It’s On! Downloadable tournament bracket, here.
Top seeds are Pitt, UNC, Louisville, UConn.
We went to bed on Friday night thinking Mongo’s San Diego St. Aztecs were a very solid bet for the tournament after their Mt. West tourney semi-final win against BYU. We woke up on Saturday not as confident as conference tournaments around the country were ablaze with upsets and teams that were on the outs at the beginning of last week were making late runs at the rapidly dwindling amount of at-large berths.
Sure enough, despite a near-heroic comeback, State fell short to Utah, 52-50, in the conference final on Saturday afternoon and which sealed their fate as their brief respite as a “Last Four In” team gave way to the reality of hosting a first-round game in the NIT when tournament selections were made yesterday afternoon.
A couple of observations:
Thanks for nothing: UConn gets a #1 seed…. gets shipped out West. I’m sure they would not have minded a #2 seed in the East in order to play in front of their fans in Boston once the Regionals start. For those people that felt Memphis deserved a #1 over UConn, the tournament selection committee solved that problem by putting Memphis in the same Region as UConn as the #2 seed. If the chalk holds, we’ll see those two square off in the Regional Final in Glendale, AZ.
Potential first round upset that jumped off the page at us upon initial inspection: the seemingly once-a-year dreaded 5/12 upset will be Arizona over Utah.
CBS Sports has unveiled its “boss button”… the button you hit if the boss happens by while you are streaming the 1st round games this Thursday and Friday and a totally non-hoops related spread sheet pops up…. except that it's not non-hoops related. Click on spreadsheet to enlarge. Now both you and your boss will know that Jeff Fryer holds the tournament record for most 3-pointers in a game. Thanks, CBS. (H/T: Awful Announcing)
Monday, March 16, 2009
The first stop on our journey between football seasons
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
We here at the Voice of Reason are now in full-boycott mode. OK -- half boycott mode.
No viewing until the Sweet 16.
It's clear to anyone with an impartial eye what is going on: The BCS conferences have whittled what used to be the most watchable and democratic of sporting events into the Grandfather Clause Affair in a classic money and power grab.
Witness: What used to be 12 at-large bids available for non-BCS conferences in 2002 has been shrunk to 4.
The MWC: With a .500 level team (UNLV) without it's top player that took out the March Madness Top Seed (Louisville) on it's home floor; A conference deserving of as many as four seeds -- was given two berths.
This has retribution for the MWC's BCS football proposal from 4 weeks ago written all over it.
Sponsor's may pay for advertisement to this now-elitist event.
But I won't see their ads.
At least for four days...
- Mongo Just L-I-V-I-D!!
Mongo, I respect your passion and your fight for your guys and the Mountain so I will let well enough alone for the time being. I'm on the fence as to whether or not State should've been in or not - cases can be made both ways. I do not think, however, there was any planned retribution because of the Mountain West's BCS football proposal.
Mongo and I may be on opposite ends of the politcal spectrum, but we agree on this one.
I thought SDSU's snub was a great big, "Oh, so you guys in the MWC think you can make us look bad with that football playoff proposal? Well here's a great big go [censored] yourself."
Post a Comment