Did You See the Madness for Yourself?

As if the NCAA basketball tournament was awaiting an opportunity to vindicate me, there was the fascinating Sweet 16 game between #1 seed Gonzaga and #4 seed West Virginia, in which the losing team held the ball too long on the last possession and paid for it with the end of their season.

Down three with 35 seconds left, the Mountaineers missed a pair of shots and retrieved the rebound each time, giving them the ball with 13 seconds left. As you can see from the video here (go to about 2:05 for the final sequence), the rebounder hands the ball to another player who immediately backs away to regroup just as the clock hits 10 seconds.

You can see from the still shot above that he doesn't begin making an effort to drive the lane or set up for a pass or a shot until 6 seconds are left, by which time it is way too late. Gonzaga stifled his attempt to dribble and he never even got off a shot. 

Think about what a disastrous possession that was. The team missed a pair of three pointers and yet still had the ball with plenty of time to even the score. Yet they wasted half the available time in a misguided attempt to run out the clock while still behind.

Eventually, some coach is going to recognize the folly of this strategy and win a Final Four or championship game. Then you will begin to see teams altering what is transparently and empirically a losing proposition.

The Team That Will Beat Kentucky

"Which team can beat Kentucky?" is the question du jour, du semaine, du Mars, it being Folie du Mars after all.

The answer, from the self-proclaimed Cognoscenti of College Cagers, is a team that matches up well with the Wildcats, that can answer Lexington's trees with timberland of their own, that can "break down" the big blue defense, or "play long" or "dictate the pace" or whatever patter is en vogue in hoops today.

The teams invariably mentioned are other top dogs of the NCAA this year like Wisconsin and Duke.

But it's obvious to a casual observer that these are patently misguided, by two Scientologists and Lois Lerner's emails.

Certainly Kentucky has less of a margin against better teams. That's so obvious the person picking her bracket based on mascot names could tell you it. The Wildcats can beat a #16 seed despite playing their worst game, something they can't do against a top seed.

But beyond that, the recipe for beating Kentucky, or any team with more talent than yours, is not a particular style of play. It's good play, a hot hand and some luck.

A team will beat Kentucky when several of of the following occur:
1. The underdog hits their shots, particularly their three-point shots. There's no defense against shots that go in the basket.
2. Kentucky doesn't shoot well.
3. The underdog stays out of foul trouble.
4. A couple of key Wildcats have to sit.
5. The underdog pulls down defensive rebounds, thereby keeping Kentucky from multiple shots at the basket each time down.
6. The underdog wins a few extra 50-50 balls.
7. A couple of questionable calls go the underdog's way.
8. Kentucky has bad juju that day.

We've seen it before. No one would cite Missisissippi (play-in game), Texas A&M (NIT) and LSU (#9 seed) as Most Likely To Succeed against John Calipari's squad. But each of them pushed Kentucky to within Donald Trump's intellect of defeat, two of them going to overtime and one losing by a bucket. Had one more trey fallen during those games this whole line of banter would be moot.

So the question isn't who can beat Kentucky. It's how.

Getting Hosed: A Short Hoops Interval

When the NCAA men's basketball brackets were first revealed on CBS last night, Oregon's shocking 12 seed jumped off the screen. A top 25 team, the Ducks were among the Pac-13's (or whatever number it is now) elite and swept the league tournament, defeating UCLA, a team given a six seed, in its home city.

Analyst Doug Gotlieb, a former Oklahoma State star and current college hoops savant, jumped down the throat of the selection committee chair, bluntly demanding an explanation (which he didn't get.)

March madness, indeed! In a rational universe, Oregon almost certainly merits an eight seed, maybe a nine. Dropping them four lines means the NCAA sachems rated them 16 teams lower than the rest of America did. The irony is that the committee did the Ducks a favor. The eight-nine line is the tournament death star because the winner draws a nearly unbeatable #1 seed everytime.

As I've documented before, there's virtually no difference between a six seed and a seven, eight, nine, or even a 10 or 11. Everyone from six to 11 is talented but flawed and it doesn't take a lot going right for an 11 or wrong for a six, to produce an upset, as we've seen repeatedly in the tournament.
This line of reasoning fails at the top of the bracket. There are discernible gaps between the top seeds and teams just a little bit lower. 

What this adds up to is: an eight seed has no advantage whatsoever in the first round and a giant hill to climb in the second. A 12 seed is just slightly less likely to survive the first round but significantly more likely to defeat a four-seed -- or the 13 -- in the second round.

I assume the Oregon coach is smart enough to zip his team's lips publicly but to deal the disrespect card privately every chance he gets.

Which means the team that really got hosed was Oklahoma State, a fifth seed with a win-or-go-home first-round contest against an angry #8 in the 12 spot.

A Bad Seed

The Texas Longhorns raced off to a 17-0 record and a #1 ranking as the calendar changed on this NCAA basketball season. The Horns have stumbled to a 7-9 record since, fallen out of the Top 25 and succumbed by 30 points to Baylor in their league tournament. So you might have been disappointed that they were "rewarded" with the #8 seed in the East region.

In fact, the selection committee has punished Texas severely and appropriately. Here's the dirty little secret of the NCAA tournament: The #8 seed is the worst seeding in the bracket. (Followed, for the same reasons, by #9.) The Horns' prospects would be better with a seed as low as 11.

There's virtually no difference in quality between teams seeded 7-10 and only a little distance between the six line and the 11. Every team in the middle of the field is good, but flawed. Every one of them can be beaten. So it doesn't matter whether UT plays the nine-seed -- in this case an equally desultory Wake Forest -- or the six-seed -- in this case Marquette.  Either opponent is roughly equal in ability to them.

Between the first and the third seeds, however, lies a chasm. Those are the second round foes facing the winners of the 8-9 and 6-11 games. Should Texas prevail, they have an almost insurmountable second-round match-up with that monster called Kentucky. Should #11 Washington bump off Milwaukee's finest , they have an eminently winnable game against #3-seed New Mexico.

#9 Wake Forest and #6 Marquette are virtually indistinguishable in terms of quality. #1 Kentucky and #3 New Mexico, night and day.

The end result: Texas might win their first-round game, but the Sweet 16 is almost certainly beyond their reach. Amazing for a squad ranked first in the country in January. It's the curse of the #8 seed. If your school is in line for one, root for it to get demoted in the bracket.
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86 the 96!

Been spending a lot of the last two weeks avoiding exposure to Winter Olympics coverage.  I can't stomach the needless nationalism that dominates our view of the Olympica, as if the ability of some 19-year-old from Vermont to ski down a hill fast demonstrates U.S. superiority over Sweden.

This time of year, I'm focused on pitchers and catchers, of course, and college hoops. The NCAA tournament -- and its lead-up -- are a particularly exciting time if you come from places like Albany, NY and Charleston, S.C., rooting for hometown teams like College of Charleston, Siena, Coastal Carolina, Cornell, and, for no apparent reason, Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, commonly known as IUPUI, which is pronounced "Oo-wee-poo-wee."

Gaining steam these days in college basketball circles is a horrifying idea. Jim Boeheim, the under-appreciated Syracuse coach, has been lobbying for several years to vastly expand the NCAA tournament to 96 teams. Boeheim wants to turn college basketball into the NBA or NHL, which is to say, make it totally irrelevant.

From a coach's perspective, this makes perfect short-term sense. He loves his kids, they work hard, they are among the best in the world, and he wants them to have an opportunity to dance at the big ball. (This year, of course, this isn't an issue for the Orange, who are #1 seed contenders. But his squad has come up short in recent years.) And Boeheim has the ear of the movers and shakers of NCAA basketball. This is worrisome, because Boeheim's proposal would literally ruin the game.

Imagine if every team that now plays in the NIT were to join the NCAA. Entire BCS conferences would pass into the tournament. Yawn. Say goodbye to the winner-take-all excitement of most league tournaments. ZZZzzzz. It would suck the prestige out of earning a berth for mid-majors and small conferences. Really, how special is a tournament invitation when a quarter of all teams get one? From the fans' perspective, it would destroy the regular season, render many conference tournaments lame and add nothing to the NCAA tournament.

All this is an object lesson for Major League Baseball. It must resist the misguided and nearsighted forces hankering for expanded playoffs and keep the regular season meaningful. It must maintain the credibility of a playoff spot, which could be sorely tested even with the current alignment if the AL Central delivers four .500 teams this year. It must maintain its slim purchase on the remaining sliver of integrity connected to the pennant race.

Bud, beware the Boeheims! 86 the 96!