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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Media Market Mythology: A Look Back

While surfing in the wake of Virginia Tech’s men’s basketball wins over Miami and Duke last week, I came across a late January article by Dave of Dave Sez, noting that Boston College’s 29 January game against Villanova was only BC’s second men’s basketball sellout of the year — despite being undefeated at the time — and only its second televised game as well.

Their second sellout of the season in an arena that holds just 8,606? In a city the size of Boston (over 5 million people)? That’s disgraceful.

The ACC suits fell in love with the idea of getting the Boston TV market, but they failed to recognize that no one there cares about BC.

Exactly right. This is why Virginia Tech fans used to go absolutely bonkers hearing about ACC expansion plans, based on media markets, that didn’t include the Hokies — whether they involved BC, Syracuse, or anybody else in the Northeast corridor. We’d been to those cities, played those teams, and knew full well how much people in the Northeast, outside of Connecticut and western Pennsylvania¹, cared about college sports anyway: not bloody much.

The Big East was built on televsion markets: New York, Boston, Philadelphia. The SEC is located in such media strongholds as Gainesville-Ocala, Knoxville, and Birmingham-Tuscaloosa. Yet somehow the SEC is the most profitable conference in the NCAA, while the Big East couldn’t defend itself against the raiding of its two top football schools and a founding member of the conference over the summer of 2003.

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A New Holiday

To borrow a line from the Flea, “now is the time at BehindTheNet.org when we dance.”

For today will be a day long remembered with fondness by Virginia Tech Hokie fans far and wide. Some have waited fifty-one years for this day to come, some are relative newcomers to the orange and maroon, but all can be proud today.

Today, Virginia Tech joins the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Happy ACC Day, Hokies. We’re home at last.

image courtesy theacc.com

Clearing The Zone

I’ve had a lot of short-shot observations get backed up in my mind over the past two weeks or so. Now’s the time to clear those out and move on — with our last season of Big East football on the way, a disappointing hockey pre-season for the Canes about to close, and politics only bound to get more heated as we approach Iowa and New Hampshire, there’s certain to be more fun stuff coming.

So off we go!

The reinstatement of the California recall was one of the bigger news stories of the week. While it’s very tempting here at BTN Central to poke fun at all of California over the mess they’ve made, it’s just too easy. So I’ll skip it. Instead, I’ll point out one interesting bit, via Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog, via the Godfather. The opinion notes that “[p]laintiffs allege that minority voters disproportionately reside in punch-card counties and that, even within those counties, punch-card machines discard minority votes at a higher rate;” the ACLU et al. plaintiffs used this as an argument that the recall vote would violate the Voting Rights Act. It’s probably verifiably true that more minority voters reside in punch-card ballot counties than not. The second part is pretty disturbing, though — they’re arguing either that (1) punch-card vote tallying machines are sentient beings and can tell when the hand feeding in a punch-card isn’t white, or (2) minority voters in general are too stupid to fill out a punch-card ballot correctly. Assertion (1) is unspeakably dumb, and assertion (2) is racist.

For leading participants in this fray, we have the California Republicans, who can’t win for losing. These days, the California Republican Party looks a lot like the national Democrats in terms of relevance to the given constituency. Both parties are controlled by the extremist (by local standards) wing, and both wind up nominating wing-nuts with no centrist appeal and no chance in the general election. Tom McClintock, you’re a good guy, and (based on my superficial knowledge) here in Virginia I’d vote for you in a second, because you’d be a competent centrist here. That said, please bow out of this election. Don’t be the guy who gets Cruz Bustamante elected. Better to compromise with Schwarzenegger than to put another incompetent, this one with Chicano-supremacist links, in the governor’s mansion.

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VT/ACC: BehindTheNet's 3 Stars

In the first entry in several months to even indirectly refer to hockey (from which the site’s name comes), I’m going to wrap up the story of Virginia Tech’s ACC entry by awarding three stars to the political players who really made this happen, similar to the hockey tradition of awarding the three stars of the game.

In hockey, the stars are introduced in reverse order. We’re not going to adhere to the tradition quite that strictly, because the story doesn’t lend itself to that kind of telling.

The first star has to go to Virginia’s Democratic governor, Mark Warner. (I’ll pause now while Rob, Amy, Gwen, Alex (and maybe a few others?) recover from the shock of me complimenting a Democrat.) While he benefitted from some first-class stupidity on his predecessor’s part during the 2001 election, Warner ran on perfectly good business and fiscal-conservative credentials of his own, and used them well in this situation. The potential negative impact to the Southwestern Virginia economy of a VT football collapse was plain to see, and Warner had to act. So he did, making multiple public statements and holding UVa President John Casteen’s feet to the fire. (He’s taking full credit for it, too — yesterday on the AP wire, a photo came out of his chief of staff jokingly replacing the license plates on Warner’s Chevrolet SUV with plates reading “VT-ACC.” I’m surprised Warner wasn’t doing it himself.)

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