Besides being our day of rest, Sunday is the day of my longstanding pickup basketball game. Which begins at 5 p.m. sharp, which means that I didn't watch the Kansas-Davidson game. Mostly. At least in real time. I saw the last couple of minutes in a bar in around the corner after my game ended, and while I would later watch the whole thing, really, I saw the whole contest right there--the Kansas guards playing tight, Davidson making some plays but going through some offensive dry spells, Stephen Curry hitting some clutch shots but missing more through sheer exhaustion.

Later, after reviewing the tape, my thoughts were pretty much the same: That's a good Davidson team, and very well coached. They successfully doubled the Kansas big guys, and it was a really smart strategy, because what they realized is that while the Kansas bigs are tall, great scorers, strong and hit the boards well, they're not very good passers. Still, I think Davidson would be playing next weekend if they didn't have their own Belmont moment late in the game--they only scored, what, 5 points over the last 7 minutes, because they started to get a little tentative. When they were up 4 midway through the second half, I think they did a little bit of that "Holy crap, we're going to the Final Four" thing, and it cost them. Still, it was a great game, best of this weekend, I'd say, in terms of sheer hustle and desire.

That's because the others were such blowouts. Unlike last year, when Florida was the clear leader, in this year's tournament there were four favorites, at once roughly equal to each other and better than the other teams in the draw. Now they're all in the Final Four, which if nothing else should give us three great games next weekend. I'm already sad that the tournament doesn't include a consolation game anymore. Especially since North Carolina-Memphis would be such a great matchup.

Still, looking ahead, what do you guys think? I'm still not a believer in Memphis; they're talented, and well-coached, but UCLA is better, so I have the Bruins moving on, 68-62 over the Tigers. In the other game...hmm. Everyone says that Carolina's defense is the Achilles Tar Heel, but I'm not so sure. Carolina gives up a lot of points because they play at a fast pace that allows the other team more opportunities to score, sure, but a better metric of a defense is the percentage of opposing possessions that result in scores, and Carolina does better there. And we've all seen throughout this tournament how gifted they are offensively.

Kansas can win, though, by keeping up a constant pressure on the Carolina guards; I think they will wilt by the second half, and the pressure should help keep the ball out of Hansbrough's hands. The Jayhawks have four superior defenders who can guard anybody in the Carolina backcourt, and that should be the difference, with Kansas winning 83-80. I'll wait to talk about the championship game until this weekend, but for now, how do you guys see this playing out?

Charles Euchner files a nice take on what new scholarship rules could mean for Harvard's NCAA tourney chances:

Harvard, Yale and Princeton perennially finish among the top five in rankings of universities for their academic offerings and research. Could they, one day, also compete for the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament?

Ivy League colleges have not been serious competitors in major sports since the signing of the Ivy Group Agreement in 1945, which banned the use of athletic scholarships. Harvard and Yale dominated college football in the late 19th and early 20th century but de-emphasized sports in the aftermath of a series of controversies over gridiron violence. (Harvard's invention of the "flying wedge," in which a mob of defensive players targets a single opposing player, led to the creation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.)

But now two Harvard initiatives—a dramatic restructuring of tuition assistance and aggressive recruitment of the nation's best high-school basketball players—could spur Harvard and other Ivy League schools to produce basketball teams worthy of March Madness. Basketball is likely to see the greatest change from these new rules, since one good player can significantly improve the fortunes of the team; see, for instance, the career of Bill Bradley, who led Princeton to the Final Four in 1965. Because of the volume of elite athletes needed, the initiatives are less likely to impact sports such as football or baseball.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

Devin, one immediate thought is, and I'm probably going to regret this, but--bring on Davidson. Kansas has lots of experience handling phenomenonally talented scorers (See: Durant, Kevin, who put up 37 in his last game against Kansas, an 88-84 loss); they'll let Curry get his 40, get out and run and win 90-80.

And now I've officially bumped my team out of the tournament.

But to me Wisconsin poses more of a challenge, because they're kind of the Hillary Clinton of the tournament: They don't give up, and they'll do whatever it takes to win. Teams like that bother Kansas, because, while the Hawks are very good, they don't impose their style of play on others--instead, they take whatever style of play is being dictated by the other team and then win playing that game. This usually works, but Wisconsin defends like nobody else in this tournament except, maybe, UCLA, and the team seems particularly good at making the contest into an ugly, close game--and that's exactly the kind of game Kansas could lose.

Also, Starr, though I loved your story about your friend and the bottle of wine (and I'm going to use that same line the next time I'm in a similar situation), everybody knows that the proper response to the men from Madison is "Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' Badgers."

That gag's been cracking me up since 6th grade.

But enough of this wishy-washy analysis based upon nothing but emotion, friendship, and, in my case, too much late night ESPN. Let's look at some cold hard statistical numbers-crunching, especially because they crunch so deliciously for KU. Ken Pomeroy breaks down the Sweet 16 on Basketball Prospectus and finds that that team with the best chance to win it all now is....your Kansas Jayhawks. His take, based on his formula to determine how well each team is playing at the moment, as expressed as each team's percentage chance to move on to the next round:

                     Elite8 Final4 Final  Champ
 1MW Kansas          93.2   64.5   48.5  33.8
 1W  UCLA            92.1   71.3   46.2  22.9
 3MW Wisconsin       82.7   32.0   19.9  11.1
 1S  Memphis         69.2   44.2   22.9   9.8
 1E  North Carolina  56.5   34.3   12.2   6.0
 3E  Louisville      60.5   27.9    8.3   3.6
 4E  Washington St.  43.5   23.7    7.1   3.1
 2S  Texas           50.7   21.6    8.4   2.6
 3S  Stanford        49.3   20.6    7.9   2.4
 3W  Xavier          51.7   14.2    5.2   1.3
 5S  Michigan St.    30.8   13.6    4.6   1.2
 2E  Tennessee       39.5   14.2    3.1   1.0
 7W  West Virginia   48.3   12.7    4.5   1.0
10MW Davidson        17.3    2.3    0.6   0.1
12MW Villanova        6.8    1.1    0.2   0.03
12W  W. Kentucky      7.9    1.8    0.3   0.02

See? The smart money says Kansas, and that's good enough for me. In fact, why don't we just bow to statistical inevitability now, and save us all the trouble...

• Stanford: I went to grad school there and, while I never went to a single basketball game, Stanford gave me my first taste of big-time college sports, namely football. The young among you are probably laughing, but once upon a time that was not an absurd statement. My stint coincided with the Jim Plunkett era (Plunkett would go to the Patriots as the #1 pick in the 1970 draft and later win a Super Bowl with the Raiders). Stanford won back-to-back Rose Bowls, one with Plunkett and another with Don Bunce at quarterback, over #1-ranked, undefeated and, as usual, overrated Big Ten teams, Ohio State and Michigan respectively.
• Michigan State: They were my Final Four sleeper and, if you can't win your pool, nothing impresses like picking the outsider in the Final Four.
• Villanova: More than 20 years later, my hat is still off to Villanova for the great upset over Patrick Ewing and Georgetown for the 1985 basketball championship. My favorite player on that team was Ed Pinckney, a great college player and a serviceable pro who lasted a dozen seasons in the NBA and averaged more than 12 points a game for his career. His sister, Cheryl, used to work in the photography department at Newsweek and was a lovely lady.
• Davidson: It isn't just that I am charmed by Stephen Curry, though you got to love a guy who can drill it from downtown and still stops to kiss his mom on his way onto the court after halftime. But I actually remember the great Lefty Driesell teams of the '60s there and, for reasons that I can't remotely recall, became a big fan of the school's biggest star, Fred Hetzel. That won't trigger a lot of memories, but he was a two-time All-American and the first pick overall in the '65 NBA draft. He only lasted seven seasons in the NBA, but he averaged 18.9 points and 9.9 rebounds a game with the pros, numbers that would earn him an eight-figure salary today.
• Wisconsin: So many of my friends went to Wisconsin in the '60s (and my brother-in-law went there later) that I have always had great affection for Madison and the Badgers. Besides, almost 30 years ago I had a memorable dinner at a restaurant called Ovens of Brittany. My dining companion ordered a German white that he didn't really like. I asked him if he wanted to send it back. He said, 'No, let's just drink it fast and try a different one." RIP Sean Toolan, killed covering Beirut in 1981.
• Memphis: I know John Calipari is a little too slick (OK, a lot too slick), but his UMass teams were some of my favorites ever. I owe him something for the great entertainment.
• Washington State: I was doing a story on decathlete Dan O'Brien who lived in Moscow, Idaho, but did his training for field events across the border on the Cougars campus. On a dank, drizzly, chilled afternoon, O'Brien tossed discuses while I gathered them and skittered them back (throwing them more than 20 feet was beyond my capability). Had I not been there, O'Brien, later an Olympic gold medallist, would have been fetching his own. I learned a lot that afternoon about just what it takes to attain greatness.
• Louisville: Two of my favorite all-time players--Darrell Griffith and Wes Unseld. And I've got a soft spot for the Big East.
• Tennessee: Once there were immortals like Red Auerbach and Red Holtzman, but the Jewish basketball coach is now a dying breed. I give you Bruce Pearl.

So in my first post for this NCAA tournament blog, I confessed to being a bracketology bonehead--no matter how closely I follow college hoops, I never win bracket pools, never even come close--and in case you thought I was being falsely modest, I am proud to report that I am currently in last place in Newsweek's 15-person pool. Actually, let me be more specific: I'm in distant last place. There's almost as much daylight between me and 14th place as there is between 14th and 1st. Oy. I've already lost my national title pick (thanks, Georgetown) and another Final Four pick (thanks, Pittsburgh... actually, thanks to the entire Big East for your support). At this point, my prediction that I'll nail 1.6 of the Final Four teams is looking spot-on, assuming one of my safe, remaining choices (top seeds North Carolina and UCLA) survives the second weekend. Give me some credit: yes, I'm always wrong with my tourney picks--but at least I was right about how wrong I'd be.

With that in mind, shall we turn to the Sweet 16? It could just be the wounds I'm nursing from Duke's early exit, but the two games in the West region are the only ones that don't really get my motor going. I think UCLA--given time to rest some nagging injuries--will put its sluggish tourney start in the rearview mirror and roll past a Western Kentucky team that probably should've lost in the first round to Drake. I'm similarly uninspired by Xavier-West Virginia, which should be a nice contest between two solid, well-coached teams, but if I had to bet my house on which Sweet 16 match-up is the least likely to feature the future national champion, this is the one I'd pick.

McSweeney's: Often annoying, far too precious, completely self-indulgent and typographically naïve. And yet....how can you fail to be charmed by John Frank Weaver's piece,  "Ernest Hemingway Blogs About the Top Teams in College Basketball?" Though this reads, well, about like you'd expect, and there are many fine moments, including, Devin, this about your Blue Devils:

Coach K is a platoon captain. He can lead men to war. Men would gladly die for him. They would run over barbed wire. They would charge into a battery of machine guns. They would limp toward a field of death on his word. In this game, they shoot for him. They press for him. They pick and roll for him. But he is a man torn. He coaches Duke. He coaches the U.S. team. A man can only love one woman. A man can only love one team. Which team does Coach K love?

It's like the guy was reading your mind...

There's the real tournament and, far more important, there is the private tournament-—namely, each of our pools. And since the latter is far more important, let's start there. I profited from one lesson I have learned through the years, but suffered grievously from another I haven't quite mastered. My winning strategy was not to get excited about any underdog that got hot in its conference tournament. That enabled me to dispatch Georgia in the first round and, more important, to stay away from the fashionable Pittsburgh pick. Pittsburgh is a perennial finalist and frequent winner in the Big East tournament, but it apparently leaves its game in Madison Square Garden come the Big Dance. Having been burned by Pittsburgh in the past, I vowed never again, enabling me to nail their usual one-and-out.

The lesson I haven't mastered is to eschew sentiment, even noble sentiment.  I managed to be remarkably unsentimental when it came to my own alma mater; I have Stanford going out to Texas in the next round. But while my gut wanted to pick Wisconsin coming out of the MIdwest to the Final Four,  my heart steered me to Georgetown, where my best buddies are administrators with longstanding ties to the basketball program. I didn't want to root against them and their team, even though I had serious misgivings about Roy Hibbert's capacity to come up big in critical moments. Still, I never would have foreseen how it actually happened—that Georgetown, with its defensive prowess, would let a team like Davidson crawl back from so far down and then stand around and watch as they ran over them. Despite my considerable regret, you've got to like sweet-faced, sweet-shooting Stephen Curry as the player of the tournament so far.

After a slow start, this tournament has been decidedly "A" quality through the weekend. We've had the requisite upsets with five lower seeds (three of them from the double-digit seeds), four overtime games and some spectacular game-winners at the buzzer (San Diego, Stanford and Western Kentucky the most memorable.) Of the 16 remaining teams, only four have been on cruise control—North Carolina, Kansas, Louisville, Washington St.—and three of the most popular picks for winning it all—UCLA, Tennessee and Memphis—barely survived the weekend.

CBS' commitment to stick with the closest games is a winner for fans, but, as a result, I have seen very little of the two teams, Kansas and North Carolina, that might be the top two picks if folks were starting anew. Still, I caught enough of North Carolina running Arkansas ragged to have no regrets about going with UNC for the title. I have UCLA as my other finalist and they appear to have a relatively easy path to San Antonio. But after watching Texas A&M give them fits, UCLA better find somebody else besides Love and Collison who can actually put the ball in the net.

Memphis, Tennessee, Louisville and Texas all impressed me with their athleticism, but, still, I can't get overly excited about teams that can't make their free throws (15-32, 19-29, 5-15 and 12-21 respectively). Three of them were lucky to survive; Georgetown, 8-17 from the line, didn't. The appalling bottom line on yesterday: only 4 teams of the 16 teams that played shot at least 75% from the free throw line and Louisville, remarkably, shot .529 from the three-point line and .333 from the stripe.

By Katie Paul 

When even bedazzlingly bad celebrity fashion is getting in on the March Madness action, it’s only natural that politics would too.

Political junkies have been all atwitter of late analyzing each candidate’s picks for their NCAA Final Four brackets. Might the inclusion of a Pennsylvania team be a political ploy, we wonder? Are the would-be leaders of the free world savvy strategists? One columnist at college paper has gone so far as to assign each candidate a different basketball team alter ego. Barack Obama’s campaign staff is in for a $10 per person pool, while John McCain’s team is running a bracket contest of its very own on his Website, through which basketball buffs can win McCain campaign gear and—oh yes, by the way—donate to the campaign. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, deferred to her ‘basketball advisor,’ her husband, on this one.

In case you’re wondering, their picks are (in no particular order):

Barack Obama: North Carolina, Kansas, Pittsburgh, UCLA
Billary Clinton: North Carolina, Georgetown, Memphis, UCLA
John McCain: North Carolina, Kansas, Memphis, Connecticut

But wait, there’s more! If you relish the competitive spirit, but thought your office mates were talking about shelving when they discussed their brackets, you might consider playing politics to join in on the fun. The Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies is hosting its third annual Tournament of the Presidents, where users debate and place March Madness-style votes on which former president the current candidates should look to as a guide—or, as they put it, “where commanders in chief go head to head.” Or, if a game just isn’t a game unless there’s money involved, then there’s always Intrade.

Either way, you don’t have to let the sports addicts have all the fun while you’re hard at work. Office distractions ought to be equal opportunity activities. Game on.

The worthy and excellent Sean Gregory picks the Top Ten NCAA Tournament First Round upsets for Time. The usual suspects are here--Richmond over Syracuse in 1991; Santa Clara over Arizona in 1993; Princeton over UCLA in 1996 (Sean was part of that one).

A question for the group: Do any of this year's first round upsets qualify for Top 10 status? Sienna destroying Vanderbilt?  San Diego's OT nailbiter over UConn? Western Kentucky over Drake in the best game of the tournament so far?

Finally! The upset/buzzer-beater thriller combo that helps ignite this tournament. Hard to imagine there will be a more entertaining game or a better ending than Western Kentucky overtime win over Drake. And I enjoyed every second of it. That being said, it ain't quite the same when the upsets come at the expense of second-tier powers like Drake or Gonzaga rather than the big lumber. The real fun of this first week is rooting against every bit as much as it is rooting for. And while teams like Gonzaga and Butler have become legitimate mainstays of the tournament, we really can't work up much enmity toward them. Not like we we can toward smug Duke (though getting less smug by the second) or others among basketball's college royalty. So I won't really be satisfied this week until one of the true giants goes down.

UPDATE: And now, with UConn out, they have. That's more like it.

So Devin didn’t have to run, but I don’t think he can hide. He got it exactly right in his pre-Tournament analysis of his Duke team. It can lose to anyone and almost certainly will—if not to West Virginia this weekend then soon after. Coach K looked like he was already moving on, contemplating the U.S. match-ups against Spain and Argentina this summer in Beijing.

Belmont provided pretty much the only drama of the day, though there were a few decent entertainments (Xavier-Georgia, West Virginia-Arizona). Still, not a single upset, if you don’t count K State—and I don’t, 'cause if I picked it in my pool, it couldn’t have been much of a surprise. The much anticipated frosh showdown between O.J. Mayo and Michael Beasley showdown was basically a bust; while Beasley flashed his talent after being hampered by foul trouble early in the game, Mayo is not yet ready for prime time and I’d recommend he remain at least one more year at USC before he leaps to the NBA.

I proved as prescient about my alma mater, Cornell, as Devin was about his. I said Cornell would fare better than it did in its last turn around the Big Dance floor 20 years ago when it lost by 40 points to Arizona—and the Big Red did, losing by only 24 points to Stanford. Our resident Jayhawk, Mr. Coatney, had a lovely line, waxing sentimental about this tournament and how it reconnected all of us to our college days—nostalgia at play across the nation. Of course, that’s hogwash. While it may be true for him, Devin and other diehards from a handful of basketball schools, it’s not really what this madness is about for the rest of us. It’s just another gambling fix—easier to access than your local casino and far less complicated than poker—which is why, as folks get eliminated from contention in their pools, TV ratings will plummet.

Frankly, even for us genuine sports fans, the show this week is only as good as the upsets and the buzzer-beaters. Other than Belmont’s near-miss, there wasn’t very much compelling about yesterday’s games—certainly nothing to keep me from flipping to Dallas and the second most exciting basketball game of the evening, with the Celtics completing a remarkable Texas sweep. And I also spent time in Nashville where the U.S. was playing a critical soccer match. Long ballyhooed Freddy Adu, still just 18 years old, is beginning to live up to his hype. He scored twice, bending two free kicks just like Beckham, as the U.S. punched its Olympic ticket to Beijing with a 3-0 thrashing of Canada.

Nevertheless, I’m game for 12 more hours today. But I fully expect that when the clock strikes midnight, I’ll still be mooning over Belmont-Duke and what might have been.

Devin, for you an Omen: In 2003, Kansas barely survived an opening round game to Utah State, a tough 15 seed. That Jayhawk team, you'll remember, went all the way to the championship game (of that game we Shall Not Speak). So there's that for you.

For me, there's...nothing, really. Not yet. Kansas rolled, as every 1 seed in this tournament ever does, now and forever, amen. Not to disrespect the Vikings or anything, but Portland State, along with the other #16 seeds, is almost certainly not one of the top 64 teams in the country. Seth Greenberg, I feel your pain, and as a basketball fan, I'd much rather see a Kansas-Virginia Tech first round matchup. As a Kansas fan, of course, I'm happy Tech spent Thursday beating up on Morgan State in the NIT. On the other hand, Kansas was up 13-3 before the game was 5 mins in, and it was all downhill from there--when I saw in the game update that Tyrel Reed, the 10th man in Bill Self's 7-man rotation, had entered the game in the first half, I moved on to the Georgia game. When your first round game is so routine they don't even show highlights on Sports Center, it makes you start to wonder if it really happened at all...

Other than the Duke-Belmont excitement, the night pretty much went according to form. Only two lower-seeded teams advanced, both from the Big 12, and neither was a major upset; Texas A&M, to my mind better than a 9 seed anyway, won what's essentially a tossup, the 8-9 match, over Brigham Young, while Kansas State, playing only a couple hours from home, beat USC, mainly because K-State's two one-and-dones, Bill Walker and Michael Beasley, were better than USC's one, O.J. Mayo. Wonder if Tim Floyd still thinks one year of O.J. resulting in a first-round tourney exit was worth the complete loss of his dignity. 

On to day two, though before we go, in honor of Baylor's first-round exit and A&M's first-round success, we look back at what was the year's most exciting game before that Duke-Belmont barn-burner: Bears over Aggies in 5 OTS:

NEWSWEEK's Sarah Kliff files a nice piece on the business costs of March Madness:

Along with the usual office pools and trash talking over rival teams, this year's March Madness comes with another major distraction: free live streaming of every game. For the first time the NCAA has teamed up with the CBS to provide March Madness On-Demand, a completely free Web stream of all 63 basketball games. Fans are eagerly signing up; fans had registered for 96 percent of the premium VIP spots--which CBS says will get fans quicker access to streaming video--by mid-day Wednesday.

Streaming NCAA games online isn't new; CBS has been doing it since 2003 when they debuted that year a pay-per-view model. In 2005, they netted about $250,000 in revenue using that system. This year's free, ad-supported model, supplemented by premium services, should earn the network "more than $21 million in total revenue," CBS President Les Moonves projected during a recent earnings call with analysts. That's despite the fact that operating costs for March Madness On-Demand have remained largely flat, according to Moonves.

But CBS's gain may be corporate America's loss. March Madness is already a big draw in the workplace; most surveys show that roughly 10 percent of Americans are interested enough in the tournament to participate in an office pool. But checking up on pools and touting one's team to a colleague takes only a few minutes here and there. Full desktop PC access to hours and hours of back-to-back games could prove a much greater distraction.

 
READ THE FULL STORY HERE
 

Starr raises a good point that we might as well acknowledge and get out of the way now, which is the way in which our interest in the tournament is tied up in our own emotions and backstory. The NCAA tournament is an almost perfect sporting event in that it draws a huge, passionately interested audience from all over the country. And, let's face it: They're not all tuning in for the basketball, but for the connection the tournament brings, back to a college experience they loved, forward to their new connections in the working world. After all, from a purely sport standpoint, we're watching minor league baseball here. And I somehow doubt we'll be doing this during the Pacific Coast League playoffs. Take the university connection out of the Duke Blue Devils and they're just the Durham Bulls. 

</SOAPBOX> Now, bring on those games!