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.

More Jack Todd foolishness

Should I just create an Automatic Jack Todd Column Generator already and get it over with?

The Montreal Gazette’s sports columnist today declares the NHL dead in the U.S. because he couldn’t find league news in the local media in Louisville, Kentucky on All-Star weekend (ht: Eric via Facebook). A city with a legendary inferiority complex and smoke-and-mirrors claims to be the 16th-largest city in America (try 50th by metro area) ignores a league with no teams playing closer than 3.5 hours away. And for this reason, the NHL needs to abandon the South entirely and, of course, put franchises in Winnipeg and Hamilton, Ontario. (Why not Quebec City, Jack?)

Of course, after the Jets left, Winnipeg built a brand-new arena 3,000 seats short of NHL standard. And the biggest obstacles to Hamilton getting a team are the Toronto Maple Leafs and Buffalo Sabres (who draw a portion of their support from across the Niagara River). But let’s not let that stop us!

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Post out of tune

As I write this, George Allen is holding onto a twelve thousand-vote lead in the Virginia Senate race. He might win, he might not. I’m sick of him either way, I just didn’t want to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.

The Washington Post needs a good kicking, though, for its treatment of Virginia regionalism in the final weeks of the campaign. Sunday’s inset under the front page banner headline, titled Md., Va. Challengers’ Fate May Depend on Inner Suburbs’ Muscle, was perhaps the most clear in its arrogant dismissal of downstate opinions as relevant to the national picture.

In the case of Northern Virginia, dramatic growth and changing political attitudes that set it more in tune with the rest of the country than the rest of Virginia are vital to Democrat James Webb’s challenge of Republican Sen. George Allen.

Let’s do a little bit of math here, starting from estimates of a basically even country and state (which seem obvious). I’m going to slightly overstate Northern Virginia’s size for the sake of estimation, and call it 1/3 of the state’s population. I’ll further estimate that downstate is roughly 60-40 Republican, which puts them 10% out of sway with an even country. If that’s the case, downstate Republicans are 40% (3/5 * 2/3 == 6/15) of the state, and downstate Dems are about 27% (2/5 * 2/3 == 4/15). To make up for this kind of a split and get it to even, Northern Virginia has to go 70/30 to the Democrats (NoVA R: 1.5/15 or 10% of the state; NoVA D 3.5/15 or 23%).

To boil that down: NoVA is considerably less than half the state’s population. If the state is even, and NoVA is to provide an even counterweight at a statewide level to the Republican downstate, NoVA has to be MUCH more disproportionately blue than the rest of the Commonwealth is red. The country would have to be 55% Democratic to make this kind of divergence even (15 points either way). It’s not.

So, Posties, give us a break with the superiority crap. NoVA isn’t more in tune with the rest of the country, it’s just more in tune with the rest of your country — which doesn’t appear to stretch much more than 100 miles or so from the tracks of the Northeast Corridor.

Chris Pronger and culpability

What’s this button up here to the left… oh, hey! I have a blog! Maybe I should post something on it.

Chris Pronger is one of the top three defensemen in the National Hockey League. Last summer, he signed a five-year contract in Edmonton after playing eight seasons in St. Louis, and marrying a St. Louis native during that time. After leading the Oilers to within a game of the Stanley Cup with nary a hint of discontent, Pronger requested a trade for “personal reasons” and explained no more; the most credible sources available suggested that his wife didn’t take well to moving 350 miles north of Montana. Edmonton fans reacted viscerally to this news, suggesting marital infidelity all the way up to a rumor Pronger had impregnated a local TV reporter that she was eventually forced to denounce on her own website. Pronger eventually got his trade to the Anaheim Ducks, but Edmonton didn’t do badly on the deal, pulling in rising star forward — and hometown boy — Joffrey Lupul.

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