Author Archives: AD

ALDLAND’s March Madness Challenge: Standings after two rounds

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We’re up to the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which means that you’ve probably figured out by now that your approach to predicting this thing has– to be generous– a few imperfections. It also means that we’re one-third of the way through the tournament, and we’ve whittled a field of sixty-eight down to sixteen.

Before the action resumes on Thursday, let’s take a gander at the current standings in ALDLAND’s Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge. We had twenty-one entries, and the top ten looks like this:

Click here to see the full standings.

My initial observations upon surveying the field are that the first and second place entries, Bingo Bango and SemiNOLA are a cut above the rest. Even though a 70.5 accuracy rate suggests that SemiNOLA should be pretty good through the rest of the tournament, the fact that s/he already picked FSU to win it all and has a miniscule 520 possible points remaining means that those of you who picked SemiNOLA in the derivative brackets bracket probably are in some trouble. Along those lines, the entries with the best odds, based on past performance and PPR are Bingo Bango (secret formula predicts a first-place finish, currently in first); mjpascha 1 (T-2/T-3); WrckMTech 2 (T-2/T-3); lranthony1 1 (4/T-3); and FBDOCameron 1 (5/T-3). Careful readers will note that ALDLAND writers Brendan and I are not in the top ten, predicting games at astoundingly poor accuracy rates of 19.5% and 25.6%, respectively.

Finally, early leaders in the best-entry-name category go to Golbourne Supremacy and Escaped from a Tchiengang.

Enjoy the games this week.

Satellites and Chuck Klosterman: A 1,000,000 foot-view of the NCAA tournament

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Yesterday, the voice of the Hip Generation, Chuck Klosterman, rated the NCAA men’s basketball tournament “slightly overrated.” In doing so, Klosterman identified an emergent feature of the tournament that I’ve been talking about for at least three years: the improved accuracy with which the tournament committee seeds the teams, leading to fewer “upsets.” Why? Satellite TV. Huh? The committee is watching more games of more teams. They’re more educated about more teams, so they rank them more accurately. Can you give me an example? Sure. Gonzaga likely has always been about as good as they are today, but the little school in Spokane with the funny name (it has a Z in it you guys!) used to come out of nowhere and “upset” teams because the ‘Zags were underrated. You used to be a fool not to mark Gonzaga down for two wins. Now, though, someone in Indianapolis could watch every Gonzaga regular-season game if he or she wanted, something people likely couldn’t and certainly didn’t do five years ago, and so Gonzaga’s come back to the pack as they’ve been more accurately seeded.

Writeth Klosterman:

The NCAA selection committee has gotten too good at its job. . . . The committee now seeds the tournament so precisely that the early rounds lack dissonance. We’ve exaggerated the import of the process. The brackets are way more accurate, but less compelling. In the not-so-distant past, the limitations of media kept college sports unpredictable. Easy example: Throughout the 1980s, it seemed like the New Mexico Lobos were habitually being shafted. In 1986-87, they won 25 games and still ended up in the NIT. And when analysts would try to explain why that happened, they’d concede that the members of the committee had not seen enough of New Mexico to give them the benefit of the doubt. They would almost admit they knew almost nothing about the program (and at the time, that felt like a problem). That could never happen now. I’ve somehow seen New Mexico play three times this year, and it’s not even my job. With unlimited media, nothing remains unknown; the committee makes fewer mistakes, and the seedings have become staggeringly reliable. Which was always the goal. The only problem is that the realization of that goal erodes the inherent unpredictability that everyone craves. The surgery was successful, but the patient died.

ALDLAND’s March Madness Challenge: Degenerate gamblers need not apply

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If you are looking to win a lot of bread, ALDLAND’s Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge may not be the bracket pool for you. If you’re into less monetized springtime sports fun, though, swing on over here to sign up. There’s still time– just make sure you have your picks in before Thursday noon.

Paul Newman’s Last Race Car To Be Auctioned Saturday (via WSJ)

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A lot of movie stars have gotten into racing cars in their spare time, but few, if any, were as good at it as Paul Newman.

The actor began racing in the early 1970s, not long after starring as an Indianapolis 500 driver in the 1969 film “Winning.” He continued to take to the track until shortly before his death in 2008. In between he amassed a long list of wins and impressive finishes in sports car racing including second place in the classic 24-Hour race at Le Mans, France in 1979.

Now RM Auctions, a company specializing in collectible cars, will offer Newman’s last race car, a 2002 Chevrolet Corvette, this Saturday at its Amelia Island, Fla., sale.

The car, which began life as a Trans Am racer, was piloted to three wins, eight top-five finishes and five poles by racing great Butch Leitzinger during the 2002 season. It has a 346-cubic inch V8 engine under the hood that puts out 700 horesepower.

Newman and his business and racing partner Michael Brockman acquired the car the following year, painted it in Newman’s longtime signature red, white and blue livery and ran it in the Sports Car Club of America series. Newman continued to race competitively, at or near the front of the grid, from 2003 through 2007. He won his last race at Lime Rock, Conn., just about a year before he died.

The auction house estimates the car will fetch between $250,000 and $350,000. However, its connection to Newman could push bids considerably higher.

(via WSJ)
(HT: @telegrphtelegrm)

Scrutiny of the Bounty: Chapter 2 – The Pretension

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The prequel to this story solidly in the rearview mirror, we’ve moved past the command performances of the shock and the horror, and it’s time for the heavy-hitters to weigh in. They haven’t necessarily taken more time to consider the issues presented, even though they usually write for publications that facilitate such pondering through less-frequent publication schedules, but they are Voices, and so they must speak. Why look, here comes Charles P. Pierce right now!

I like Pierce’s writing a lot– he’s Grantland’s best writer– but his last couple articles have fallen off a bit for me. His previous one, about Ryan Braun, definitely felt rushed and awkwardly framed. What bothers me about politics coming through in sportswriting isn’t that I might not agree with the writer’s policy preferences or that I think politics and sports have no overlap (Congress and baseball excepted). It’s that a political lens often seems simultaneously inapplicable and overemphasized. In other words, it’s very unlikely that you are Hunter Thompson and that Richard Nixon is living in the White House phoning in plays for the Redskins. (Quite unlikely, since they’re both dead.) Sometimes it’s best to keep your separate worlds separate. (That’s my experience, anyway.) The point is that Ryan Braun’s situation doesn’t really have much to tell us about our overlord oppressors and the historical War on Drugs.

Follow that up with Pierce’s swing at Gregg Williams’ bounty program, which oozes pretension from the get-go. First-sentence Harvard name drop? Check. First paragraph West Wing reference? Check. We’ve got a mini-thesis on the Mesoamerican ball game before we even scrape the surface of the illusory NFL, with its “silly pretensions” (as opposed to the serious ones that he employs), “preposterous prayer circles,” and “the  dime-store Americanism that’s draped on anything that moves.” Oh, and how could we forget the “suffocating corporate miasma,” whatever that means. The word “Queegish” soon follows, and I realize it’s past my bedtime here in flyover country.

The crux of Pierce’s high-minded caterwauling is a more hushed, but apparently equally urgent Denny Green moment: The Saints’ crime was showing us in daylight that the NFL is what we thought, in the darkness of our willfully ignorant minds, it was. That’s fine. Loss of innocence isn’t not an angle of approach here. It does seem like, though, if football still had its shroud of innocence, it would’ve gone with more of a bang. The head injury issue probably fits the bill a little better, if we’re looking for a recent example, but nobody asked me, and I think we’ve known the real deal about football for awhile.

Next to drummed up (not to say inauthentic) outrage, an apparently necessary exercise in which the horribles are trotted out and reacted to as if witnessed for the first time, and now we’re nearly into a mad libs piece adapted from a reflection on McGwire and Sosa’s home run chase after the word was out on steroids.

This is getting boring to write, which may say something about your experience in reading it. The point is that I am disappointed in Pierce’s article because it seems so unoriginal, overreactionary, and unessential. I never did get into Gregg Easterbrook, but based on what Drew Magary tells me, I think Pierce could be his liberal brother. Pretension is what happens when the stuff that you get to do when you’re a really good writer outpaces and overburdens the thing that made you a good writer in the first place. That’s one way to get to it anyway.

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Related:
Scrutiny of the Bounty: A prequel

Conference Championship Monday

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After a short break, Monday updates are back to note that Michigan State and Vanderbilt both won their conference tournaments on Sunday, defeating Ohio State and Kentucky, respectively. For the Spartans, it was enough to earn them a one seed in the NCAA tournament and a first-round matchup against Long Island University. For the Commodores, the Harvard of the South finds itself a five seed, facing the Harvard of Cambridge, Massachusetts. More on the brackets later today.

In NFL news, the Colts released Peyton Manning last week, and he spent the weekend talking to the Broncos and Cardinals about joining their teams for this season. A decision is not expected until the end of this week at the earliest. Related to this was a trade between the Redskins and Rams that likely will result in Robert Griffin III going to Washington in the upcoming NFL draft. Out west, Randy Moss is trying to make a return to the NFL following a brief period of retirement, earning himself a tryout with the 49ers.