Teams to Watch !

Every year there are countless bracket predictions and contests regarding the NCAA March Madness Tournament.

People are willing to bet who is and is not a shoe-in for the final four.

Who the Cinderella team will be.

Who will win the big dance.

And every year almost everyone gets it wrong.

Personally, I think any one of the 4 top seeded teams is more than capable of winning the whole thing.
And one of them probably will.

Instead of giving you my prediction, right away, I have come up with a short list of teams to watch this tournament.

Consider it my NCAA Stock Watch List equivalent.

So, here are my Teams to Watch (in no particular order)

Connecticut
Duke
Kentucky
Michigan st.
Syracuse
UNC
West Virginia

Florida
Kansas
Michigan
UCLA
UNLV
Louisville
Cincinnati
Marquette
George Mason
St. Johns
Texas
Wisconsin

OK, I lied. They are in a particular order of sorts.

I based my watch list, like I do with stocks, on certain factors.

In this case, Historical Performance, Experience, and Talent.

For a variety of reasons, the top seven teams on my list ranked the highest.

Chances are, one of those will be the next NCAA champion.

However, there are plenty of worthy “long shots” in this list. In fact, one such “long shot” bracket I filled out has the following teams in the final 8.

Perdue Louisville
Syracuse Kentucky
Duke Cincinnati
St. Johns Wisconsin

Perdue? Hey wait, Perdue wasn’t on my initial list of Teams to Watch. What Gives?
OK, I had to pick somebody from that half of the Southwest Bracket and it was a toss up between them, Texas A&M and the Fighting Irish. Personally, I would love to see some of our local teams like VCU, Richmond, and Mason go far, but though they are all good teams, I just do not think they will. But back to Perdue, I think they have a decent chance of advancing through the rounds. With a little luck, they could do it.

So, who do I have for my “Long Shot” Championship?

Kentucky and Louisville!

Go Kentucky!

Who do you think is going to win?
I bet one of us will be wrong 😉

And be sure to check out our Fumbled Returns Mutt Madness Contest and put a photo of your pet where your money and mouth are. Who knows, you could win some really good prizes from Petsmart!

Bracket Busters

Officially I am in two bracket leagues.
Technically, I am in three. The third I did on my own not going against anybody in particular and based it entirely on who had the best last 10 game winning streak.

After round 1, I have 24 games out of 32 correctly picked in one and 19 in the other.

As it turns out, the third bracket I did also stands at 19.

All my brackets still have the final four in tact. Which was and continues to be my goal. I picked three different winners for each bracket. Syracuse, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

As I look at the different sites(ESPN, CBS, and FOX)NOBODY seems to have picked perfectly, but quite a few have 30 out of 32. That’s amazing!

I wonder how many, like me, created more than one bracket?

This got me into wondering what the average number of brackets each person plays in.

I could not find an answer to that but I did find other interesting stats and trivia.

1) Odds of picking a perfect bracket? 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1. That’s nine quintillion to one!

Think of it this way: if every man, woman, and child on the planet randomly filled out one million brackets each, the odds would be greater than 1000 to 1 that even one would have a perfect bracket

2) According to the NCAA, more than 10 percent of Americans participate in March Madness “office pools.”

3) The FBI estimates that more than $2.5 billion is illegally wagered annually on March Madness each year. Less than 4% of that amount is wagered legally in Nevada.

4) The phrase “March Madness” was coined by Henry V. Porter in 1939 to describe an Illinois high school basketball tourney. Brent Musburger first used it during NCAA coverage in 1982 causing a legal battle almost as insane as the playoffs.

Good luck to everyone and their brackets, except those going against me… 😉 and don’t forget to get out this weekend and enjoy the weather! It is going to be close to 70 degrees here and sunny!

And to think, this time last month we had almost 3 feet of snow on the ground.

The Quakers

There is more than one NCAA Basketball Tournament.

A small local, when I went to NC, school in Greensboro NC is going to the NCAA Division III championship series.

Guilford College, part of the Old Dominion Conference, is going back to the championship series for the 2nd year in a row.

This is huge for this College. Back when I went there we never won anything. The most excitement we had was from a two sport letter player Greg “keen-eye” Sims who played both Basketball and Football.

His brother, Marvin Sims, was drafted and played a couple years in the NFL for the then Baltimore Colts.

Greg’s claim to fame was that he was easily one of the best athletes on campus, and…

He got invited by the Cowboys to attend their training camp. This was the same year that Everson Walls, who was another undrafted invite too, started and all Keen-Eye could talk about was how great Everson and all the other starters were.

Unfortunately Greg did not end up making the team but had an experience of a life time and great stories to tell.

So, congratulations to Guilford and good luck in the tournament!

Bracket Racket

I never do well with March Madness Brackets.
Probably because I do not watch or follow basketball all that much.
Probably because it is so wonderfully unpredictable.

Quite frankly, college basketball is the only basketball I feel is worth watching and then, only during March Madness.

But of course not watching or following basketball on a regular basis does not mean I do not sign up for my fair share of pickem contests.

I do.

Who knows, I just might win.

After all, I read somewhere that a lady in an office pool won the last two years running. She does not know the teams, follow basketball, or even pretend to know any of the players or stats.

What’s her secret?

She likes the name. She readily admits it is kind of like picking baby names and goes with the best sounding, or unique or personal favorite.

If she can do it, then so can I.

So here we go.

Final Four

West Virginia vs Purdue
Michagan State vs Syracuse

Championship

Syracuse over West Virginia

I kind of like my final four but maybe I will create one or two other brackets that pick different winners.

Oh, and just in case you have not noticed; I too have a contest currently in progress but only have one entry so far. 😦

Come on folks, now is the perfect time to dress up your dogs and submit a photo.

If Sam and Grace (the dog), the current lone entry, do win, lets at least give them some competition…

Today is the day…

That you are either complaining that you were robbed of a championship
or
that you are boasting how great you are.

When in reality, you are just lucky…
or not.

See, when it comes to fantasy football, you never know how things are going to turn out.

In the borderless league championship game, the final outcome rested in the hands of the winners and losers of Monday Night Football.

And once again, Brett Favre and the Vikings CHOKED!

And once again, the east coast lost to the west coast…

Oh well, it really was a great season and we had lots of firsts for the league over the course of the season.

In fact we already have some firsts for next season lined up. Such as Franchise Players, and Draft order based on final standings.

One thing I have already noticed is that the default consolation brackets on ESPN negate the over all records and standings of the bottom 6 teams.

The way it is set now, whomever does the worst in the consolation brackets ends up being in last place, regardless of the overall record. Which means you get first pick in the draft next year. This gives the non-playoff teams an incentive to lose each and every single one of the last three games.

Of course, as commish, I can over ride this and do as I please but we do have a league discussion board where ideas, suggestions and complaints are recorded and discussed in an open format.

(I give everyone the false hope that their opinion really does matter).

It actually could be fun to see how badly one could make your team choke but ultimately this could distort the balance, standings and draft picks for next year.

So the current last place team with a record of 4 – 9 in the regular season lost all three consolation rounds and now gets 1st pick in the draft. As apposed to the worst regular season record of 1 – 12 team is actually 3rd in the draft because somehow they managed to win one of the last three games.

I already know this is going to be an active discussion board in the post season.

I really love this stuff!

Bracketology all done at 16?

Well, actually all but one of my three brackets are “done”.

In two brackets I showed undying loyalty to local teams and the ACC.
Of course this meant plenty of upsets.
Too many in fact, so, now when I look at those brackets, I’m upset… 😉

I still have this one which is “OK”.

500 points: 82.16%
Round One 220 of 320
Round Two 280 of 320

Though as I said in a previous post, I went with the best ranked teams in the first two rounds; which meant no upsets, no Cinderella’s, saving the upsets for the final rounds.

So, I still have a good chance of being upset with this bracket too… 😉

Bracket Update

OK, so I admit it. I am more into football than any other ” “ball sport.
And I really do not follow it enough to be any good at bracketology.
But, I do enjoy basketball during March Madness and I do fill out a couple brackets just for the fun of it.

So, how am I doing…?

My “different” all favored teams win in the first two rounds and the upsets happen in the last two is, as you can well imagine, not doing so well…
PTS PCT(%) RNK PPR
220 38.97% 2825825 1540

Strangely enough: My best performing bracket has my Midwest division completely blown out. I had Wake Forest and Boston College making runs… HA!
PTS PCT(%) RNK PPR
230 59.30% 1884738 1380

My other bracket is right about 39%. What hurt me in all of them is that I tended to favor local teams. Oh who could of thought that!

But both VCU and American made it very interesting and came very close to providing the biggest upsets of the tournament.

Imagine having a VCU vs. American U. face off in the second round of the NCAA with one of them going on to play in the sweet 16!

Now, that would have been really great.

Bracketology

I’ve been playing with picking brackets the last couple days and I keep coming up with the same SuperBowl2 result.

It’s like a bad version of groundhog day all over again.

So, I decided to try one a bit different.

It’s different because it has NO UPSETS in the early rounds. Every single favored and higher ranked team wins.

I save the upsets for the last 2 rounds.

So what did I come up with?
Check it out?

And then I did my obligatory crazy all ACC final four bracket! LOL 🙂

Over Analyzing?

But Really Cool…

And for all you hard core backetologists…
There is a link on that page which brings you here to create your own screens.