even though our beloved hokies are watching just like us, and the tourney has already been going on since tuesday, i feel like there's enough interest in the greatest tournament on the planet to warrant a thread.
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so yeah, the most march madness moment of day 1, the last 10 seconds of marquette/davidson. i was pulling for davidson since i grew up 20 minutes from their campus but sometimes you just gotta appreciate the madness.
The fact that Ty Garland has more NCAA Tournament wins at La Salle than Erick Green is further proof that Greenberg was a terrible coach.
Damn you Harvard and your stupid brains!
Also, I thought the tie-breaker in our office pool was margin of victory in the final. Turns out it's actually total points in the final. Doubt it'll come to the tie-breaker, but it's very unlikely that the final score will be something like 4-3...
This is why I didn't go to Harvard.
I am thanking Harvard so much for winning right now, that has saved me! Luckiest pick ever.
But Marquette was so close to blowing it. And curse Ok. State
The picture above brings a tear to my eye. I miss that 07 team
Bracket be damned Go Great Danes
Why do I even bother filling out a bracket? This is what I should name my bracket next year.
basically what has happened to my bracket so far
at least i got ole miss right
Did anyone else hesitate/avoid picking OK State simply due to the fact that we beat them? I did, but picked them over Oregon anyway...should have went with my gut.
Not only did I avoid Oklahoma State, but I didn't touch the rest of the Big 12 with a 12' pole.
OH HELLO SETH
At this point I wouldn't mind seeing LaSalle play Ohio St. for the west.
go ty, from si:
By inches, the ball off the hands of the 6-foot-1 Garland cleared the outstretched hands of Reginald Buckner, the Rebels' muscular 6-9 center.
"He blocked my shot a couple times during the game, but I ain't scared of nobody,'' Garland said. "I went in there and knew if I could get an open shot, I could make it.''
Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/ncaa/men/gameflash/2013/03/2...
georgetown, georgetown, georgetown!
every year guys!
what they have done would be equal to us losing to jmu (or a team like that) for 5 straight years.
Not nearly as bad as that. Sure, they've been losing to double-digit seeds, but these are all tourney teams. We lost to an FCS school. Totally different ball park.
FGCU Basketball didn't exist until two years ago. That's comparable I'd say.
No, because they are still regarded as one of the top 68 teams in the nation. How long they've been playing is irrelevant. I don't think anyone would argue that JMU was one of the 68 best football teams in the nation. I don't think it would be considered one of the top 136 teams in the nation that year. I'm sorry, it was a painful day for me too, but it was a different order of magnitude in terms of crappiness.
Saying the tournament teams are the top 68 teams in the country is ridiculous. There's no way the 6 16-seeds are the 63rd through 68th best teams in the nation, that is ridiculous. Liberty was 11-20 going into their conference tournament. There is no way that they were even #68 in the country, maybe not even top 200. I know it isn't the best measure to use, but their RPI was #288. Because of the "automatic bids", for anyone beyond about the top 50 (12 seeds), there are better teams that missed the tournament.
FGCU was #94 in the RPI. I don't think the comparison is too terribly different. Georgetown was a 2 seed, meaning top 8 in the nation. When JMU beat us, we were #13. In the final Sagarin ratings, we were #13, and they were #97, the 10th highest FCS school. Pretty damn good comparison, if you ask me.
There are 347 division 1 mens basketball teams. Being in the top 100 still puts you in the top third of the country. There were at the time of the JMU game there were 120 FBS teams (121 if you count JMU for this comparison).
94th out of 347 teams is not nearly the same as 97th out of 121 teams. I'm sorry, there's just no comparison here. And that's not even taking into account the fact that FGCU just tore through another tourney team.
Sagarin takes into account FBS and FCS, so it isn't just the top 121 as you say. FCS is still Division 1 by definition. It's just called Division 1-AA. Besides, automatic bids don't mean that you are part of an elite group. It just means you were the best of your conference (or made a crazy run like Liberty). Saying that the NCAA tournament represents the top 68 teams in the nation is the same as saying that the BCS represents the top 10 teams in the nation. It may be an exclusive group, but not all teams are elite.
EDIT: FWIW, Sagarin ranks 246 teams across I-A and I-AA.
I think we can still agree that the 97th best football team and the 97th best basketball team are far different animals. Id' say that FGCU upsetting Georgetown is more like some team unranked, but still a contender upsetting a top-10 team. The 97th best football school is a basement dweller. Like Duke pre-Cutliff bad. It's just not the same. Is it an upset? Of course. But it's just that. Not "the worst loss in program history" bad.
Not quite. In 2005, Duke was #133. In 2007, Duke was #109. 2006, data is not available.
This year, Colorado was #156.
Losing to any of those 3 teams would be terrible, statistically, worse than our JMU loss was. But they wouldn't have appeared quite so bad just because they are in the same division as us.
I think what I'm trying to get at is that Division 1 basketball essentially covers FBS and FCS football, and that FGCU basketball would easily fall into FCS if basketball was split up similarly to football. And in that sense, the upsets are very similar.
And this one might even be worse, given what was at stake. For us, that JMU game was just a regular season game. Only thing at stake was the change in the W-L columns. Georgetown was in the NCAA tournament. That loss ended their season.
But I still say there's a big difference between #100 in basketball and #100 in football. That's why we divide the divisions. Because of the necessary roster sizes and costs of fielding a football, the little guys can't keep up like they can in basketball. There's far less parity in football because of it. That's why Appy St-Michigan and JMU-Vt are such big deals.
Anyway, I guess we clearly aren't going to come to a consensus here, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.
It's kind of tough watching Montrezl Harrell playing so well already for Louisville and realizing he would have been the second best player on our team by miles.
Happy for Garland, sad we need to live through our players that transferred to find any basketball success.