All right. Just because UNC is over in the Little Dance does not mean the smartest Tar Heel fans on the internet shouldn’t be expending their crazy basketball knowledge in a bracket contest. Last year dj_joek edged keithunc by one point to take the first ever THF Tournament Pick ‘em. What does that tell you? That the early rounds do matter.
To join the group please click here. The information is below:
Group #: 102681
Password: goheels
So get you picks in before Thursday. The winner gets the satisfaction…that’s it…I have no budget for prizes since I blew it all on web hosting fees and Homewrecker burritos at Moe’s.
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No NIT bracket? I kid, I kid. Of course I was going to have VT make a deep run in the tournament but Seth can finally be justified in complaining about the selection process. I guess talking back to the police and bad mouthing the selection committee are pretty much the same thing. Better luck next time Seth.
Seth needs to play a non-conference SOS that is not in the 300′s before he starts complaining about not making the tournament.
After going through the brackets I was absolutely flabbergasted at the way it was skewed:
Midwest: Kansas, Maryland, Georgetown, Ohio St, Tenn, MSU
West: Syracuse, Gonzaga, Pitt, Kansas State
East: Kentucky, Texas, Minn, Wisc, Marq, WVU
South: Duke, Louisville, Baylor, T A&M, Vill and Siena
One would think that the committee has punished the overall 1 and 2 seeds from this bracket. It’s as if an effort has been made to see that Duke goes to the final four. Thankfully, it has not gone unnoticed:
http://www.sportingnews.com/college-basketball/article/2010-03-14/ncaa-gives-duke-cupcake-draw-south-region
http://sports.espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/7070/bracket-babble-five-things-to-hate
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/03/13/1813273/ncaa-caves-to-tv-pressure-by-going.html
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/danpatrick/blog/101861/index.html?xid=si_topstories
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/stewart_mandel/03/14/breaking.bracket/index.html?eref=sihp
http://tourney.si.com/2010/03/15/bracket-musings-selection-sunday-edition/?eref=sihp
It’s amazing how much I could care less about the tourny this year because my(our)beloved Heels are not in it. Sad.
Sorry y’all, but I am going to kick y’all’s butts! Good luck!
^^Keith, I was going to post that same sentiment, even ads hyping the tournament are hollow this year. I love college basketball but this is just too painful. Now it also hurts since there’s no local round 1&2 option but that was already determined. Next year is Charlotte.
^^Channel some of that attitude to the Heels for tomorrow night, uncgirl ! Hopefully they’re generating their own, but a little extra never hurts.
****
The tournament won’t be the same without the Heels, but my interest will be heightened by rooting for anyone who plays Duke, Kentucky, or Kansas.
I watched Temple in the A-10 tourny and once or twice this season. They are good. I watched Cornell at KU. They are good. Wanted to have both teams advance sweet 16-elite 8ish and theyre freaking playing each other! I feel like there is a lot of that this year. Like Gtown and Evan Turner and they gotta face each other early too, anyone else feel that the committee took sexy teams and made them face each other early, maybe even too early?
All kidding aside, I do wish we could fill out an NIT bracket.
Wilbon Has Spoken
Mike Wilbon, PTI today, commenting on UNC’s absence from the NCAA tournament , and its year:
” UNC will be back next year because Roy Williams knows what he’s doing. People overreact so much to having a year like this. It’s not a big deal.”
My buddies and I have filled out NIT brackets for the past 8 years.
The first step is admitting you have a problem. I guess a basketball problem is okay but I don’t know of any NIT Pick em’ online applications.
Now maybe I’m an over-intellectualized sourpuss, but I had to bring you this short essay by the brilliant Paul Mirengoff, who was one of the founders of the influential political blog Powerline, and best man at my wedding:
The NCAA men’s college basketball tournaments begins this week, the field of 65 teams having been selected and seeded yesterday. This year, the conventional wisdom holds that the quality of the at-large teams selected to make up the numbers is poor, and that this argues against suggestions that the field be expanded to 92 teams in future years.
The conventional wisdom is correct. However, I would take it one step further. Every year the field is littered with mediocre at-large teams — squads that failed seriously to contend for their conference championship thereby proving that they don’t deserve to play for the national championship — and this argues for contracting the field to 32 teams, or some such number.
I’ll stipulate that monetary considerations preclude any contraction of the tournament, just as they probably preclude keeping the field at 65 much longer. I also realize that many fans believe the current tournament format is close to perfect.
But why do they believe this? Look at the brackets and tell how many of the first round games you would watch if they were played on a weekend in January. I wonder whether, even in the context of a national championship tournament, folks would watch many of these games if it weren’t for their participation in office pools.
By playing so many games, the NCAA and CBS guarantee that there will be a few exciting early round contests to talk up, amidst all of the blow-outs and ho-hum affairs. But it also tends to undermine the round of 16. This is the point where teams with legitimate claims for the national championship should start meeting in match-ups of genuine intrigue. However, early round upsets, when they occur, ruin such match-ups and tend to produce an excessive number of ho-hum games during the second week of the tournament.
To me, the NCAA tournament is the perfect reflection of our culture: it exalts excess and cheap thrills (close games generated by sheer volume), while catering to fan narcissism (the desire, though office pools, to have the tournament be about us). And it does so by lowering standards and diminishing the importance of performing at a high level on a consistent basis.
For these reasons, I predict that fans will learn to love the 92-team tourney if/when it arrives. ###
Without necessarily endorsing all that Paul says, I think his cultural barometer is right on the mark. This, while I must out of honesty confess that when I still worked in an office, instead of at home, I entered the office pool under four or five different aliases. The only thing they had in common was that Carolina always won.
“The tournament won’t be the same without the Heels, but my interest will be heightened by rooting for anyone who plays Duke, Kentucky, or Kansas.”
Amen! Larry S.
I’m sure, for basketball purists, the inclusion of teams who really don’t have a chance sort of waters down the whole process, and expanding the tournament would take that even further. On the other hand, reducing it, say to 32, would eliminate the teams who can’t realistically compete for the championship (only 2 teams below a #8 seed have ever gotten to the Final Four, and the lowest seed to win was #8), but it would also remove an exciting element of the current setup.
Allowing lower-level conferences to qualify and compete for the big dance not only gives them the opportunity to promote and highlight their oft-forgotten institutions, but it helps provide scenarios that are very popular with the greater TV audience beyond the purists.
Since expanding to 64/65 teams, the lower half of the draw (More precisely 9-14. No 15 or 16 seeds have progressed beyond the first weekend) has put a team into the second weekend (Sweet 16) 54 times, or around 14% of the time.(2+ times each year) Even though the outcomes of these matchups are fairly predictable, the excitement of the Cinderella effect is just enough to keep overall interest high. To me, the Elite Eight is where it really gets good anyway.
I don’t know what the perfect format is, but I think what we have now at least combines the balancing factors that help to make it a very special event.
I just can’t decide when I want to pick dook to lose.
Cal? Purdue? ‘Nova?
I just can’t put them in the final 4!
Scottie Reynolds is about to be my favorite player in this tournament.
But I’m also really interested in seeing Wall play. He’s going to be a contender at the next level.
^ Nova beat them down last year. Nova is likely to beat them down again. Nova is without Dante Cunningham, but Duke is without Gerald Henderson. I really see it as a push.
^^I have Nova beating them. I can’t stomach Duke in the F4. But everything I’ve read indicates Nova has been slowly going caput, so who knows. *shrugs*