12/21/24
March 14, 2002
And so it begins.: Pepperdine, my surprise pick to reach the final eight, falls to Wake Forest. What was I thinking? Thankfully, Missouri prevailed. It's madness, I tell you, madness!
posted by jacknose to basketball at 04:27 PM - 24 comments
yeah, i've got kansas in FF, but i'd so have loved a holy cross upset. my bracket didn't do great today...but i gotta toot my horn for calling wyoming over the Zags. i heart March!
posted by danostuporstar at 08:50 PM on March 14, 2002
My bracket's looking pretty good right now, we'll see how long that lasts. I'm very angry about not betting on the 12 seeds as I had planned... I knew that the 12s would kick some ass this year... Except for Creighton. Go Gators! :)
posted by Bernreuther at 08:57 PM on March 14, 2002
I've nailed every upset so far today! I don't remember every one, but I picked Gonzaga to lose and the 12s to win, plus Kent State. Woohoo! Is the Yahoo thing updated at the end of the day?
posted by grum@work at 09:02 PM on March 14, 2002
And then USC goes and loses in overtime, ruining my perfect day. Oh well.
posted by grum@work at 09:50 PM on March 14, 2002
I also had Gonzaga losing. As for the rest of my bracket... not so good. I called Mizzou winning but I had Marquette, USC, and OK St. all winning...
posted by gyc at 09:55 PM on March 14, 2002
A quick look at the Yahoo game shows that only 6 people out of more than 591,000 were perfect for the day (16 out of 16). Yikes. Even if you were to randomly fill out your sheet, you should get a perfect first day 1 out of every 65,536 tries. The Yahoo tournament rate is approximately 1 out of every 98,000 tries. Collectively, the tournament participants are worse than just flipping a coin for each game. Oy.
posted by grum@work at 09:20 AM on March 15, 2002
While a Kansas loss to Holy Cross would have broken my bracket beyond repair, I still would have liked HC win both because I like those way-under underdog victories, and because I fear Kansas will beat Duke in the end. (and my home will be a dark place if Duke loses.)
posted by jennyb at 02:02 PM on March 15, 2002
Wow, this year there is a lot of parity. I see Oklahoma played close by UIC, and now Creighton beats Florida. The only blowout these two days have been Duke and Indiana winning...
posted by gyc at 02:07 PM on March 15, 2002
I was thinking Hawaii would make it to the great eight, but of right now...ummm I don't know... My bracket's toast. (i did pick Missouri though...and Tulsa, hehe)
posted by Benway at 03:47 PM on March 15, 2002
Yeah... I picked Hampton to upset UConn... they stuck around but UConn put them away... at least Illinois won and won big. I'd be interested to see at the end of the tournament if anyone on Yahoo got 100% of the picks right.
posted by gyc at 04:40 PM on March 15, 2002
never underestimate the X-men. Actually I think the lack of depth and all the travelling had a lot to do with their loss as well.
posted by mick at 07:38 PM on March 15, 2002
gyc: the odds of getting it all right are pretty near infinitesmal; I don't think anyone has ever done it in the much larger ESPN pools. This cool page suggests that less than 5% picked UNC-W, and only 3.21% picked Wyoming. As soon as you get multiple upsets like that, the odds of picking everything right get really, really small.
posted by tieguy at 08:22 PM on March 15, 2002
Cool, thanks for the link tieguy... I'm very surprised though that only 3.1% picked Wyoming over Gonzaga. I would have thought that more people would have picked Wyoming over Gonzaga than UNCW over USC at least since on paper the W-G matchup would have been closer. Meanwhile, got to love SIU for knocking off Bob Knight and TTU.
posted by gyc at 09:45 PM on March 15, 2002
gyc: I guess people believed the hype on Gonzaga. I saw only one game of theirs, but personally picked them to the sweet 16 (to lose to Oklahoma.) They just looked damn good in that one opportunity. Part of that was, I guess, because it looked like they had great shooters; those great shooters shot less than 20% for the game. Happens, I guess.
To me, by the way, the real story of the first round is that the Madness was not particularly mad- it looks like there will be only 2 upsets today, and only 5 yesterday. I don't have any stats offhand, but I'm sure that is much lower than usual.
posted by tieguy at 10:17 PM on March 15, 2002
There might have been less upsets, but there were much fewer blowouts than before. For example, in the 1-16 matchups, only Duke and Cincinnati blew out their opponents. In fact, almost all of the games in the tournament were surprisingly close.
posted by gyc at 12:44 AM on March 16, 2002
I don't think anyone has ever done it in the much larger ESPN pools. I've heard at least two stories in the last two years of people getting all the games right, including a woman last year who admitted she didn't know anything about basketball. I agree that the odds are long, but it's just a question of monkeys to typewriters.
posted by yerfatma at 08:07 AM on March 16, 2002
gyc: definitely true. Lots of fairly close games. We'll see if the close games that played to seed mean more upsets the rest of the weekend. It is definitely possible we'll see a lot of 2-4 seeds lose out this weekend, and KU looks vulnerable against Stanford if Hinrich doesn't play or doesn't play well.
yerfatma: oh, of course. I'm sure it has happened before. Even with something like a million entrants last year, ESPN's pool is still 'small' compared to the overall possible number of combinations. It just hasn't happened yet in one of the big, nationwide pools that can actually verify such things ;)
posted by tieguy at 09:58 AM on March 16, 2002
Deeeeep breaths. Heck of a display by Notre Dame against Duke. Tough, agressive gameplan- very well coached by Brey. Incredibly, it was Duke's bench (Sanders and Ewing) that pulled the fat out of the fire. Those kinds of games are why we play, I guess. (And yes, I promise to stop calling the Big East a weaker conference now :)
posted by tieguy at 02:35 PM on March 16, 2002
aside: I think CBS's Solomon Wilcox has done an outstanding job. He's come a long way since his days as a bumbling affiliate reporter covering HS football.
posted by mick at 06:46 PM on March 16, 2002
But the rest of the CBS crew are a bunch of bumbling idiots. One of their studio guys compared some team to 'fruit yogurt' this morning, and they switched away from a two point game with ~40 seconds left to a five point game with two minutes left. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Both of those are typical of their excuses for 'commentary' and 'programming.' I rue the day they beat ESPN/ABC for the tourney contract.
posted by tieguy at 06:52 PM on March 16, 2002
on the bright side, at least it's not NBC
posted by mick at 09:33 PM on March 16, 2002
Greg Gumbel and Clark Kellog are borrrrrring.
posted by corpse at 08:13 AM on March 17, 2002
mick: at least NBC would pull an Olympics and put games on CNBC and MSNBC. And I'd kill to have Bob Costas call a national championship game and opine on, say, Bob Knight, or early entry to the NBA. He'd probably be wrong but it would be fun to listen to :)
posted by tieguy at 09:12 AM on March 17, 2002
Go Holy Cross!