SB Nation User Blog: 83fan

BCS officials disgusted by NCAA Tourney

83fan — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:56:24 -0000

Here is a nice little dig at our favorite anti-trust arrangement by the brilliant minds at the Onion. It's not their greatest work, but it's still fun:

BCS officials disgusted

DETROIT—Claiming that determining an unquestioned national champion through a playoff system "went against the very idea of sporting competition," and that the sheer exuberance of college basketball fans was "a shocking and nauseating display of everything wrong with collegiate athletics," top BCS officials roundly condemned the NCAA Tournament Monday.

Big East Pool Update

83fan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:26:40 -0000

Good start guys. It appears that we have collectively gone about 6-94 after the first two games of the BET. I am pretty sure no one has a perfect bracket anymore. Thus, if you think you were an idiot, like me, for picking G-town over St. Johns, rest assured you are just like about 45 of the other idiots on this site, and you aren’t really all that far behind.

And seriously, DePaul over UC. Really? We batted a nice .020 on that one as a group, which resembled my lifetime batting average if you count that one error as a hit. Pretty impressive work, guys. I guess I should have seen that one coming considering that Depaul had steadily improved over the course of the Big East season from facing 10 minutes of scrub subs to about 2 minutes of Shannon Fraley-types by the end of the season. They are just hitting their stride.

Biggest Regular Season Game Ever?

83fan — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:30:38 -0000

Monday’s match-up will be the #1 team in America (having earned that ranking deep into the season) v. our own beloved team likely to be ranked #6 or even #5. That’s a composite ranking of #7 or higher. I cannot think of another Cards regular season game of such import based upon the rankings, and certainly, I don’t think there have been any home games this important. Not to mention that there is a good chance it will decide 1st place in the BE at the end of the season, and the winner of the game will put themselves in stong position to claim a #1 seed the NCAA in March. Last season's Georgetown game might have had more technically on the line, but neither team was sitting as high as the Cards will be tomorrow (G-town was #8).

The closest game to compare that I remember without research is actually the other sport that no longer exists at UofL. In 2006, the #5 Cards hosted the #3 Mountaineers for a composite #8 ranking. Now, because of the importance of the regular season in football, that game was much more important in every other aspect. But tomorrow should outrank it by 1 or 2 based on the polls.

Someone do the research.

Andy Kennedy's Wife Gives Pun Writers Great Gift

83fan — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:04:27 -0000

Andy Kennedy's Wife Gives Pun Writers Great Gift

She's sued the Cincinnati cab driver who has sued Andy claiming that the stress of the lawsuit has ruined her sex life.

Pun away.

Community Project recap: Cantwell

83fan — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:51:55 -0000

Not to steal Mike's thunder if he was planning a review, but just to remind everyone about the preseason contest, here is the link to what everyone projected. It looks like everyone was a bit optimistic (no surprise), but JMC came the closest:

http://www.cardchronicle.com/2008/6/10/549265/community-projection-hunte

I didn't do too badly myself, but I was hoping to be wrong (and that we'd be running the ball better and playing with the lead more).

Worst Broadcasters

83fan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:10:56 -0000

Here's a decent topic for the off-season:

10 Worst Sportscasters

Maxim has created a list of the 10 worst sports broadcasters that might be worthy of some half-hearted debate. There is one glaring omission for those who agree with Mike, but they do identify the omitted’s broadcasting partner who certainly is worth of inclusion.

I’d also take issue with Bill Walton being on the list. Of course, I can see why people don’t like him, but so long as he is teamed with 2 other people who know what they are doing and can actually focus on the game (as most NBA telecasts do now), I quite enjoy his insights and diversions.

And I like Bergman, although I can’t say that I’ve heard much from him recently. I just don’t stay up for many Monday night games. But he has a good voice, is fluid and knowledgeable, even if he likes to throw in some trademarks occasionally. I’ll never forget the fantastic job he did the night Cal Ripken broke Gerig’s record. Once the game was officially in the books (5th inning), he just shut up and let the fans and the scene do the talking. Not quite a Nance/Musberger approach. But that was almost 15 years ago. Damn, I’m getting old.

Alas, no “bending, bending” people on the list.

Lunardi cheats

83fan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:23:38 -0000

Because this is a long week that was made even longer by a opening round loss and a Friday evening start time, I decided to waste some time helping prove Mike's point that Lunardi has inside sources. So here's a nice distraction to pass 3 minutes of your "waiting for Gus Johnson" time.

I recorded Lunardi's picks on March 11 after all of the Sunday games had been computed, and then again on March 16 at 1:00 a.m. (those are Lunardi's "last updated" times) to compare how the seeds moved and whether those movements had any basis in what actually happened this week. I think most people know this now, but Lunardi did not have Villanova in either of those brackets, and on the March 16 bracket, he listed Villanova as the 3rd of the "Last 4 out" behind Va. Tech. and UMass. He also had Ohio State and Ill. St. in at that point, but he changed his bracket just before the pairings were announced to dump Ohio State and Ill. St. but to include Villanova meaning that Villanova leap frogged 4 teams without any of them playing a game. That's pretty solid evidence, if you ask me.

But here are some additional aberrations that I don't think are easily explained without Lunardi getting inside information that he was wrong. I haven't included every change, especially when it seems explainable. For example, Pitt was an 8 seed that moved up to a 3 seed, but I think we all know why.

The list is the March 11 seed, the March 16 seed, and the actual NCAA seed.

UNLV went from 11 to 8 to 8 after beating TCU by 1 (14-16), Utah by 6 (17-14), and BYU handily. The BYU was very nice, but they had already beaten BYU once by 29 points during the season (and lost one), and BYU was only a 6 or 8 seed (see below).

Vandy moved from a 6 to a 5 to a 4 after beating Auburn (14-16) and losing to 9 seed Arkansas (which moved up to a 9 seed with a win over Vandy and UT).

BYU dropped from a 6 to an 8 to an 8 after beating Colorado St (bad), SD State (20 wins), and losing to UNLV. Few of the 6 to 8 seeds didn't end the season with a loss, and not all of them were to NCAA tournament teams.

Illinois St. from 11 to 12 to out. They didn't play any games after March 11, and their last was a loss to #14 Drake on March 9.

Now, that's not a long list, so it is not fair to say that Lunardi is a hack or bad at what he does. It would be interesting to see how well the average "Joe" would do compared to Lunardi overall, but that's not the point here. And I didn't compare how his last picks measured up with the actual seeds in every case. What is important is that his changes always seemed to get it right (or closer to right) without a basketball-related reason to do so. So my conclusion is that he is relatively close on his picks, but he still gets inside information to "correct" where he is off.

Villanova = Marquette lite?

83fan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:17:36 -0000

I just watched some of the Marquette Villanova game and was struck by how similar the 2 teams seem. Obviously, Marquette had the advantage tonight, and seems to have a little more strength in the middle. But I haven't really seen much of Villanova this year, so other thoughts are welcome.

In any event, I thought this was encouraging because I really thought we just have the right match-up for Marquette. And while ND should be our top concern now, winning against Villanova almost guarantees us a first round BE tourney bye, and keeps us from having any bad losses in the closing weeks no matter how ND or G-town go.

The one difference might be Reynolds who always impresses me, and while James is no slouch, he really struggled against us this year for whatever reason.

Common Opponents

83fan — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:55:30 -0000

I posted this on one of the message boards, but they get buried so quickly, I thought I'd post it here too. Sorry if it seems petty, but I'm sorta ticked off right now:

This season, so far, we have had 8 common opponents from last season (and Rutgers will make 9). For every single game, we have had a worse result on the spread than last season. The worse, quite obviously, is tonight with a 61 swing from last season (as of right now), but UK (-37) and UConn (-35) were pretty bad, too. The average is 24.5 points worse. But again, every single game got worse.

MTSU - 2006 +27 2007 +16
Net -11

UK 2006 +31 2007 -6
Net -37

SU 2006 +13 2007 -3
Net -16

UC 2006 +6 2007 +4
Net -2

UConn 2006 +31 2007 -4
Net -35

Pitt 2006 +24 2006 +7
Net -17

WVU 2006 +10 2007 -7
Net -17

USF 2006 +23 2007 -45
Net -61

Average Net Loss of 24.5

Now, this isn't much of a surprise to anyone, I don't think. We all know we have stunk this year.

But I think it points out that the "we lost so many defensive starters" excuse is pretty lame. Can anyone tell me that we lost more talent than every single other team we played both seasons? And can you say that we didn't have better replacements than a single other team on our list?