The first day turned out to be a little disappointing, from a fan’s perspective. There were only two upsets by seed, and one of those was an 8-9 game. Other than that, the higher seed won all the games, and most of them weren’t all that close. CBS demonstrated a real gift for switching to… Continue reading NCAA Tournament 2007: Chalk on Day One
Category: Basketball
First Round Update
Maryland held off a tough Davidson team to win, 82-70, in a game that I saw basically none of. By the time the BC-Texas Tech game wound down to its uninteresting conclusion, Maryland had built up a fairly secure lead, and there were only a couple of minutes of garbage time left. I gather that… Continue reading First Round Update
NCAA Tournament 2007
While I am taking the day off to watch basketball all afternoon, I will not be live-blogging the first round, the way I have the last couple of years. I realize this is a huge disappointment to about two people out there, but since typing on the laptop got me crippling muscle spasms in my… Continue reading NCAA Tournament 2007
A Bracket for Everything, and Everything In Its Bracket
Posting has been basketball-heavy of late because, well, there isn’t much else going on that I find all that interesting at the moment. More importantly, though, it’s the Season of the Bracket… I’m not the only one affected, of course, though many people who don’t care about hoops have to find other outlets for the… Continue reading A Bracket for Everything, and Everything In Its Bracket
Even the Liberal New Republic…
… is blogging about basketball. Of course, this was inevitable, because college basketball is inherently a liberal sport. There’s no sports analogue for welfare and affirmative action better than the “atuomatic bid” system that allows small conference champions into the NCAA tournament, giving them the same chance at the title as teams from the power… Continue reading Even the Liberal New Republic…
Worst. Bracket. EVER.
As threatened in passing earlier, I went through the NCAA Tournament field, picking the games based on the ranking of Ph.D. programs in Physics (I set the “Scholarly quality of program faculty is high” weight to 5, and left everything else off). I entered it on Yahoo, which provides a spiffy PDF version for those… Continue reading Worst. Bracket. EVER.
Office Pool Advice
With the annual Office Pool Season now open, lots of people are queueing up to offer advice on how to fill out the bracket sheets for our national foray into illegal gambling: Inside Higher Ed offers a bracket based on graduation rates, with a Final Four of Florida, Virginia, Michigan State, and, um, Holy Cross.… Continue reading Office Pool Advice
Let’s Stick It to the Little Guy
There’s been a lot of commentary already about how the NCAA selection committee short-changed the smaller conferences. Only six small conference teams got at-large bids this year, half the number from a few years back. This actually understates the problem, though. Not only dis the committee take too few small teams, in a few cases,… Continue reading Let’s Stick It to the Little Guy
Doom!
So, the NCAA brackets are out. Syracuse got left out of the field, which is what Jim Boeheim gets for sneering at the selection committee in public. And also for not playing a game outside the state of New York until late January… Maryland, at least, is in, seeded #4 in the St. Louis region,… Continue reading Doom!
Let’s Hear it for the Little Guy 5
The site was silent yesterday because Kate and I drove down to The City to surprise my grandmother and father (her birthday was yesterday, his is Tuesday), and see a Broadway show (about which more later, maybe). That means a slight delay in the accolades for some little guys, but fortunately only one automatic bid… Continue reading Let’s Hear it for the Little Guy 5