NCAA Tourney - greatest sporting event in the world
 

Good Lord I love this tourney. Already in the first two games, one was a minor upset with Wisc - Milwaukee (11) beating Oklahoma (6), and right now Pacific (13) is beating a highly touted BC team by 6 in OT.

Billy Packer, eat poop. He sat on his high horse talking about the selection process and how these little schools don't belong in the NCAA tourney with the likes of BC and other teams from the Big East and the ACC.

Damn right they do, Packer. The greatest part of the tourney is the little guys beating the established powers, or at least pushing them to the wire when no one thinks they should.

Yeah! Eat poop, Packer.

Ohh, I thought you were going to compare and contrast the NCAA thingy to World Cup Soccer.. Oh well.. ;)

Though Pacific lost to BC in 2OT, it was one fine, fine game (until the 2nd OT, when Pacific just disintegrated).

Can we add a fashion element to this thread and discuss the fact that more sports teams are using black in their colors as it helps to psychologically intimidate their opponants?

(I've no idea if this is even true - but someone was claiming it in a snippet of the Santa Monica City Council meeting I accidentally tuned in on)

Well, when my 6th grade daughter plays basketball, I will only buy her black high tops for exactly that purpose. She's going to have a black mouth piece when she gets to that level. So many girls wear pink high tops or white with pink stripes or something. Not intimidating in the least.

I'm not so worried about the color of my girls uniform. I'm just happy we found a B-ball coach that teaches solid teamwork and skills for winning. So many coaches around here are of the "as long as you have fun" mentality. It's actually quite amusing to watch the parents of the opposing team go apoplectic when our 4th grade girls set a double pick and the ball handler just breezes down the center lane for a layup.

Have to teach that stuff early. During my HS off season, I take my daughter and her friends down to the gym at the school and run some drills on fundamentals and team work and then let them play.

Good for your 4th grade daughter to even know what a double screen is!

And now you have a 15 seed Winthrop holding a 1 point lead over a 2 seed Tennessee with under 3 to go! Go underdogs!

I heard an interesting discussion on NPR the other day. An econimonist feels that he has demonstrated statistically that points-shaving is rather rampant in NCAA basketball. He bases this on 3 observations he made by studying a large sampling of games in which one team was heavily favored over the other from the past few years:

1) The win-loss distribution (not factoring in the spread, just raw wins and losses) was exactly what would be predicted by the odds.

2) There were significantly more wins by the favored team that were decided by just under the point spread than statistically predicted.

3) Conversely, there were significantly fewer wins by the favored team that were decided by just over the point spread.

It's certainly a compelling argument. He was quick to point out that he didn't have enough data from any single team to point fingers and say, "These guys were point shaving!" He can only look in aggregate and conclude that something is definitely skewing the results from their statistical distribution.