Say what you will about the NBA draft process, but it did yield at least one neat result in the pairing of Michigan State alum Draymond Green and Vanderbilt alum Festus Ezeli in the Warriors’ 2012 draft class.
And of course Golden State uses Instagram.
This week’s issue of Sports Illustrated includes a transcript of Dan Patrick’s interview with former Kentucky Wildcat and presumptive New Orleans Hornet Anthony Davis. Included was this exchange, initiated by DP’s curiously worded question:
Patrick: Did you tell Kentucky Coach John Calipari you were going to go pro or did he tell you?
Davis: He told me. He told me to [come into his office]. When I walked in, first thing he said: “Look, Ant, you have to leave. You did too many great things this year. Won a national championship, got every award. There’s no point in you coming back.” I started laughing. But he had no smile on his face. He was dead serious.
Patrick: Did you want to stay at Kentucky?
Davis: I wanted to stay. Great team, great coach. But the way life is, you have to move on.
It’s tough to know how much to make of this out-of-context exchange. When Coach Cal called Davis into his office, was that the first time they talked about the star freshman’s departure? When Davis laughed, was it because he found the suggestion outlandish and wanted to stay, or was he just being sheepish? When Davis told DP he wanted to stay, was he being serious?
Still, there’s a persistent feeling that Cal really was kicking the kid on down the line to make room for the next crop of high-profile players. In a program operated on a one-and-done model, having a player of Davis’ talent stick around for another season could mean that UK would lose at least one of its top recruits, who commit to Kentucky because they want to shine for a single season and move along to the league where players get paid above the table.
They say that the first Super Bowl preview show begins shortly after the prior Super Bowl finishes, and with the crowning of Kentucky as the 2012 national champs late last night, today is the perfect time to post the first preview of the 2013 Final Four. There’s already much to discuss, and we can be sure that the 2013 Final Four will look much different from the one we saw over the last few days.
For one thing, most of the top players from the 2012 tournament– including Kentucky’s Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Kansas’ Thomas Robinson, Ohio State’s Jared Sullinger, Michigan State’s Draymond Green, and Vanderbilt’s Jeffrey Taylor– will be gone to the NBA.
Another reason the 2013 Final Four will look different is that it will be played in Eastern Europe.
In one of the great moments of stealth marketing, the NCAA subtly announced during last night’s championship game that next year’s Final Four would take place in Alanta, Lithuania, a town of 464.
This is a sensible choice for basketball and non-basketball reasons, and it’s a great way to expand the NCAA’s brand abroad.
Lithuania has a strong, proud, and hip basketball tradition most notably marked by its 1992 Olympic team, known as “The Other Dream Team.” Led by Arvydas Sabonis, the Lithuanian squad represented their burgeoning democracy and their sponsors– Grateful Dead Productions– well, taking home the Bronze Medal by defeating Russia, their former overlords, in the Barcelona games.
After surviving a Napoleonic invasion and two World Wars, Alanta has displayed a ruggedness that deservedly caught the eye of the NCAA and shows that it is more than capable of hosting next year’s Final Four.
Last night’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament championship game gave us two champions. Most publicly, Kentucky’s 67-59 win over Kansas handed the 2012 national championship to the Wildcats.
Most importantly to readers of this site, John Calipari’s first national championship sealed Bingo_Bango’s victory in the inaugural ALDLAND Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge, a result even casual observers knew for weeks was a lock. A 99% accuracy rate is impressive. Bingo_Bango should email us at aldland[dot]com[at]gmail[dot]com to negotiate a worthy prize.
Here’s the rest of the top ten:
Honorable mentions go to mjpascha 1, who turned in a consistently solid second-place performance, and Goulbourne Supremacy, the winner of the best-entry-name division for the combination of nomenclature and performance.
Finally, dishonorable mentions to your two writer-participants, Brendan and I, who finished outside of the top ten.
Thanks to all of you for playing.
I woke up this morning without a Friday Jam in mind, but I was thinking about the fact that the Final Four gets underway tomorrow in New Orleans between two Midwest teams and two Kentucky teams, and then it come to me. It came like a flash; like a vision burnt across the clouds! I wrote it down, but I learnt right away that it wasn’t an Arlo Guthrie song.
What better than a newgrass tune from a Midwest band about Louisiana? And if you don’t like that, at least you can gawk at the people trying to figure out how to dance to it, or not, as the young gentleman’s preference may be:
Of course, what we really ought to have for you in this spot is a nod to the recently departed Earl Scruggs. Click here for a song and a brief tribute.
It’s time for the Final Four in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. A whole lot of moving and shaking went down in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.
Looking at the current standings in ALDLAND’s Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge, North Carolina’s loss in the Midwest Regional final to Kansas appeared to shake up the standings the most. Out of our twenty-onetwo entries, here’s the current top ten:
Click here to see the full standings.
While Bingo_Bango managed to avoid heartache by persevering in the top spot since our last update, the Tarheels’ loss kicked WrckMTech 2 from a tie for third out of the top ten and dropped FBDOCameron 1 and lranthony1 1 from that position into a tie for eighth. Perhaps even more notable and as the secret formula predicted last week, SemiNOLA’s leveraged bracket collapsed, falling from sole possession of second place to a tie for seventeenth. Ditto for Can we Have Kemba Back?. Vpresben 1 also slipped, going from a tie for eighth to tenth.
All of this provided opportunities for lower entries– picking Kentucky to win it all appears to be the common feature amongst this group– to climb toward the top. Mjpascha 1 hopped from a tie for third into second place. Best-entry-name category nominees Goldbourne Supremacy (T-8 to T-4) and Escaped from a Tchiengang (T-10 to T-6) were two of the beneficiaries as well, and Ifartblackandgold 1 moved in concert with the latter. (Cf. Twombly v. Bell Atlantic.)
The big award of the week goes to Austin_Payne 1 who jumped from nowhere into a tie for fourth. Additional mention is due to our late-arriving, twenty-second entry, AndyGlossner 1, submitted by a frequent commenter on the site and stepping into an outright hold on third place.
Heading into the final two rounds, things look pretty locked up, although an Ohio State win over Kansas could allow AndyGlossner 1 and Austin_Payne 1 to unseat Bingo_Bango and mjpascha 1.
Finally, a nod to Bingo_Bango and Austin_Payne 1 for unorthodox picks (from the state of Kentucky) to come out of the West, although the former’s selection of Louisville now looks better than the latter’s selection of Murray State.
Enjoy the final two rounds.
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.
Today’s Jam, filed from 6,200+ feet:
___________________________
Bonus March Madness vocal Jamz: The Six Best NCAA Tournament Calls of Gus Johnson
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.
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.
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.
ALDLAND 