I definitely like this Noah kid a lot more now.

Categories: Commentary, donald, NewsWatch, Postseason
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I’m sure you’ve heard all about the Division II championship game played this past Saturday, but perhaps many of you didn’t get to see the last 45 seconds of it. Absolutely ridiculous:

Winona State came into the game with a 57 game winning streak (over two seasons), only to have it ripped away in the last minutes of this game. Thanks to Wing for the pointer to the youtube link.

Categories: donald, NewsWatch, Postseason
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The first Thursday of the NCAAs is a wonderful day. Four basketball games at once, four time slots…making for 16 fantastic games of College Basketball. One of my fondest memories of my youth is getting lucky one year and having a snow day the very first day of the NCAAs. There’s absolutely no better feeling as a kid than getting a snow day — you wake up, groggily listen to the radio and hope that your school gets announced. And when it does, you shut off that alarm and go back to sleep for those precious hours of sleep. On that lucky day, I slept until noon, turned on the tube, and watched five hours of basketball. Now that I’m working, I try to work from home the very first day of the tourney. It’s not quite the same as a snow day, but it’s still awesome.

A few interesting links that I’ve read over the past few days:

• ESPN Page 2 Guide to the NCAA Tournament: It’s a long, amusing read. Besides giving some props to Ken Pomeroy’s offensive and defensive efficiency ratings, they also bring light to my question from a few posts ago: What’s up with Syracuse’s uniforms? It turns out Nike is bringing out a new set of uniforms just for the NCAAs. Nike’s outfitting Syracuse, Ohio State, Florida, and Arizona in the “tight shirt, baggy shorts” uniform, which they chose to name Nike System of Dress. What’s amusing is that if you go to the site, they show players from each team in the new outfits. One of the players doesn’t belong, because he’s the only one without a shirt on. That player? Yes, he’s on Syracuse. Of course, that’s the only team that didn’t make the NCAAs either. Highly amusing.
• Princeton Basketball News: This is an excellent college basketball blog with in depth coverage of Princeton basketball. What’s touching is that they also cover prodigal son John Thompson III and Georgetown basketball. I highly recommend the post on the Big East Tournament which sums up what’s fun about being at MSG. Also see the youtube video that shows JT3 cutting down the net after the Hoya victory last week.
• Meet Central Connecticut State: From the NYTimes Bracket blog — apparently Greg Oden doesn’t know how the NCAA Tournament works: “The coach had to explain to Oden that the teams play the first round on Thursday and the second round on Saturday. “Then he asked if the game was in the same place.”” I haven’t been impressed with Oden, and now I’ll be rooting against him — how could you possibly not know how the NCAAs work? Honestly, I’ve never seen him passionate about playing basketball this year.
• Penn’s Stephen Danley Hijacks The Bracket: I’ll make it short — Penn baller (and Rhodes scholar finalist) Danley writes about what it’s like to play basketball in the Ivy League. His blog post borders on the pretentious. An excerpt about Penn’s interactions with the media:
  

  It didn’t end there. Just this week someone asked our star point guard, Ibrahim Jaaber, what going to the tournament for a third consecutive season meant to him. ”The marinara sauce on my spaghetti,” he told them. Calling it the frosting on the cake just won’t cut it at Penn.

  Hey Danley — you know what won’t cut it in the real world? Acting like a douchebag. Hilarity ensues in the comments, as the otherwise sedate audience (read: Upper East side investment bankers and management consultants) banter about the merits/demerits of Danley’s post. I love it.

• Name of the Year blog: Found from Bill Simmons’s article yesterday is this gem: a tournament of the greatest names people actually have. My favorites? Yourhighness Morgan, Phyre Quickly Burns, and Conceptualization Gibbs.

Peace out and have a great Thursday. I know I will.

Categories: BlogWatch, donald, NewsWatch
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There were a couple of good articles in the latest edition of The New York Times’s excellent if infrequent Play Magazine. Though there were a few short pieces about college basketball, none were about the Big East (well, one, if you count the feature on a UConn Women’s Basektball superfan).

However, How to Build a Prodigy describes the latest in what I would call “sports neurology”. Not everything is new here, but it’s a good summary of the past few years of research. And now I know that it’s too late to improve my jump shot, unless I want to make 5000 or more correct attempts.

If you’re still trying to determine your picks for our Big East Tourney Pick ‘Em Challenge (see below), you might want to check out For the Gamblers, 1+2=5. Key points:

Ignore seeds once they’ve been assigned. Just because a 12 seed often beats a 5 seed, this particular 12-seeded team didn’t get magical powers from the selection committee’s decision.

Don’t watch games. Counter-intuitive, but true. Not that this is going to stop you, but the more you watch, the more biased your opinion becomes. The article mentions the obvious fact that if you watch one team a lot, you’re going to be subjective. But memories are extremeley selective in general, and “The best handicappers are people who don’t watch games at all”. This leads to an interesting corollary: all the big pundits who make predictions are going to be wrong. (Has anyone done an analysis of how accurate ESPN writers’ picks are?) More interestingly, it also suggests that the NCAA selection committee, which uses a combination of statistics and watching tons of games, might do better by just using statistics. (Or having some kind of double-elimination tournament for all Div I teams.)

Trust Vegas. When it’s all about the money, rationality prevails over emotion.

The tournament never follows seed exactly, but it’s never that random either. Take small chances, but don’t pick your favorite Cinderella 16-seed to run the table.

Remember, it’s not too late to enter your Pick ‘Em brackets!

Categories: Juice, NewsWatch
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Khalid El-Amin: Alive and Kicking | CHN College Basketball

His battle to make it back to the League has gone overseas, where El-Amin has continued his winning ways and has become one of the best players in Europe.  Check out this resume – back-to-back Turkish League Player of the Year (04 & 05) and last year in the Ukraine – 2006 Ukrainian Championship, 2006 Championship series MVP and 2006 regular season MVP.  This season Khalid’s Azovmash Mariupol squad is in third place in the Ukrainian Superleague with a 5-1 record.  El-Amin poured in 22 points in their last win.

Funny, this resume mimics his high school accolades before UConn.

Categories: Connecticut, Dan'l B, NewsWatch
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