Narrated by NBA legend and surprisingly funny person Chris Webber.
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Trust your instincts, not these “experts.”
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After a year in which a freshman-powered team won the national championship, the top recruiting classes have struggled mightily. What changed?
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Last season, the best team in the country started three freshmen and two sophomores, and one of the frosh won the nation's player-of-the-year award. Then they all left for the NBA draft. It seemed like a turning point. Of course, the evolution had started years earlier: there had already been guys with games polished enough to excel in school immediately, like Kevin Durant — during one season at Texas, KD averaged 26 points and 11 rebounds (11! despite weighing about 90 pounds at the time and being so weak that he couldn't bench 185 pounds a single time at the NBA Draft Combine). But Kentucky symbolized a total conquering of college basketball by its youngest members. The one-and-done player had been around for a while, but John Calipari won a title with what was essentially a one-and-done team.
On the edge of the 2013 tournament, though, Coach Cal's title looks more like an outlier than a model for next-generation NCAA success. Instead of priming themselves for a chance to tear down the nets in Atlanta, four of the nation's top six recruiting classes are sitting back on campus, playing Mario Kart. Kentucky, Texas, Baylor, and Providence — the #2, #4, #5, and #6 classes in the country, according to ESPN — all struck out on making the Dance; that's in stark contrast to 2012, when only one of the top six classes, St. John's, stayed home. And in case you want to argue that Kentucky's failure should be excused because of the injury to Nerlens Noel, keep in mind that UK was being talked about as having the best haul in the country even before Noel committed, thanks to the basketball virtues of Alex Poythress, Archie Goodwin, and Willie Cauley-Stein — three coveted prospects who just lost last night in the first round of the NIT.
So what are we to make of this? That old, cagey basketball players still hold the secret to success? That teams should start trying to recruit Kurt Thomas? That we should blame the Millenials? That John Calipari has lost his edge? Maybe, yes, yes, and no. The one-and-done player certainly remains a viable model, but this year's frosh-struggles demonstrate that the old-fashioned "have players learn to play the game with each other over time" strategy is alive and well.
Part of it is depth. Last year, five of the top six classes went to Duke, Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Ohio State, a selection of blue-blood programs that brought those rookies to rosters already replete with grade-A players. They added ultra-talented freshmen to stable depth charts and team cultures, meaning that, in cases where those freshmen struggled or got injured, there was enough ability to replace or shore up the spots they left open. In 2013, Kentucky had to deal with losing almost all of its super-talented 2012 class as well as the departure of would-be upperclassmen Doron Lamb and Terrence Jones, meaning that, even though it once again had the number-one haul, the team wasn't adding to the same bedrock as it did the previous year. (And make no mistake: as much as Kentucky has to thank its freshmen for that title, Lamb, Jones, and Darius Miller were huge aspects as well.) At Texas, sophomore guard and potential team leader Myck Kabongo was suspended for accepting improper benefits. Meanwhile, Baylor had seen its best player, Perry Jones III, leave for the draft at the end of last season, and Providence's upperclassmen just weren't very good to begin with.
Second, it seems possible that the sheer amount of talent in Kentucky's 2012 haul will become harder and harder to put together. Because of the sea change in college basketball that has seen more mid-majors making the tournament and more players from mid-majors getting drafted into the NBA, a top recruiting class may not be that much better than the median as it used to be. With talent more evenly spread around the country, teams with less of a name-brand are getting taken more seriously by the selection committee, often at the expense of the major schools with the glitzy recruits. (Just ask this year's Kentucky and Baylor teams.)
So it's unlikely that we'll see the phenomenon of overrating freshman-dependent squads next year, like what happened in 2012 with North Carolina State being the ACC preseason #1, based on their #10 class, or Baylor receiving a first-place vote in the preseason Big 12, or Kentucky being the country's preseason #3. And don't shed any tears for Kentucky, either: after retaining Goodwin, Poythress, and Cauley-Stein the Wildcats will once again bring in in the nation's best recruiting class, replicating the particular formula that led to their national championship.
The takeaway from the 2012 college basketball season is simple: you still need old dudes! And by old, I mean 21.
The games are on, but you're “working.” Here's how to build a desk-based 360-degree basketball experience.
This week, about three million Americans will spend a few hours of their work day watching the NCAA Tournament at their desks. It's said that it will cost the American economy $134 million in lost productivity. Some writers believe such numbers are inflated — but isn't the real problem that the number should be higher? We're only losing $134 million? Even though every game can be live-streamed on six different gizmos? That's unacceptable. March Madness is too amazing for us not to be losing $124 billion due to college basketball watch parties at desks across the country.
So how can you become an official member of the basketball-obsessed cubicle class? We've dug up a few things you'll need to turn your desk into March Madness central — and to keep your boss from ever finding out.
Every game of the tournament will be streaming live on the internet. All you really need is a laptop to watch. (Or a desktop, if that's what's at your desk.)
Just bookmark this link: NCAA.com/MMOD. Every game will be streaming live from that link. That URL will be your best friend this month.
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Every game that airs on CBS will be free for you to watch online, on your computer, tablet or phone. (Or, you know, on your television.) This is amazing.
But there's a catch: Any games that air on the other three networks — TBS, TNT or TruTV — will ONLY be available to cable or satellite TV subscribers. All you need to get past the paywall is a login from your cable/satellite provider — just the email address and password you use for your account with them.
If you're not sure what it is, check with your provider. There's nothing worse than being stuck at the office not watching a game because you couldn't remember what email address your Comcast/Time Warner/DirecTV account is under.
Don't pay for TV? Some advice you didn't hear from us: Find a friend with cable and get their login. The March Madness app will allow multiple logins under the same email address. (Just don't abuse it and get your friend kicked off the site, okay?)
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So, you went to Ohio State University? Congrats on attending the best school ever!
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Winning a pool doesn't mean picking the most likely winners; it means making picks that distinguish you from the pack. Here's how to find the teams that will win you cash money dollars, not just a high score.
Oregon's Diana Inch won the Yahoo bracket contest last year. Beset by constant paparazzi attention and requests for money from distant relatives, her behavior has become increasingly erratic, and she recently checked herself into a luxury rehab facility for "exhaustion."
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Most of the talk about March Madness pools focuses on who'll get seeded where, or trendy upset picks, or, even on the geekier end, how to best pick the most games correctly using statistical models. But really, filling out a bracket isn't about picking the most games correctly. It's about giving yourself the best chance to win. And those are two different things.
In 2007, a pair of math and computer science professors at St. Louis University published a paper about March Madness pools, finding that entrants often select certain teams with a disproportionate frequency compared with those teams' actual chances of winning. Without an immaculate performance in the early rounds, picking these crowd favorites makes it nearly impossible to win the entire pool. You might be right, but everyone else is too.
"Estimated probability" is a team's chance of reaching a given point in Nate Silver's forecast, which is itself a combination of several different computer ranking systems, like Jeff Sagarin's and Ken Pomeroy's, and also accounts for recent injuries, geographical location of games, pre-season rankings, and tournament seedings. For "pool probability," or the probability that other participants have chosen the winner of a given matchup, I used public data from ESPN's Tournament Challenge. Both data sets were generated at approximately 10 p.m. on Monday, March 18.
But picking too many underdogs, particularly in the early rounds, is a bad move too. In the ESPN Tournament Challenge system, on which this analysis is based, it's rarely worthwhile to pick a high seed to win one or two games just for a measly point or two, especially when its opponent has a much greater chance to go further in the tournament. Thus the delicate position in which most bracket-pickers find themselves — choosing enough underdogs to separate from the crowd, but still picking teams with a high probability of winning.
This is intuitive to most, but is an element frequently left out of March Madness models — and the reason why so few people adhere to the probabilities all the way through. Most will throw in a few upsets to differentiate themselves, and these are the picks that are most informed by intuition. Here, we'll attempt to put some science behind those separate-yourself-from-the-crowd picks.
Rivals' political leanings don't extend to tournament strategy.
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For the fifth straight year, President Obama has filled out a special presidential version of a March Madness bracket on his own big board. Last year, Obama's pick (North Carolina) only made it to the Elite Eight, and he's apparently reacted to that letdown by going extremely conservative. Across the aisle, a potential 2016 candidate for his job, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, has also filled out a bracket. (Obama's Republican counterpart has a tougher job, politically speaking, in that his loyalties are divided in a Florida-heavy NCAA field.) Rubio's picks are more (dare we say) progressive-thinking. Here's a closer look:
Looking at Obama's Sweet Sixteen selections, he's only got one non-top 4 seed making it through, that being No. 5 Wisconsin out of the West region. He's even feeling good about teams like No. 4 Saint Louis (Midwest) and No. 3 New Mexico (West) which haven't faced the same level of competition as the bigger schools.
Via: whitehouse.gov
The president is bullish on No. 4 Michigan knocking off No. 1 Kansas in the South region, though the Wolverines didn't exactly end the season on the best of notes. It's a pick that makes little sense, though an always-volatile Michigan unemployment rate may be to blame.
Meanwhile, he also has No. 2 Ohio State defeating No. 5 Wisconsin to make the Final Four. Backing the Buckeyes means pushing through a team from Ohio (the swingiest of swing states) and also getting to stick it to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) one more time.
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Dear Lou Piniella: if you “don't want to use the word 'rape,'” then DON'T USE THE WORD “RAPE.”
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The trade, which sent five valuable Miami players, including All-Star Jose Reyes and pitchers Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson, to the Blue Jays in exchange for five minor players, is widely viewed as a salary dump by the Marlins, selling off their best assets to save money.
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H/T to Jimmy Traina
You don't have to make the NCAA tournament to have your One Shining Moment.
One year after winning the National Championship the Kentucky Wildcats found themselves on the wrong side of this year's NCAA tournament bubble. Instead of getting ready for the Big Dance, the Wildcats were a No.1 seed in the National Invitational Tournament.
As a No. 1 seed, the Wildcats earned a home game, but since their arena was already booked for the first round of the NCAA tournament they had to play their "home game" at tiny Robert Morris University outside Pittsburgh, PA.
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Go ahead and pick teams by mascots or colors, but put a little science behind it. A BuzzFeed original analysis of the last 15 NCAA tournaments.
We broke down school mascots into 8 categories: birds, reptiles, mammals, insects, colors, nature-related, evil beings, and people which included local culture related stuff. The evil beings beat the people category 71% of the time. So if an evil-mascot team is matched up against a person-mascot team, you know what to do.
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Reptiles also beat up on the people 75% of the time. And they came up victorious against mammals 70% of the time. Other mascot trends that occurred about 60% of the time include birds bombing nature; colors over mammals; evil consuming mammals and reptiles; mammals, insects and nature trouncing people; and mammals eating insects.
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Some conferences, like the Ivy League, have a somewhat dismal history. Check the charts below to see which conferences have stalled out, and where, over the last 15 years.
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Florida's players might have done a little too well in Stats 101.
Will Florida's bright statistical outlook get mugged by reality?
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Every year in March Madness there's a team or two that becomes a popular dark-horse pick because they lost more games than they probably should have in the regular season. These teams have excellent defenses and offenses; they rebound and don't turn the ball over. On average, they've outscored their opponents by a significant margin in each game. But they've lost a few close ones here and there, and their record looks mediocre. Whether you pick them usually comes down to whether you believe the numbers have them pegged properly or, conversely, that there's an inherent weakness in their game that the numbers aren't seeing. This year's most-debated team of this sort is Florida. But there might be something unique about Florida compared with dark horses past. Most athletes don't pay much attention to advanced stats, and even coaches who study them closely tend to do so on an abstract level. There's evidence, though, that this year's Florida players are, in fact, "skewing" their own statistics on purpose — that they're actually self-conscious about their own statistical performance, play-to-play, in a way that might be screwing with brackets all over the country.
Let's back up a bit, to Ken Pomeroy. Pomeroy is a meteorologist from Utah who runs the most influential college basketball statistics website. As his site has become increasingly popular, one of the central observations underlying his rankings — that a team's unfiltered points and points-allowed numbers can be misleading because they don't account for the speed at which a team plays — has become fairly widely accepted. There aren't a lot of people anymore who get tricked into thinking that a given team is good at defense just because they play really slow and their opponents just don't take enough shots to run up high scores.
One prominent Pomeroy believer is Florida coach and two-time NCAA champ Billy Donovan. Donovan says he's always followed advanced statistics, but according to a recent piece in ESPN The Magazine, he's recently taken his use of stats up a level by making "defensive efficiency rating" an explicit goal for his players. (Defensive efficiency = how many points, on average, a team gives up to its opponents per possession.) Donovan has an assistant keep a running track of the team's "DER" during games and lets his players know how they're doing at halftime. ESPN's writer watches Donovan become angry at a player for a defensive lapse that cuts the team's lead from 17 to 15 in a game against South Carolina, which they'd eventually win by 41 points; the implication is that the coach stays vigilant about his team's numbers even with a comfortable lead — and that his players know it.
And now the NCAA Tournament has come around, and Billy Donovan's Gators are seed third in the South regional — and at the top of every stats guru's list of teams underrated by the selection committee. Florida's final AP ranking was 14; they lost seven games in a down year for their conference, and were 0–6 in games decided by single digits. But Ken Pomeroy, using efficiency stats, has them as the best team in the country, while Nate Silver thinks they're the third-most likely team to win the championship. BuzzFeed's own statistically driven piece noted that Silver gives the Gators a 37% chance of making the Final Four, but only 17% of the users who've filled out ESPN's bracket have picked them to get to that spot.
In fact, a little bit of a mini-ruckus has broken out in the online college basketball world over Florida; Sports Illustrated's Seth Davis and The Sporting News have slagged them, with Pomeroy and the aforementioned Big Lead contributor coming to the Donovannaires' defense. On one hand, you've got critics saying Florida's efficiency numbers belie their flakiness — that they're a talented team who can really pour it on when they're clicking but have a tendency to choke in close games and can't win on the road. On the other hand, you've got defenders saying, "Well, our numbers are pretty reliably on the money, and it's almost impossible to find statistical evidence that teams really 'choke' consistently as opposed to just having runs of bad luck, so [shrugs, counts money earned by betting on a statistically dominant but allegedly flaky Duke team to win the tournament in 2010]."
But isn't it possible, given the evidence of ESPN's article, that Florida's overall statistical dominance and propensity to win blowouts is not due to exceptional intrinsic talent — but rather evidence of knowing that their coach really cares about their margin of victory? Think of it this way: You're a Florida player who's got a 30-point lead in that aforementioned South Carolina game. You know you're going to win. You'd like to take it easy, play out the game with restraint, try not to get hurt or get in a fight. But look at the bench, and there's one guy over there in a suit and tie literally calculating your defensive efficiency by the second; your head coach keeps going over and talking to him; your head coach's eyes bug out of his skull when someone fails to contest a shot at the rim and the lead gets cut from 30 to 28. This individual, the head coach, Billy Donovan, basically has complete freedom to make your life miserable if he so chooses. Are you going to play harder in that situation than you might for another coach, one who believes there's not much to learn from the precise score of blowouts, who uses these occasions to give some low-stakes minutes to inexperienced underclassmen, or as an opportunity to let a player who's recovering from injury work himself back into game shape, or to give the walk-ons a chance to play in front of their parents?
I know what I would do in that situation: I'd do anything I could to try to please the guy who renews my scholarship and decides whether I have to run wind sprints at 6 in the morning. And maybe Florida's tendency to win big when they do win is evidence that their players make the same choice.
NBA writers like ESPN's Tom Haberstroh have started to notice that the Miami Heat play like a pretty decent team most of the time, and then an all-time dominant beast-mode behemoth when a game is within five points with under five minutes to play. It's statistical evidence that they can flip the proverbial switch, staying even for most of the game and conserving energy, then pulling away for the W. It seems possible, given what we know about Donovan, that Florida is a team that never turns that switch off — that they're a pretty good team that's had some bad luck in close games but isn't quite the diamond in the rough that their raw numbers might suggest. Does Florida have its thumb on the Nate Silver scale? It's hard to say from outside the program — but your bracket's life might very well depend on the answer.
A comprehensive guide that will instantly improve your trash-talking.
Famed Muppet Eli Manning was far more embarrassing before he went and became one of the top quarterbacks in the NFL. His derpy-ness gets him on the list. But his championships keep him at the bottom.
Anthony Tolliver isn't really embarrassing. He's an average NBA player. But Creighton has done well to avoid super-humiliating alums. So good on you, Creighton. Sorry, Anthony.
Image by Todd Kirkland / AP
FGCU only has like seven famous alumni. This is a meta-embarrassment, but other than this album cover, I know nothing about 7 Blue Skies.
Opinions regarding gingers run wild on Twitter.
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It's the question on everyone's mind this March Madness.
You, sir or madam, did a FINE job on these pants.
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Image by WANG ZHAO / Getty Images
Bucknell players are going to be seeing this dude in their sleep.
What's provocative about it? Well:
1) The open mouth. Definitely the open mouth.
2) The laughing. This kid probably hasn't laughed this hard since that time his buddy wiped out skating a pool in the sixth grade.
3) The three monocle, of course. The three monocle is always provocative.
4) The fact that he's a bench player. Some people don't take kindly to bench players celebrating like this.
5) The hand clap, which is basically him being like, "Yo. YOOOO."
6) The fact that, even though he's not wearing a little diamond-stud earring, it looks like he should be wearing a little diamond-stud earring.
7) His haircut. It just adds to everything.
Now, I think this kid is awesome. I think this kid is a perfect representation of college basketball. But if you were playing against him, he would piss. you. off.
It's Cinderella season. Stand up and be proud!
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He's 6 foot 11. She's 5 foot 1. They're heart-meltingly cute.
He helped lead Butler past a feisty Bucknell team in the first round of the NCAA Tournament with a 14 point, 16 rebound performance.
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That's Andrew in the background.
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Source: smithandstage.ourwedding.com
Ups and downs of a white-collar institution.
For years now, the NCAA has offered not only online streaming of its March Madness tournament but also an ostensibly sneaky way to keep your viewing habits from rousing suspicion among the corner offices. The "Boss Button," with a single click, can hide your streaming video and drop down a bland, boilerplate image that looks like nothing suspicious if the boss stops by to ask for numbers on the Jenkins account. And as our society has changed, so too has the Boss Button. Let's take a walk through March history.
Based on an idea from CBS SportsLine general manager Steve Snyder, the original Boss Button display is still the king, for the simple reason that it doesn't look like anything even remotely related to college basketball. It looks like something that almost anyone in any profession might look at. And CBS unabashedly promoted the feature as something revolutionary, risky, and fun:
"Boss Button" - Afraid management is lurking? No sweat. One click of the "Boss Button" and the live video action on the screen will be replaced by a silent readymade spread sheet!
It's never been better than this.
Via: flawlesswalrus.com
Boring, yawn-inducing charts were the order of the day. Dull enough not to attract attention. Not everyone knows how to use or build bar charts, though. Your boss might wonder where your Excel skills came from. (Bonus: the data purported to portray actual food consumption during the 2006 tournament, but that beef jerky figure always seemed dubious.)
Source: mrexcel.com
After 2.5 million boss-button clicks in 2008, the NCAA moved to make some bucks off this creation, so Comcast came aboard to sponsor the Boss Button, which ceased to look like anything you'd create at work. Instead, users got a blatant Comcast ad with team names encased in colored cells. We can only speculate about all the firings that resulted from this drastic, implausible change.
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With this much basketball you need to be resourceful.
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