Posted on March 16, 2006, in Sports, Television and tagged By Bryce I.. Bookmark the permalink. 21 Comments.
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Further Reading-
Kulturbloggers
Posted on March 16, 2006, in Sports, Television and tagged By Bryce I.. Bookmark the permalink. 21 Comments.
Further Reading
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This year has sucked for basketball as the two teams that I root for have had abismal years, especially in contrast to the last 10 years. I did not watch a single game. I could barely get motivated enough to enter a pool. Yes, Duke will win. Or at least my bracket has them winning.
OK, this is my fourth and last March in the USA. I have never paid any attention to March Madness. Tell me why I should, and why I should not leave America w/o having partaken of said “Madness.” Oh, and give me the lowdown on who’s playing whom when, where, and on what channel.
Because there is no March Madness in the UK?
Really, College Basketball games are fun to go to.
There’s the fan craziness & the school band craziness & the parents of players craziness.
On the whole, a lot more fun than going to movie theater.
Ronan: someone is playing someone else every day for the next few weeks. CBS and ESPN.
Ronan,
Ignore SG.
Games are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Except for the championship game which is usually on a Monday.
He is at least right about the channels.
Imagine if you lived in a country that was hosting the World Cup and decided to ignore it. March Madness is a little bit like that, but will college rather than countries. It is the greatest sports event in the USA. Mostly because it involves 65 teams, so there is a good chance that a school you went to or happen to like is participating and there is always the chance of a huge upset. For many teams just getting to the Sweet 15 is considered a huge accomplishment, one that they’ll talk about for years.
Dude, ARJ, what the hell is the “Sweet 15″?
LOL — arJ’s street cred in bashing me swiftly vanishes!
The Big East is soft again, just like last year. Why do they keep putting so many teams in from that conference? Still, I have Villanova going all the way, but maybe I’m just still angry from last year when they should have eliminated UNC if not for a bad call.
Ronan –
Watch Hoosiers, then come back and we’ll talk.
Actually, for all that Duke is the top seed in the entire tournament, this year’s edition is flawed in ways that previous Duke teams have not been. Still, other than UConn, there aren’t any teams that are obviously better.
arJ, I noticed that Stanford beat Wake Forest in the NIT last night.
Bill, it’s not so much the raw numbers that should be counted, but the percentage of the teams in the conference that make it, and what seed they get. 8 teams from a 16 team conference is nothing special. Get 12 in and we’ll talk.
The Big East sure has changed since I was a kid rooting for St. John’s. It’s not even really a conference anymore.
Oh, and http://www.cbssportline.com has online streaming of the first three rounds for free. It’s not bad, esp. if you’re stuck in an office with no TV.
Ronan,
Unlike many other sports events, March Madness is single elimination, all the way. This makes it quite different from the World Series, or the NBA playoffs.
(The NFL playoffs are single elimination, but football is different – they’re used to that schedule, they only play 16 games in a season, they play once a week. March madness takes a sport that’s not super well-suited for single elimination, and throws every team into the pot.)
As a result of the single elimination, fast-paced format, you’ll have some very good teams who will be upset by Cinderella teams. March madness is all about the Cinderellas.
In that respect, it’s very similar to the World Cup as well. No one cares if/when Brazil wins the World Cup again (yawn). Or Germany, Argentina, etc.
Ditto in March Madness. Duke, or UConn, UNC, Arizona, Kentucky, Kansas – no one really cares much if/when they win. (And the powers are pretty well known). But all of the Cinderella upsets in the lower rounds create the excitement. How far will the latest Cinderella team go? Will they beat Kansas? Wow! It’s like Cameroon over Argentina.
Also, everyone-and-their-brother fill out a bracket, and try to guess who’s going to win. Typically with your co-workers, and typically for some relatively small fee (like $10 – everyone in at $10, winner takes the $200 pot). (There’s a non-gambling bloggernacle group set up, everyone with a bracket, at ESPN. I’m losing.)
The brackets are usually heavily weighted towards picking the last games right. So the horse race of whose bracket looks like it’s winning can veer precipitously from day to day, which adds to the fun and the insanity.
Finally, there’s a big element of uncertainty in accurately judging games because it’s extremely hard to accurately assess the teams against each other. With 200+ college teams and a 35ish game season (with multiple games against in conference foes during the season), the likelihood that team A will have played team B during the regular season is slim. In fact, Team A may have not played any team that even played against Team B (i.e., there may be no one-step connections, either). And so to try to figure out which is better, you end up with all sorts of convoluted chains of logic, “well, A beat C and C beat D and B beat D, but not as badly as C, so maybe A is better than B. But then, A didn’t beat E, and D beat F who beat E . . .” to try to figure out who to favor. This adds to the general unpredictability of the whole event.
One of my all-time favorite Sportscenter spots was right before the 2002 Tourney. They were discussing the matchup of #1 seed Maryland vs. #16 seed Sienna and showed brief clips of a 20-something chain link of games starting with a team that Sienna had beaten eventually leading to a team that had beaten Maryland, with the claim that Sienna would beat Maryland.
So I meandered over to the Kulturblog group page and there’s one member: D. Inouye. Well, that’s one way to ensure a Kulturblog victory, Dallin!
If I were evil I would go and retroactively fix my typo to read Sweet 17. But I am not evil. Merely stupid. Even more that stupid I am a poor typist.
Even more thaN stupid…
sigh…
mwah hah hah!!
Go Bears!
I have to admit that the Cal prank where they spent a week IMing a USC player promissing a hook-up after the game and then taunted him with it mercilessly during the game is about the best such exploit I’ve ever heard of. All the same, Cal sucks.
Kaimi: “no one cares if/when Brazil wins the World Cup again”? Is this intentional provocation or just American football (as in “soccer”) ignorance?
I will just say this: I care, Kaimi. A lot. And every Brazilian with a pulse. And well, there are several (maybe not quite half) of the teams entered this year who have a legitimate chance of winning the tournament. Comparing the World Cup–the single greatest sporting event in the world–to march madness strikes me as, well, exceptional hyperbole.
True, S.P. Bailey. It’s a huge deal when Brazil or anybody else wins the World Cup because pretty much the whole world’s involved. It’s never ho-hum. It’s always an amazing accomplishment.