NCAA week two followup

Wow, is Yahoo’s scenario generator awesome.

I have three of the four final-four teams: all but Kansas (not that Clemson, my pick out of the Midwest, could have beaten Davidson, let alone KU), and my running record is now at 39 of 60.

My current standing in my two pools is thoroughly mediocre, but the scenario generator gives me hope. In my 4th-of-6 pool, I finish second if the final is UNC-Memphis, no matter which way that game goes; conversely, if UCLA beats Memphis I stay 4th no matter how the other two games go. But in my 7th-of-14 pool, I finish tied for first either way in a UNC-Memphis final, second if Carolina wins over UCLA but all the way down to 9th if UCLA wins, all the way down to twelfth either way in a Kansas-UCLA final, and flipflop 5th or 6th in a Kansas-Memphis final.

Second-round survey

The condition of this year’s NCAA tournament is perhaps best described by the standing of my bracket (8 of 16 second round, 32 of 48 overall) in two separate pools. In one, I’m second of six players, behind one guy running away with the lead. In the other, I’m eighth out of 13. Same bracket, similar level and distribution of basketball knowledge (though a different set of biases), wildly different competitive standing.

The upset that surprised me least in the second round is the one that surprised the rest of nation the most: Davidson defeating Georgetown at the RBC Center in Raleigh, emerging from the subregional opposite UNC’s 1-seed. Carolina lost to Georgetown last year in the regional finals, and even that aside, there’s very little love lost for the Hoyas among ACC fans in the Old North State. I told everyone I talked to that if Davidson could keep it close in the second half as latecoming Tar Heel fans finally filed in from their Easter Sunday dinners, the building would close in on Georgetown; that’s precisely what happened. The Post is right to be upset over the home-court advantage to Davidson, but all the writers freely admitted that the Hoyas lost the game on their own merit.

Tech was drawn into a couple tournament stories as well, even as the Hokies awaited their NIT second-round date with UAB (taking place as I write). Most prominent was the fact that the Davidson sharpshooter Stephen Curry, son of Hokie legend Dell Curry, somehow eluded VT’s recruiting grasp — a story simplistically played as a serious failure by Seth Greenberg.

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ACC Tournament Thoughts

• I was thirty seconds away from calling my aunt outside Charlotte, AIMing my VT ‘08 brother, and loading up the car for tomorrow’s game — if all those UNC fans had left disappointed (not to mention the Dookies from game 2!), they’d have dumped their tickets to the scalpers on the way out and made it very easy to score a finals ticket.
• What we’ve just provided the committee is a textbook case to demonstrate whether they weight the entire season evenly, or whether they care who’s hot going into the tournament. If it’s even, we lose: too many embarrassing out-of-conference losses in the first two months of the season to ignore, and not one decent win among them, while we were breaking in five (and, after the fall semester ended, six) freshmen. If it’s about who’s hot: we won five of our last seven, including a road loss to an RPI top-25 team in the last four seconds and a virtual road loss to the number 1 team in the country on an off-balance putback by the consensus national player of the year with 0.8 seconds to go.
• Malcolm Delaney is a stone-cold killer.
• After how much screaming I did at the referees during the VT@Clemson game, I couldn’t complain about this one.
• I can’t receive the Charlottesville VT radio network affiliate in my office due to interference from all the computers. So for Friday’s game against Miami, I wound up hooking up my USB TV tuner to my laptop and listening to the TV commentators without the benefit of the video. I knew the TV commentary could be inane, but I never realized quite how bad it was until then.

At worst, we’ll pull a home game and a very favorable seed in the NIT — and that’s a long way from how I thought we’d do this year. The best times are ahead for this Hokie nucleus.

Columbus, One Week Later

Timeliness does not appear to be a strong suit of this blog, so I doubt many of you are surprised by a week’s delay in my second-round report. The benefit, though, is some perspective on Virginia Tech’s first NCAA appearance in eleven years.

Sunday was a long day. I was up by eight, had my Timmy’s by 10, and was checked out of the hotel for good by 11:30 for what turned out to be over five hours of basketball, thanks to a rather extended UVa-Tennessee match; I didn’t hit Interstate 670 post-game until 5:30, and it was 10 minutes to midnight by the time I got home. Five hours in an arena was brain-numbing, Interstate 70 through eastern Ohio wasn’t any better, and then it got dark. I was ridiculously happy to see traffic and the occasional streetlight by the time I rejoined 70 from 68 in Hancock, MD. Conclusion: don’t do this kind of thing solo again. (Of course, that wasn’t the original plan anyway — thanks, Southwest!)

In retrospect, all that talk about us being a different team and more capable of beating Southern Illinois than we had been in November would have been applicable in early February, but not March. SIU followed the same basic pattern we saw over and over in the last month of the season: guard Zabian Dowdell very tight, keep Deron Washington from penetrating (and thereby posterizing your interior defense) at all costs, and work the shot clock until the open 3-pointer appears with 2-3 seconds left. (For that matter, so did Illinois; their refusal to finish off the 3 was what eventually killed them.) Compounding the problems, A.D. Vassallo went ice-cold, and Seth Greenberg left him in the game far, far too long; with A.D.’s confidence went the team’s chances of pulling back into the game after SIU’s take-charge run at the end of the first half.

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