Basketball Archives - Page 5 of 13

Sports Forecast for Friday, March 20, 2015 – March Madness Edition

We’re interrupting our normal daily sports forecasts to concentrate on March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and American cultural obsession. We’ll run you through the games each day and give you a little flavor for each one.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 New Mexico State Aggies vs. #2 Kansas Jayhawks, 12:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

After yesterday’s historic insanity, it’s probably too much to hope for for this game to be close. Then again, if there was going to be a 2 seed that gets a real scare in the first round, it would be Kansas. Most of the computer rankings say that Kansas should be flattered to have even gotten ranked so highly by the tournament’s seeds.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Georgia Bulldogs vs. #7 Michigan State Spartans, 12:40 p.m. ET on TRU.

If you wanted an exhibit to show that coaching does matter in sports, particularly college basketball, you couldn’t find a better one than Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo. Despite not having the best players most years, his teams always seem to win at least a game or two in March Madness. They are favored over a solid but unspectacular Georgia team.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #12 Wyoming Cowboys vs. #5 Northern Iowa, 1:40 p.m. ET on TBS.

With all of yesterday’s upsets, the two 5 seeds actually managed to beat the 12 seeds they faced. The 12 over 5 upset is the one that armchair pundits (and we’re all armchair pundits, aren’t we?) everywhere look for. It just seems like at least one 12 seed always beats a 5. 538 ran an interesting article on why this might actually be true. Will Wyoming pull it off?

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #12 Buffalo Bulls vs. #5 West Virginia Mountaineers, 2:10 p.m. ET on TNT.

Or, maybe it’s Buffalo’s turn? Normally at this time of the year we’d see stories about how the snow struck city of Buffalo could really use something to cheer them up but this year, compared to Boston, living in Buffalo was like having a time-share in Palm beach. It’s hard to root against West Virginia and their pressing defense.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Indiana Hoosiers vs. #7 Wichita State Shockers, 2:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

This is one of the few NCAA Tournament games that feels like a preview to coming attractions. If Wichita State can get by the Indiana Hoosiers, it will (probably) set up a matchup with in-state rival Kansas on Sunday. Everyone outside of Indiana is rooting for this to happen but I wonder if Wichita’s players will be guilty of looking ahead and get caught for it here.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 Belmont Bruins vs. #2 Virginia Cavaliers, 3:10 p.m. ET on TRU.

It seems funny to stick a 2 seed on TRU TV but Virginia is no normal 2 seed. They play a slow, grind-it-out, defensive game. I guess the TV schedulers might have felt that their play was too slow for most viewers. I have to say, I’m curious to see it. The slower you play, the fewer possessions the game has, and the fewer possessions the game has, the higher the chance for luck to play a role in the outcome. Maybe Belmont can get a few bounces and keep this close or even win?!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 UC Irvine Anteaters vs. #4 Louisville Cardinals, 4:10 p.m. ET on TBS.

THE ANTEATERS ARE GOING TO WIN, THE ANTEATERS ARE GOING TO WIN! Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia page on anteaters: “When a territorial dispute occurs, they vocalize, swat, and can sometimes sit on or even ride the back of their opponents.” THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO DO!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 Valparaiso Crusaders vs. #4 Maryland Terrapins, 4:40 p.m. ET on TNT.

Take some time before this game to read Jeremy Pahl’s wonderful article about growing up in Valparaiso and what basketball meant to him, his father, and the whole city. You’ll be pulling for the Crusaders afterwards.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 Oklahoma State Cowboys vs. #8 Oregon Ducks, 6:50 p.m. ET on TBS.

Oklahoma State lost six of its last seven games before today. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll just be able to snap out of it and win this game but stranger things have happened. Actually, about ten stranger things happened yesterday. Hmm…

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Robert Morris Dentists vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 7:10 p.m. ET on CBS.

What an amazing matchup! Dentists vs. Devils — hard to say which one is worse. Just kidding, the Robert Morris team is actually called the Colonials, not the Dentists, but how great would that be? Duke is the team that most of the country loves to hate and, knowing that a 16 seed has never beaten a 1 seed, my guess is that we’ll all get to hate Duke for a little while longer.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Davidson Wildcats vs. #7 Iowa Hawkeyes, 7:20 p.m. ET on TNT.

The funny thing about this game is that despite making the tournament, both these teams are afterthoughts in their own states. Iowa is not thought to be as good as Iowa State or Northern Iowa and Davidson, located in North Carolina, is nowhere near as good as North Carolina or Duke. It kind of makes me want them both to win, although that is obviously impossible.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 Albany Great Danes vs. #3 Oklahoma Sooners, 7:27 p.m. ET on TRU.

In case you’re wondering what a “Sooner” is, it’s a historical reference. A sooner was someone who jumped the gun and entered Oklahoma to claim what once was Native American land for themselves just before President Grover Cleveland legalized the land-rush in 1889. Perhaps not quite as bad as the Ole Miss Rebels historical nickname, it’s still pretty despicable. I guess we should all root for the dogs that look like horses team?

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Coastal Carolina Chanticleers vs. #1 Wisconsin Badgers, 9:20 p.m. ET on TBS.

Wisconsin is famous for choking in the NCAA Tournament and losing when they’re expected to win. If they do it tonight, they’ll be famous for it forever and ever.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 St. John’s Red Storm vs. #8 San Diego State Aztecs, 9:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

Alas, St. John’s big man, Chris Obepka, who made a name for himself this year for wearing short(er) shorts, is suspended for the tournament, so we won’t be graced by his leggy presence. Having seen St. John’s play in person just a week ago, I suspect we may not be graced by any of their presences for long. They didn’t seem like a very good basketball team to me.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 North Dakota State Bison vs. #4 Gonzaga Bulldogs, 9:57 p.m. ET on TRU.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you make it through to this game. That’s a lot of basketball in two days! Rest up, ’cause there’s more on Saturday and Sunday!

Why it's okay to love March Madness and hate it too

March Madness, the annual NCAA Men’s College Basketball tournament begins today. It’s a remarkably popular event. The tournament storms through the sports world, eclipsing nearly everything else for its duration, and makes significant inroads into the normal, non-sports fabric of the United States. If you go into a sports area in the physical world, like a sports bar or your office’s water cooler, or in the virtual world, like the sports-only social network Fancred, you’ll hear a lot of people saying the same thing: “The first four days of March Madness are my favorite days of the year.” On the other hand, if you roam into some non-sports areas, like a folk dance or an intelligently satirical television show, you’ll hear sentiments that range from the casually uninterested to confusion about why so many people are so excited about the tournament to righteous indignation about March Madnesses exploitative nature. As with so many differences in life, there is truth on both sides. Let’s try to bridge that gap by running through the arguments on both sides, starting first with the hate and moving to the love. If you’ve never understood how anyone could hate March Madness or how seemingly everyone could love it, keep reading.

March Madness is big business. The last time the television rights to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament came up for bidding was 2010. CBS and Turner Sports agreed to pay close to $11 billion dollars to the NCAA for the right to broadcast the games for the next 14 years. It’s safe to assume that CBS and Turner both plan on making a profit from their investment. The NCAA, despite being officially a non-profit, certainly makes a profit in the way that most people think about profit. Their president, Mark Emmert, took a $1.7 million dollar salary in 2011. His job, as vital as it may be to facilitating the organization of basketball games, is not what generates all of this money. What generates the money, is basketball, and the people who play that basketball, the so-called “student-athletes,” don’t receive a salary at all.

HBO’s extremely good Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a wonderful job with this topic in last week’s show. If you’re new to the subject or just want a wonderful refresher course, I suggest you watch it now.

If you’re a sports fan, Oliver’s argument is so old-hat that it’s hard for it to generate any real passion any more. But that’s kind of the point. It’s good to be reminded that the NCAA’s case for continuing not to pay their labor force is almost as twisted and circular as Groucho Marx’s in the 1929 film, The Cocoanuts.

The NCAA essentially says, “We can’t pay you, you’re amateurs.” After asking his workers if they want to be wage slaves and receiving a “no”, Groucho says, “Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Remember, there’s nothing like Liberty — except Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Be free, my friends. One for all, and all for me, and me for you, and three for five and six for a quarter.” Both Groucho and the NCAA are so brazenly absurd that they [seem to, at least for a while] get away with it.

My only issue with Oliver’s coverage is that he doesn’t offer a solution, which inadvertently puts him level with the protagonist in a heavily censored version of the Nelly song, Hot in Herre, who he made fun of earlier in the episode, saying, “Now it’s just a man complaining about the heat and offering no solution whatsoever.” There is a solution out there, there has to be, but for now it is enough to simply identify the problem and agree that it needs to be fixed.

While the underlying hypocrisy and exploitation inherent in March Madness rankles, there are some really great reasons to both enjoy and cherish the tournament. One of the primary reasons to love the tournament is its sloppy but undeniably democratic nature. Compared to virtually every other American sporting event, March Madness in unique in its combination of the highest quality play with the most inclusive format. College basketball is enormous. There are 347 Division 1 college basketball teams. Each of these teams plays in one of 32 conferences. Each of these conferences crowns a champion at the end of the year and every single one of these champions is given automatic qualification into March Madness. It’s true that the majority of the other 36 places are given to teams in one of the top four or five power conferences, but the nature of the tournament is still extremely inclusive. This is also what makes the tournament so exciting. No where else (in American sports at least, this kind of thing is much more common in European club soccer) do you get to see and root for such extreme underdogs.

In the past week, two wonderful pieces of journalism, one video, one narrative and written, were released. If you want to get a deeper understanding of how the NCAA tournament came to be so inclusive (and how it almost wasn’t) and just what being able to compete with the biggest schools means to people in the smallest basketball towns, I cannot recommend these two pieces highly enough. From Grantland and director Nick Guthe comes a short film called The Billion Dollar Game. The 13 minute video tells the story of how a single, almost-upset of a number 1 seeded Georgetown team by number 16 seeded Princeton (not normally an underdog in anything, but in men’s college basketball, they certainly are) in 1989 was such a powerful example of the potential for drama inherent in asymmetric sport that it convinced the NCAA and their television partners to maintain the democratic nature of the tournament. Justin Pahl’s piece on SB Nation, Countdown to March: Life and Death with a Small Town Team is just an incredible article. It’s more a short memoir than a long article, really. Pahl grew up in the small, midwestern city of Valparaiso, Indiana. His father was a professor at Valparaiso University and they shared a love that bordered on obsession for the school’s basketball team. Pahl mixes the story of what happened to that team and to the older kids in his town whose athletic feats he grew up idolizing with the story of his own coming of age in a beautiful way. Reading this article will give you a profound understanding of the conflicting urges of small-town America: pride, desires to stay and to leave, inferiority complexes, love. When I see a small-town team from an lesser known conference keep pace with one of the big boys in this year’s tournament, I’ll think of Princeton’s Billion Dollar Game and Valpairaiso’s Countdown to March and pull for them just a little bit harder than normal.

Sports Forecast for Thursday, March 19, 2015 – March Madness Edition

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 Northeastern Huskies vs. #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 12:15 p.m. ET on CBS.

Hooooray!! March Madness is here! Let’s get this thing started! Time to settle in on your coach or your bar stool or duck down in your cubicle and get your illicitly streaming phone or tablet going! Unless you’re a Notre Dame fan, you’re all going to be rooting for Northeastern here. The best part of March Madness is the madness — the upsets, so that’s what we want to see!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 UAB Blazers vs. #3 Iowa State Cyclones, 12:40 p.m. ET on TRU.

Okay, the first half of the Northeastern vs. Notre Dame game is over. Let’s switch over to the start of this game. What? What is TRU? Do I even get that channel? Ah, thank god for Sports Illustrated’s guide to finding TRU. Great, here we are. Hmmmm…. UAB’s name is “Blazers” and their mascot is a dragon? Who wants to bet that the dragon was added in later to bowdlerize the original meaning of the nickname. No, don’t look it up, that’s what bar bets are for.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #14 Georgia State Panthers vs. #3 Baylor Bears, 1:40 p.m. ET on TBS.

Okay, the first two games aren’t going to satisfy the country’s itch for an upset, so maybe this one will. Why the heck did the tournament decide to start with three #14 vs #3 matchups anyway? I’m guessing those are always the lowest rated games, so why not put them during the day when most people are at least supposed to be working anyway, but it does make for a bit of an inauspicious start to the tournament. Patience. Patience and more popcorn. Let’s go Georgia State! This would be a great upset story — their coach tore his achilles tendon while celebrating the win that put them into the tournament. He was hugging his son, a player on the team. Also, that guy Kevin Ware who broke his leg so terribly when he was on Louisville and they were in the Final Four a couple years ago is on this team.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #15 Texas Southern Tigers vs. #2 Arizona Wildcats, 2:10 p.m. ET on TNT.

Okay, so this is unlikely to be a competitive game, but it does give all of us a chance to actually see Arizona. Unless you’re on the West Coast or are a real college basketball junkie, you probably haven’t seen the Wildcats play yet this year and they’re supposed to be one of the two or three teams that could give Kentucky a run for their money. Are they really that good?

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #11 Texas Longhorns vs. #6 Butler Bulldogs, 2:45 p.m. ET on CBS.

Here we go! Two hours and thirty minutes since the tournament began and we’ve got what should be a real, competitive game. Not only is a 11 vs. 6 closer on paper than the earlier games but Texas is an unusually talented 11 seed. They’re one of those teams that, if they could put their shit together and play well for a week or two, could make a deep run. Butler, the team that’s used to playing the role of the underdog, is the overdog in this matchup and it should be interesting to see how they react.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #11 UCLA Bruins vs. #6 SMU Mustangs, 3:10 p.m. ET on TRU.

UCLA was once the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team of men’s basketball. They won everything all the time. Nowadays? Not so much. SMU is a different story. They’re coached by the 74 year-old peripatetic coach, Larry Brown, who is still the only coach to ever win an NCAA championship and an NBA one. Many people felt they should have gotten into the tournament last year, so they’re a bit of a sentimental favorite this time around, now that they’ve made it.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #10 Ohio State Buckeyes vs. #7 VCU Rams, 4:10 p.m. ET on TBS.

Glurb. So much basketball. I gotta go do something else. But wait, this could be a good game. And after this one, there’s a quick break for an early dinner before the next one comes on. I’ll stick it out. Plus, there’s some built in interest here. The favorite in this game is VCU, a team from a small conference, and the underdog is Ohio State, a big school from a big conference. If you need a tie-breaker to figure out who to root for, VCU’s coach is named Shaka Smart!

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Lafayette Leopards vs. #1 Villanova Wildcats, 6:50 p.m. ET on TBS.

“You’ve had your dinner,” the March Madness gods chortle, “now get back to the TV!” You meekly obey and watch poor Lafayette’s ritual slaughter at the hands of Villanova.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 Purdue Boilermakers vs. #8 Cincinnati Bearcats, 7:10 p.m. ET on CBS.

Now we’re cooking with gas. The second of four games all starting within 40 minutes. An 8 vs. 9 game is always a toss-up in terms of predicting what is going to happen and usually it’s a close game too. It’s hard to get too excited about either of these moderately successful teams in big, power conferences, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Cincinnati. They just seem like a tough team most of the time.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 Harvard vs. #4 North Carolina, 7:20 p.m. ET on TNT.

This is Harvard’s fourth appearance in the NCAA Tournament in a row. They’ve won their first game the last two years, upsetting higher ranked teams both times. This has a lot of people anticipating this game and hoping that Harvard can make it three in a row and show up the North Carolina basketball royalty. After a few minutes, you’ll realize this isn’t going to happen. Luckily, there’s lots of other games to watch.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #12 Stephen F. Austin vs. #5 Utah Runnin’ Utes, 7:27 p.m. ET on TRU.

This is another highly anticipated upset possibility. Two things play into that. First of all, there’s the tournament truism that a 12 always beats a 5. Also, Stephen F. Austin did it just last year when they beat number 5 seed VCU as a number 12 seed. Don’t buy into it. According to virtually all of the expert rankings out there, Utah is closer to a top ten team this year than the 20-24th best team their seed would suggest. They should be able to handle Stephen F. Austin.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #9 LSU Tigers vs. #8 North Carolina State Wolfpack, 9:20 p.m. ET on TBS.

Entering the home stretch for day one of the tournament. Only three games left. This is a sneaky good game. LSU has a couple of solid NBA prospects on their team, which is surprisingly something a lot of these teams can’t say, and North Carolina State actually beat Duke, Louisville, and North Carolina this year, so you know they can put on a show.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #16 Hampton Pirates vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 9:40 p.m. ET on CBS.

One day a 16 seed will beat a 1 seed. It won’t be today. One day Kentucky might lose but also, not today. I find it interesting that CBS would even want to show this game but I guess Kentucky is the biggest star of this tournament and even showing them in a blowout will get great ratings.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #13 Eastern Washington Eagles vs. #4 Georgetown Hoyas, 9:57 p.m. ET on TRU.

And now, finally, the game we’ve all been waiting for. This is one of the most popular choices for a big upset in round one. Somewhere between 15-20% of everyone who’s filled in a bracket thinks that the Eastern Washington Eagles are going to beat the Georgetown Hoyas. Why is this? Well, for one thing, a lot of people felt that Georgetown should really have been seeded lower than they were — that they made a better 5 or 6 seed than a 4 seed. Also, Georgetown has been a disappointing tournament team over the last few years. In fact, they haven’t made it past the first week of games since 2007.

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Copy

March Madness, the NCAA college basketball tournament, is one of the most highly anticipated sporting events of the year. Aside from furtively watching games on laptops, tablets, or phones during work, the most common way that people interact with the tournament is through the filling out of March Madness Brackets. Doing a bracket is a form of gambling. Before the tournament begins, a bunch of people get together and (usually using some web software) each predict what they think is going to happen in each of the 67 games during the tournament. Rules vary a little from one platform to another and one group to another, but generally you get points for correctly predicting the winner of a game and those points increase as the tournament goes on. For instance, you might get one point for predicting a game during the first round of the tournament but twenty points for getting the winner of a Final Four or semifinal game right. By and large, brackets are a fun way to get involved with the tournament. It keeps you interested in what’s happening and usually it’s not for enough money to be a problem if you lose.

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. So far we’ve covered chalk, telling a story, and the frivolous approach. Now we’ll take a look at filling out a bracket in the way that gives you the best chance of winning — by letting someone else do the work.

Unless you’re a college basketball nut, you probably haven’t even seen most of the 64 March Madness teams play. Actually, even if you’re a college basketball nut, you probably haven’t seen most of them play. Unless you’re a statistics student or an economics professor, you probably can’t build a model that predicts the outcome of college basketball games. Even if you can create a model, how much better do you think it will be than Dan picking games pretty much at random? Not much better, is the answer. Lucky for us, there are people out there that spend their entire lives watching college basketball or crunching the data produced by college basketball. Why not simply borrow from one of them to fill out your bracket?

Open up Ken Pomeroy’s 2015 College Basketball Rankings or Ed Feng’s The Power Rank or Jeff Sagarin’s Pure Points Predictor. Take a look at their rankings and see which one you prefer. Keep it open in one tab and your bracket in another. Run through the games and choose a winner based on Pomeroy, Feng, or Sagarin regardless of the seeds. Keep it up all the way through the tournament with one possible exception. This year the overwhelming favorite is Kentucky. The Kentucky team is undefeated and first in all three of these rankings. You have to decide what you want to do about that. Because of the way brackets work, choosing Kentucky to win will put you in with the majority of the people you’re competing against. If you do this, you’re relying on getting more of the other games right than anyone else. The alternative is to pick another team to win the whole thing. If you do this and they win, you’ll have a much smaller pool of people who have also taken that team. Normally, I would say to avoid the overall favorite but Kentucky is such an overwhelming favorite (although Nate Silver still says they only have a 40% chance of winning) that I can’t fault you for wanting to take them.

Here’s the cool thing about relying on someone else’s rankings. By doing this, you’ll inevitably create a bracket that’s a good mixture of mostly favorites and some reasonable under-dogs. The NCAA selection committee that creates the 1-16 seedings for the teams in the tournament and because those numbers are right on the brackets, most people simply go with them. They see a #3 and assume that that team is necessarily better than a #6. That’s not necessarily the case. Using a different ranking gives you a built in opportunity to go against the grain while still choosing a team that an expert thinks should win. For example, all three of our rankings options have Utah, a five seed, significantly higher than one would expect from its seeding. That certainly suggests that they’d be a good upset to pick over fourth ranked Georgetown, and it wouldn’t be a shock to see them advance over Duke. Another team all three models agree on is Maryland. Maryland is a four seed in the tournament, but all three of the models rank them as weaker than that — one as the 25th best team and two as the 33rd best team.

Of course, none of this might matter. Your friend who picks chalk might finally have her day in the sun or your brother who always picks based on color may be celebrating at the end of the tournament, but this method combines the best chance of winning with the biggest chance of being able to thump your chest and say “I had that” after correctly picking an upset. I’m going to fill in a bracket this way now!

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Frivolous

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. So far we’ve covered chalk and telling a story. Now we’ll take a look at filling out a bracket in a completely frivolous way.

Here’s the thing about March Madness brackets. They are essentially random. Everyone has been in a bracket pool that ends up being won by someone who didn’t watch a single college basketball game all year and who chose teams based on something insane like proximity to Maryland or how many consonants their team nickname contains. This absolutely infuriates people who think of themselves as knowledgeable about college basketball AND who think that their knowledge should give them an edge over people who don’t take the bracket seriously. This year, why not be the person who doesn’t take it seriously — that way if you somehow end up with the best bracket, you not only win but you also drive your friends, family, or colleagues crazy. Here are a few ideas for guiding principles to a totally frivolous March Madness bracket.

Team Colors

What could be more ridiculous than choosing winners based on color? The thing is, choose the right color, and it’s just as likely to win as not. The best two colors to run with this year are blue and red. Blue is the overwhelming favorite with three of the top four seeds, Kentucky, Villanova, and Duke wearing blue. Red will get you the other one seed, Wisconsin as well as at least one two seed, Arizona. There simply aren’t enough of the other colors out there to make them a reasonable choice. Although it would be fun to do a bracket where you give preference to any color other than blue or red. I doubt that one would be successful, but it would, at least, be unique!

Team Names

Team names are always fun to think about. I enjoy dividing the field up into categories and then choosing one or two to run with. This year’s favorite would definitely be cats, with three of the top ten teams Kentucky, Villanova, and Arizona all sharing the name of “Wildcats”. Other cat names in the field are the Northern Iowa Panthers, the Davidson Wildcats, the BYU Cougers, the Cincinattie Bearcats, the LSU Tigers, the Georgia State Panthers, the Lafayette Leopards, and the Texas Souther Tigers. Other popular categories of animals are dogs and birds. You could also probably build a good bracket by having just the non-cat/dog teams win. In this case your champion team could be the UC Irvine Anteaters, by far the best animal mascot in the tournament! Leaving the animal universe, you’ve got some historic names like the Robert Morris Colonials, Xavier Musketeers, and the Virginia Cavaliers, there are even a couple of meteorological forces like the St. John’s Red Storm and Iowa State Cyclones. Choose one category or a combination of categories and run with it.

Public vs. Private

We all have our biases when it comes to education. Did you go to a private school or a public school for high school? Still paying off a slew of loans from choosing a small liberal arts college or did you go to your state school? There’s plenty of both in this tournament, so why not use school type as your guide to picking wins? Up at the top of the bracket, going private will get you Duke, Villanova, and Gonzaga. Going public will leave you with Kentucky, Wisconsin, Kansas, Virginia, and Arizona. Good luck! As a tie-breaker, you could always use size of school. Go small for private and big for public when both the schools in a game are on one side.

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Tell a Story

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. So far we’ve covered chalk. Now we’ll take a look at filling out a bracket by telling a story.

During the lead-up into this year’s Super Bowl (stick with me, this will make sense) I listened to Grantland’s NFL Podcast featuring two writers from the website, Bill Barnwell and Robert Mays. One of their podcasts covered some of the many prop (or proposition) bets that you could make before the big game. These are bets about various things that may happen during the game, like will a particular wide receiver catch more than seven passes or will a quarterback throw more than three touchdown passes or who the game’s Most Valuable Player will be. I’ve enjoyed making bets like this (never for real money though, only for fun) in the past but I’d always thought of each bet as an isolated question. Mays and Barnwell suggested that the best way of making prop bets is to tell a story about what you think is going to happen in the game and then follow it through. If you think one team is going to win by running the ball a lot then maybe you should pick that team’s running back to be the MVP and bet on a lower score since games with a lot of running are usually lower scoring. This idea of telling a story made a lot of sense to me and it can be applied equally well to filling out a March Madness bracket. Think about the tournament as a single entity instead of a group of individual games and then tell a story about it that makes sense to you. Pick the games based on that story. Here are a few suggestions of stories that you might think about telling.

Tell a story about height

If you’ve ever played basketball, even in gym class, you know it’s helpful to be tall. One story you could easily tell about this year’s tournament is that it will be a triumph of height over everything else. This is particularly easy to imagine because the best overall team in the country, the undefeated Kentucky Wildcats, is unusually tall. In addition to Kentucky, other very tall teams are Maryland, Wisconsin, Iowa, and UC-Irvine.

Tell a story about age

Each year, many of the best players in college basketball are freshman in college. This is because the NBA, the best professional option for basketball players, does not allow its teams to hire players until a year after they graduate from college. Most of the best players in the United States decide to do one year of college and then enter the NBA draft. Teams like Kentucky, Duke, and Kansas, all among the favorites to win the NCAA Tournament, are also among the youngest teams in the country. You can go either way on this one — tell a story about older teams showing the young punks what basketball is all about and take Gonzaga, Wisconsin, or Villanova to win it all. Or go with talent over experience and choose Kentucky, Kansas, or Duke. Use the handy charts on Stat Sheet as your guide.

Tell a story about conferences

One of the fun things about college basketball is that many of the teams playing each other during March Madness will have never played each other before, at least not this year. There are so many college basketball teams and most of the time during the regular season, teams play other teams within their conference. In order to rank teams from 1-16 in each of the four regions, the selection committee has to make a bunch of assumptions about the relative strength of each conference. Sometimes, they get it wrong. If you think a conference was better than the selection committee thought it was, err on the side of choosing those teams to win games. This year, the Big 12 and Big Ten each got seven teams into the tournament followed by the ACC and Big East with six each, and then the SEC with five and PAC-12 with four. Choose one of those conferences to hate on. Choose another to celebrate. Guide your choices based on conference biases and you’ll create an interesting bracket.

Tell a story about getting hot

Last year, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team won March Madness as a seven seed, the first time a seven seed had ever won the championship. What happened? They got hot at the right time and were able to take the momentum they built during a run to the AAC conference championship final and build on it through the early rounds of the NCAA tournament. By the time they got to the final four, they were an unstoppable force firing on all cylinders. Now, there’s all sorts of articles out there debunking the idea that momentum in sports exists during a single game, much less across a multi-week tournament. That said, you could do worse than to look at which teams won or were runners-up of their conference tournaments, especially in the top five or six conferences. Pick teams that have shown recently that they know how to play under pressure.

Tell a story about pace

Pace is a statistic that expresses the number of possessions a team has during a game. It’s reflective of their style of play. College basketball, because it has a longer shot clock than the NBA (35 seconds rather than 24) has a much more varied pace landscape than professional basketball. Even at the very top of the tournament, among the one and two seeds, there’s a wide variety. Wisconsin and Virginia are two of the slowest teams in the country. They win by playing smothering defense and scoring just a little bit more than the other team. Kansas, Arizona, and Duke are the fastest playing teams of the top eight, although they pale in comparison to the lightning fast LSU and BYU teams. If you love high-paced basketball, make your viewing over the next couple weeks more fun and favor the fast teams. If you love defense, you have some great options to go with as well.

Ways to fill out a March Madness Bracket: Chalk

To help prepare you to fill out a bracket this year, we thought we would explain some common, uncommon, serious, and frivolous ways to fill one out. Today we’re starting with chalk.

Chalk is the simplest way to fill out a March Madness bracket. In every game, simply take the team with the better seed. Here’s a quick explanation in case you don’t know what that means. The 64 teams that will start the tournament on Thursday are divided up into four groups of 16 teams each. Within each group, the teams are ranked or seeded from 1 to 16 with the number one team being the most accomplished and likely to win and the number 16 team being the least. In the first round, 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so on. Taking chalk means that you pick the team with the better seed (lower numbers are better) in every game.

This term is widely used but doesn’t seem to have a clear derivation. The New Republic and Visual Thesaurus both believe it comes from a time when most betting was done in person at horse races and the odds were maintained by a bookie with a blackboard and a piece of chalk.

The benefit of picking chalk is that you’re almost alway going to be in the running to win your bracket pool. The downside is that you’re almost guaranteed not to win. Chalk is something of a default strategy. Although very few people choose all chalk for their entire bracket, for any given game, more people are going to predict the team with the better seed to win than to predict an upset. Choosing all chalk means that you get the points that most other people get but you’ll never get a point that they don’t. As time goes by, you’ll settle into the top third of the entries but won’t have a very good chance of winning the whole thing. Someone who predicts even a single upset correctly will probably have a better score.

Of course, sometimes chalk is a good idea. Imagine you were playing against only one other person and you knew that she was going to pick a bunch of upsets. By taking all chalk, you’d be pitting her ability to predict the future against the NCAA Tournament selection committee. And that’s a bet, I’d be willing to take. The smaller your bracket pool, the more likely it is for an all-chalk bracket to win. In a larger pool, it’s basically impossible that one of the entries won’t be better than chalk by accurately predicting a major upset.

I’m sure someone more well versed in mathematics or economics could explain the logic of chalk not winning better than me. What I can add to the discussion though, is that picking chalk is less fun than other strategies. One of the best parts of watching college sports and particularly March Madness is that emotion can often carry an underdog to a victory against an overdog. It’s more fun to root for a 13 seed no one has ever heard of with players that won’t make it in the NBA than it is to root for the 4 seed they play against whose players and coaches are virtually professional already. If you choose all chalk, you don’t get to root for upsets and rooting for upsets is fun.

Tune back in later for more (and more fun) ways of filling out a bracket.

Four lessons about deadlines from basketball

We all work on deadlines. Whether you’re a student working on homework, an office worker constructing a spreadsheet for his boss, a musician learning music for a show, or a writer hustling to get a piece complete in time for her editors to do their thing before publication, we all have deadlines. Even outside the realm of work, deadlines are a constant: better clean your room before Dad gets home, vacuum the living room before your friends come over, use the last of those sprouts before they start getting slimy. To a surprisingly large degree, how we manage deadlines determines how successful we are at work and at home, in our jobs and in our relationships and with ourselves. Basketball may seem like an unlikely source of wisdom but in many ways, it’s a sport that’s all about deadlines. Dig an inch deep into the foundation of basketball and you’ll find plenty of lessons about deadlines. Here are some of them.

Deadlines are real

Basketball has hard deadlines. Shoot the ball in 24 (or 35 in college) seconds. Inbound the ball in five seconds. Get the ball over half-court in eight seconds (1o in college). If a basketball team fails to do any of these things in the time allotted, they lose the ball and the other team gets it. There’s no extension, no extra credit for effort. These are simple, objective, hard deadlines with no forgiveness. Basketball players face these deadlines fifty to a hundred times a game and almost always beat them. In an average NBA game, each team will have the ball around a hundred times and only once in those two hundred possessions will either team miss the shot clock deadline.

If you want to be good on deadline, work on a lot of them

There’s nothing more exciting in basketball than a buzzer beater. A buzzer beater, as we explained in a recent post, is a shot that leaves a player’s hand before time runs out on a shot or game clock but goes into the basket afterwards. It’s generally a shot that ties or wins a game at the last possible moment. Making a buzzer beater is a triumph of calm under pressure and an acute understanding of exactly how much time is left before the clock runs out. Basketball players are freakishly good at doing this. Whether it’s 18.4 seconds, 8.4 seconds, or .4 seconds basketball players seem preternatural in their ability to beat deadlines. Of course, we know they’re not really super-human, they simply practice. Every day, every game, every possession, every time they play basketball, they do so with those hard deadlines we described in the last section. If you want to be ready to impress when time is tightest and your task is extremely important, prepare yourself by setting and beating deadlines every day.

Optimize each piece of work

In basketball, it’s not hard to beat the clock. You can usually dribble the ball over half court and then just chuck it at the basket. Simple, no fuss, and you’ve made your deadline! The problem is that despite beating the deadline, you probably won’t win the game this way because making a shot from so far out is difficult. Everything a basketball team does on offense is designed to create the easiest shot to make in the time allotted. Each player who catches the ball does a simple calculation in their head which we can translate to something like this:

If I shoot now, I have a x% chance of making the shot. If I pass or dribble, I might be able to increase that chance by y%. By taking the time to do that, I’m increasing my team’s chance of missing its deadline and therefore losing the ball from a% to b%. What should I do?

Basketball players approach their task by looking to optimize their chances of success. If they’ve got lots of time, they spend it working on increasing the quality of their shot. If they’re running out of time, they don’t panic or get down on themselves or whine, they simply take a lower quality shot and do their best to make it succeed anyway.

How often do you truly optimize when you’re working on a task? Do you think about quality or just about getting it done? Do you give yourself a chance to do your best possible work in the time you have?

Put deadlines in context

Of course, if you’re a basketball fan, or a student of sports history, you may be thinking, “what about seven seconds or less?” Seven Seconds or Less was a strategy popularized by Mike D’Antoni, coach of the Phoenix Suns and immortalized in Jack McCallum’s book. D’Antoni and the Suns believed that they could win by shooting the ball in the first seven seconds of the shot clock. This seems to go against the idea of optimizing for quality on each task that we suggested in the last section. It does, but not in an incompatible way. What the Suns realized was that deadlines are not isolated phenomena. Each deadline and each task happens in the context of other tasks and deadlines. The Suns thought about their goal (win a championship) and how they could best apply their resources to meeting that goal. They decided they would be best served by resolutely sacrificing quality for quantity. By playing at a faster pace than any other team had before, the Suns revolutionized the way teams think about playing basketball.

Take a step back and think about your goals. Are you better served by cramming forty hours of studying in over the weekend or settling for fifteen plus some relaxation and sleep? If you knock this report out in two hours instead of the eight you could spend on it, what else can you complete in the other six hours? How do you know when good is good enough or when it has to be close to perfect? Dole out your time and effort to tasks based on their contribution to your end goal not on how much time you are given to complete each task. Don’t let the deadlines drive you, take control.

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Surely there are more lessons about deadlines to be found in basketball and other sports but I told myself I’d publish this by 2:30 and it’s 2:24 now, so I’ll stop writing now and hit publish. Hope you enjoyed reading this. Let me know what you think in the comments section below.

Can you explain conference championship tournaments in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

I don’t get it. College basketball has the perfect tournament called March Madness. Why does it need to have these extra conference championships? What’s the point? Why would anyone bother watching when the real competition is yet to come?

Thanks,
Lori

Dear Lori,

It’s true, the NCAA Basketball tournament, popularly called March Madness, is a wonderfully fun event. The tournament is 64 (technically 68 teams for the men’s tournament now, but most people still think of it as 64 for men and women) of the best college basketball teams in the country, playing in a single-elimination tournament until only one team is left. Before that happens though, almost every conference (all but one, the Ivy League) will have a conference championship tournament. These tournaments are happening now, in the two weeks before the NCAA tournament begins. Compared to March Madness, these tournaments may seem underwhelming, but they’re important for a variety of reasons. Their most important meaning does relate to the NCAA championship tournament. Every winner of a conference championship will get an automatic bid or place in March Madness. This shapes the conference tournaments and their meaning for the teams that play in them. It all depends on what type of team you are in what kind of conference.

Conferences come in all shapes and sizes but we can break them up into three categories: power conferences, tiny conferences, and in-between conferences. Tiny conferences usually only get one place in March Madness. Power conferences may get five, six, seven, or even eight teams into the tournament. The in-between conferences vary from year to year, depending on the quality of the teams in their league that year, but they might get two or three teams in.

For a team in a tiny conference, winning the conference championship is the only way to qualify for March Madness. For these teams, their conference championship is the pinnacle of competition. They know that they probably don’t have much of a chance to win a game in the NCAA tournament, much less win the overall championship. This transforms March Madness from being the tournament to being almost thought of as a prize for winning the conference tournament. Win the conference tournament and they’ll get to say, for the rest of their lives, that they played in March Madness. Being a dominant team in a one-bid league also means that the conference championship is a perilous time. There’s no rule that says a league only gets one bid. Non-automatic bid teams are selected for March Madness by a committee and there’s no guarantee that the committee will select a team with a very good record from a weak conference if it doesn’t win its conference tournament.

The situation in power conferences are different. The top teams in these conferences are basically guaranteed a tournament spot, even if they don’t win their conference tournaments. For these teams, the conference tournament is a chance to show off for the committee and hopefully get a higher seed in (and therefore an easier path through) the NCAA tournament. The teams in the middle of the power conference standings are the ones playing for bigger stakes. Win the conference tournament or at least get close, and they could rescue a mediocre season by qualifying for the tournament.

The experience in the in-between conferences, as you might guess, falls in-between the tiny and the power conference championship experience with one twist. These conferences often have one or two teams that are virtually guaranteed a tournament spot based on their regular season success. If they win their conference tournament, they get an automatic bid as well. If a surprise team from the in-between conference wins the conference tournament instead, that team will get the automatic bid. The favored team or teams in these conferences will probably still get their spots, meaning that instead of two spots in March Madness, the conference might get three; instead of three, they might get four. Every spot comes at the cost of another team elsewhere in the country, so you’ll see teams in one conference root for the favorite in another conference just so that a surprise team doesn’t eat up an automatic spot in the tournament.

Conference tournaments are exciting in their own right, but they do lead to some potential for counter-intuitive incentives. Like in European club soccer, as I recently explored in a post on whether or not teams always actually “play to win the game,” some teams may go into their conference championships with other things on their mind. Avoiding injury or testing a new strategy could be more important to a team that already feels it has a spot in March Madness wrapped up than winning the conference championship. For years, the Big East was widely thought of as the best and most physical basketball conference in the country. Teams that won or even just went very far in the Big East conference championships often were so physically and mentally drained by the effort that they couldn’t play their best in the NCAA Tournament. This sparked two competing lines of thought. One was that Big East teams shouldn’t try to hard to win their conference championship. The other was that winning the Big East title was in some ways more prestigious than winning March Madness itself.

This year, the power conferences (for the men’s tournament) are the Big 12, Big Ten, Big East, ACC, and SEC. The in-betweens are the American, Mountain West, Pac-12, Atlantic 10, West Coast, and Missouri Valley conferences. The other leagues are mostly tiny conferences with one bid, but of course, we won’t know until the selection committee releases their choices. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Dear Sports Fan at 100,000

This morning I woke up to find that Dear Sports Fan turned 100,000 overnight. That’s right, since May 22, 2011, the first day of this blog’s existence, it has been viewed 100,000 times! The past almost five years have been an amazing time for me. This blog has gone from being a casual side-project to a passion to an almost full-time avocation. I’ve poured a lot of myself into the around 500,000 words I’ve written for this site and if there hasn’t been blood or tears so far, there has definitely been a lot of sweat. I want to thank the close to 3,000 people who have come along for the ride in a really meaningful way by following me on Twitter or Fancred or liking my page on Facebook. You all are the worm that keeps me excited about getting up early and writing. [BAD METAPHOR ALERT]

To celebrate, I’d like to share a little bit about the blog, give some stats and anecdotes from the first 100,000 views and talk a little bit about the next 100,000.

Statistics

How did Dear Sports Fan get to 100,000? Let’s let the numbers tell the story.

As you can see from this first chart, the site’s growth was reasonably consistent for its first three years, from May of 2011 to the spring of 2014. Then it starts picking up a little speed and grows a little more rapidly. Starting in August of 2014, the site’s growth accelerates like a mile runner kicking towards the finish line. This growth rate continues to get steeper until the last little bit of the graph. Translating those numbers to events, I can tell you that I became much more dedicated to the site in late 2013/early 2014. My dedication was rewarded with more views. More views fed my dedication, and during the Spring and Summer of 2014, as I struggled with the decision to leave my job of seven and a half years, I decided that part of what I wanted to do when I left was write Dear Sports Fan. After I left in August of 2014, I was able to start writing every day. This, combined with a particularly newsworthy NFL football season, sparked the growth you see in the curve above. This peaked with the Super Bowl on Feb 1, Dear Sports Fan’s best day ever with 966 views. Since then, there’s been a natural lull, both in terms of my writing and the public’s viewing. I’m actually thrilled that Dear Sports Fan has maintained its relevance as much as it has during the slow sports time after the Super Bowl.

An even better way of looking at these statistics is through a chart showing average views per day.

One fun thing to notice in the chart above is that every September before this past one has a little peak. This is the peak in interest as the college and NFL football seasons start and lots of people start wondering how football works and why our culture seems so obsessed with it. This past year I was able to take that peak and build on it. Two other spikes that are fun to notice and remember are February 2014, when I wrote a lot about and even traveled to the Winter Olympics in Russia and June 2014 when the World Cup made soccer a brief national obsession.

What’s Next?

I have two projects that I’m excited about starting. The first is a text message service for hockey or basketball fans and the people who live in, around, or with them. The NHL and NBA playoffs begin April 15 and April 18 respectively. The playoffs are a hectic time. Teams play almost every other night but are not always scheduled in a predictable way. The importance of each game is magnified to somewhere on a scale from vital to earth-shatteringly important depending on the context of the seven-game playoff series. Injuries are tracked with as much interest and as little forthrightness as Cold War era troop movements. It’s a lot to keep track of and I’d like to help out with a text message each morning. The second project will be a series of articles and podcasts describing major sports franchises and what’s unique about being a fan of that team. There’s a surfeit of information out there about sports teams but very little that helps the layperson understand what to expect from a typical Mets fan and how that’s different from a Yankees fan.

Both of these new initiatives are more focused on getting directly involved with people who read, listen to, or otherwise make use of the site. Engagement has been the biggest struggle so far and I’m really hoping this will help. If you’re interested in being a part of one or both of the new features, comment on this post or send an email to dearsportsfan@gmail.com. Let me know if you’re a fan or someone who lives among the fans and which team or teams you follow.

Thanks for all the support,
Ezra Fischer