might think is nonsense, but coaches from their actions do not).

I just don't think what he said was disrespectful. Unusual, sure.

Over the past 20 or so years, the Big Ten has outperformed against their seed expectation. In fact, they've outperformed that by more than any other conference, and it isn't particularly close.

Would love to see Michigan State carved out of that calculation. And the 2023 tournament included. And not sure what the 2000s has to do with the conference's current reputation of scandalously poor tournament performance.

A. I never watch regular season college hoops anymore.
B. I promise I texted this to a friend mid-game, this isn't just because FDU won (although is obviously colored by the fact that in the midst of forming these thoughts they were in a battle with a 16 seed):

How the hell did Purdue put together a good enough record to grab a one seed? I can't remember seeing a less impressive 1 seed, they were completely bereft of athleticism, of guys who could make plays and create off the dribble. Were they missing multiple players?

ACC only had one school (Miami) make it through the first weekend. In a vacuum, I thought Clemson should have made the tourney, 14-6 in a power 5 conference is pretty good, no matter their overall strength of schedule.

As a Duke fan, the season was satisfying overall, even though the Tennessee loss stung. Mitchell's injury really was bad luck. The team got better as the season went on, which truth be told wasn't happening at the end of K's tenure.

Derreck Lively is NBA-ready as a rim protector, and Whitehead was injured a lot, but shot very well when on the court (42% on 3s, and I think was over 50% in conference play). Heavy rumors that Jeremy Roach will graduate early and transfer.

How the hell did Purdue put together a good enough record to grab a one seed? I can't remember seeing a less impressive 1 seed, they were completely bereft of athleticism, of guys who could make plays and create off the dribble. Were they missing multiple players?

No, they weren't. They played really well before Christmas. They throttled Duke, beat up Gonzaga, etc. And even though they won the Big 10 by three games, they really didn't look very impressive for most of the conference season. The guards were exposed. They didn't have a solid second scoring option, etc.

For as long as I've been following them, both Keady and Painter have been exceptional at getting the most out of their talent (and then some) during the regular season, playing at or near the top of their ability with a consistency few match. Then they hit the tournament and everybody starts playing up to their abilities, and a talent level that rarely matches their seed gets exposed.

They had one truly elite team in my 30 years of following them, and they lost their best player to a blowed out knee about two weeks before season's end. He was never the same player after that.

Would love to see Michigan State carved out of that calculation. And the 2023 tournament included. And not sure what the 2000s has to do with the conference's current reputation of scandalously poor tournament performance.

Yeah, I agree that the AL East isn't all that dominant over the rest of the league once we exclude the Yankees too.

Sure, include 2023. By Kenpom rankings the Big Ten was expected to have .... one team make the Sweet 16.

And if "as usual" meant "we are only allowed to look at exactly the last two years, and not before, because, you know, before that the Big Ten outperformed their seeds by more than any other conference in the 2019 tournament", then sure, that works.

Yes, the Big Ten had a couple downer years in the tournament. How that can be interpreted as "of course we shouldn't expect Big Ten teams to do well" is drive-time sports talk radio level of analysis.

this may not be the thread, board, or time for this but:
you could argue that matt painter is in the midst of the most impressive regular season run in purdue history. top 20 national finishes in 7 of the last 8 seasons (top 15 in 6 of those 8). he's lost in the first round three times over that span ... but, despite this, i'd say they've performed adequately in the ncaa tourney (15-7) and over his career his team's win about as often as you'd expect based on seed in the ncaa's.
but! i've heard complaints about painter since long before the fdu debacle.

so - would people give specifics as to what they think he does well or poorly? (particularly not focusing on a specific game). he doesn't strike my as a super flexible thinker, but does generally put his players in positions in which they can succeed?
[apologies to sosh who has already done this in post 48...]

Thanks for 48, SoSH.

you could argue that matt painter is in the midst of the most impressive regular season run in purdue history. top 20 national finishes in 7 of the last 8 seasons (top 15 in 6 of those 8). he's lost in the first round three times over that span ... but, despite this, i'd say they've performed adequately in the ncaa tourney (15-7) and over his career his team's win about as often as you'd expect based on seed in the ncaa's.

And he got them closer to the Final Four than they had been since Lee Rose. Alas, that was when Kihei Clark made the exact opposite play from Thursday night.

Umm, what?

Over the past 20 or so years, the Big Ten has outperformed against their seed expectation. In fact, they've outperformed that by more than any other conference, and it isn't particularly close.

Shorten that to 10 years, and they're lurking in fifth place, behind the Missouri Valley. But congrats on finding a particular metric over a long enough timeframe that makes them look good.

I do not feel that it is controversial - or "sports talk radio level of analysis" - to opine that the B1G has regularly disappointed recently. Or I dunno, maybe you think that the LA Angels have been great recently too - look at all those division titles they've won in the last 20 years! Most of any teams in the division!

Shorten that to 10 years

And they're still performing better than their seed expectation. Congrats on intentionally hiding necessary context to arrive at your pre-determined conclusion.

Again, the argument for saying the Big Ten underperforms is based on a stretch of two years, and has to specifically avoid going to three, and now requires you to not fully comprehend the data you are looking at.

According to the...alighty PASE, every stretch from 2016-2022 (so, 2016-22; 2017-22; 2018-22; etc.) has the Big 10 underwater.

I don't think anyone here is even knocking the conference for failing to win a national championship since the year 2000. Despite adding members since then (including a school that has won a title more recently than any other B10 team).

Look, I get sensitive about the Big East, but that's mostly when there's talk about how the conference died. I can recognize that, but for Villanova's historic and nationally-beloved run, the conference doesn't have much to show for it in the last ten years. The conference would have loved to regularly send eight schools to the tournament, even if most of them would flame out in the first weekend, earning the conference a reputation for such performance in recent years.

It is crazy to me how much people evaluate conference strength based on the tournament, when these teams are all playing like 15 OOC during the season and we have a much, much larger sample size to determine which conferences are/aren't properly evaluated, but that all goes out the window based on the tournament. Especially in the tournament where there's so much parity right now due to the portal, G League, etc. and so many of the games are decided by just a couple buckets. I can appreciate the NCAA tournament is probably more representative than any individual OOC game in the regular season, but nowhere near the point it outweighs the overwhelming sample size of the regular season.

FDU coach jumps ship for Iona (thanks, Pitino !).

He has several young children who he says were upset when they found out he was getting a new job - at FDU - because they thought they'd have to move. But he still lives in the same house - and now can continue to do so (although maybe now he can afford a bigger house in the same town).

He's going from Rockland County to Bergen to Westchester in a little over a year - the STAC campus in Rockland is about 20 miles from both FDU and Iona, just in different directions.

dancing across the NY/NJ border - I know it well.

And they're still performing better than their seed expectation.

Who ####### cares, though? Like, why is this a metric that is something anyone should care about?

But regardless, I'm content to say that the B1G has underperformed over the last 10 years relative to the SEC, ACC, PAC12, and Missouri Valley, and let people think of that what they will. It's certainly a more honest way to look at it than "THEY'RE THE BEST BY A LARGE MARGIN!" which is how your original framing put it and from which you've heavily backtracked now.

It is crazy to me how much people evaluate conference strength based on the tournament, when these teams are all playing like 15 OOC during the season and we have a much, much larger sample size to determine which conferences are/aren't properly evaluated, but that all goes out the window based on the tournament. Especially in the tournament where there's so much parity right now due to the portal, G League, etc. and so many of the games are decided by just a couple buckets. I can appreciate the NCAA tournament is probably more representative than any individual OOC game in the regular season, but nowhere near the point it outweighs the overwhelming sample size of the regular season.

It's not THAT much larger of a sample size - sure, teams play 15 or so non-conference games, but like football, a lot of those are between mismatched opponents. A lot of lower DI teams play multiple games against teams from DII, DIII, or even lower classifications mixed in with non-competitive money games against the big schools. An elite program might play, what, 3-4 games against conference-caliber competition in the non-conference part of the schedule? Any more than that, and we hear about how tough their schedule is.

I know college ranking systems put a lot of weight on those non-conference games out of necessity, but I'm skeptical that they tell us much, not least of which because 15 games is a puny sample size to begin with when you're looking for connection points between 363 D-I schools in 30+ conferences (plus, as noted, the expanded universe of DII-and-lower opponents). Obviously it's still a bigger sample size than the Tournament, but still not big enough to mean much.

It's not THAT much larger of a sample size - sure, teams play 15 or so non-conference games, but like football, a lot of those are between mismatched opponents. A lot of lower DI teams play multiple games against teams from DII, DIII, or even lower classifications mixed in with non-competitive money games against the big schools. An elite program might play, what, 3-4 games against conference-caliber competition in the non-conference part of the schedule? Any more than that, and we hear about how tough their schedule is.

I know college ranking systems put a lot of weight on those non-conference games out of necessity, but I'm skeptical that they tell us much, not least of which because 15 games is a puny sample size to begin with when you're looking for connection points between 363 D-I schools in 30+ conferences (plus, as noted, the expanded universe of DII-and-lower opponents). Obviously it's still a bigger sample size than the Tournament, but still not big enough to mean much.

Texas had a non-conference SOS of 182. That's 6th worst of the remaining 16 teams (5th worst if we remove Princeton, who is an outlier in many respects).

They played:

vs. UTEP
vs. Houston Christian
vs. Gonzaga
vs. Northern AZ
vs. UTRGV
vs. Creighton
neutral Illinois
vs. AR-Pine Bluff
vs. Rice
vs. Stanford
vs. LA-Lafayette
vs. TAMUC
@ Tennessee

There are a few teams in there that sure, I'll agree "tell us nothing", your Houston Christians, your TAMUCs. But even teams like Rice, UTEP, those games still tell us something if you're taking margin of victory into account, which betting odds and any meaningful model or person judging team quality. 4 tournament teams in there as well for Texas. Then extrapolate that out across all teams in the conference, some of whom aren't in the tournament.

It tells us a lot more than tournament results especially with a sport as 'noisy' as basketball.

It tells us a lot more than tournament results especially with a sport as 'noisy' as basketball.

Sure, as I said, "obviously" it's a bigger sample size than the tournament. But it's still a very small sample size!

For one thing, I think the meaning to be derived from "did Texas beat Rice by 10 points, or 20 points?" is limited on its face, especially over the course of 15 or so games (13 in UT's case, apparently). But the bigger point is that, I mean, just think of how limited team rankings after the first 15 games of an NBA season are, and that's in a league of 30 teams. Why would we ever think that 15 games or so of an 363-team NCAA season tell us anything meaningful?

"More" meaningful, OK ... but still worthless. There just are not enough data points to tell us anything one way or the other with any reasonable degree of confidence, so why not just have fun arguing about the high-stakes tournament?

IMO this is true of pretty much every sport except baseball, which plays a ton of games a year, and in which the postseason seems like a sad mockery of results played out over the long term. But even then, we know pretty much that a 162-game season is still subject to a ton of essentially random variance.

The chart linked in 43 can be adjusted for any time period. My first inclination was to set things since 2016. Doing that dropped the Big Ten from 1st to 30th.

Hell of a game, but good lord, the end of NCAA games make the NBA look like ludicrous speed by comparison.

Speaking of the end of games, IIRC the women's game has the advance-the-ball-on-timeout rule. The men's game should adopt that. Makes for much better endings, IMO.

Im surprised Arkansas got blown out by UConn. Good talent, good coach.

Great game by FAU, who has completely clamped down on Tennessee.

I think there are orders of magnitude too much attention paid to basketball conferences. How many teams made it? How well did they do?

I don't think it says that much. I think all (or nearly all) the "information" you get looking at conferences you can get looking at the significant programs within those conferences. For the Big Ten, Ohio State matter, Michigan, and Michigan State matter. Minnesota (sob) and Penn State typically don't (except for pop-up seasons).

It is obvious, but conferences do well in the tournament when the top-shelf programs do well, or the pop-ups manage to be cinderella for a week or so. I think talking about the Big Ten being good, or bad, as expected or better or worse, is really just a back door way to attack (or support) the significant programs in the Big Ten (this applies to any conference).

There is some information for a specific year that can be aggregated - who in the conference disappointed, what major program is up or down right now, or whatever, but at its base pretending that the numbers on a conference this year versus last year say much about next year is kind of silly. I mean it says something, but it is mostly about the top end schools in the conference.


But yes, I know, it is tradition to frame everything at the conference level. I just think it is kind of misdirected tradition though, at least as far as analyzing things go. For bragging rights or whatever, have fun.

I missed a lot. First, I AM FUN AT PARTIES! Second, not trying to prevent you from enjoying your team. Enjoy! I just disagreed about the coach, maybe took you a little too literally.

Im surprised Arkansas got blown out by UConn. Good talent, good coach.

I'm a biased UConn fan who thought thought UConn deserved a 2 seed. Even thinking they were that good already, this was the best game I saw them play all year. Their defense was suffocating and relentless and their offense was hitting on all cylinders. Arkansas was just in the in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I'm a biased UConn fan who thought thought UConn deserved a 2 seed.

I mean, if you go strictly by KenPom's ratings, they should have been a 1 seed.

. I missed a lot. First, I AM FUN AT PARTIES

To quote the congressional candidate Steve Austin from 30 Rock, “I don’t believe in parties. I don’t join ‘‘em and I don’t get invited to ‘em”.

I just disagreed about the coach, maybe took you a little too literally.

so did Iona, apparently - they hired him to replace Rick Pitino 2 days later......

Noted powerhouse Iona.

Noted powerhouse Iona.

Iona just had Rick Pitino. They have enough of a budget to hire someone a lot more expensive, again. they picked this guy (who, as I noted above, might have gotten even better offers but he didn't want to uproot his family).

he's a really good coach. it's ok to acknowledge it.

I think just about everyone thought that there was less separation than usual between the #1 seeds and the rest of the field, but still, having all four #1 seeds gone before the Elite 8 seems pretty crazy. If Xavier beats Texas tonight, there won't even be any #2 seeds left.

Darren Rovell
@darrenrovell
·
6m
Most bet on teams by percentage of money at @betmgm
to win the title:

1. Alabama ❌
2. Kansas ❌
3. Houston ❌
4. Texas
5. UCLA ❌
6. Duke ❌
7. Purdue ❌
8. Gonzaga
9. Arizona ❌
10. UConn