Yep, the buzz you hear is from the flies circling around the last of the
HIGHLY seeded schools from my side of the Big Muddy. Yet another from that litter has fallen, this time to an 11 seed play-in team from the west and the Pac12. I guess Walton was right in maintaining that the conference was dis-respected unrighteously. (nope, you won't find that one in the dictionary)
Perhaps the seeding committee should drop the two worst performing factors employed in setting up the brackets this year, even if it means firing themselves. I'm lobbying for AJ or somebody else around here to be invited to the smoke filled room. The teams they picked at the top, excluding undefeated Gonzaga (duh!), underperformed, with many of them dropping off the charts early, in games during which they played much lower rated opponents.
The big10ish, with eight chances to make the final four, missed the target as badly as I did with my first two choices for wives. Of course nobody is paying me for advice, performance aid, or to play. Those with the responsibilities did about as well as the French have done in any war this side of Napoleon. Most of their teams never got out of the first week-end. Those that did, with the exception Michigan, still didn't make it to the sweet sixteen. The Big Blue fell to a light blue clad and littler UCLA squad, even with a one point lead, under two minutes to go, and one of the top Bruins sitting on the bench with five fouls. UCLA was one of those afterthoughts that had lost their last four games prior to getting a courtesy ticket to see if they could join the 62 teams deemed better in the Big dance. I'm not sure there are three better teams now, but Gonzaga will probably prevent me from finding out.
It only took the first round to bust the last of millions of brackets. Might that be a sign that somebody other than everybody else blew the task? Is there a chance some of the teams watching from home should be in the bubble? My guess is better brackets could have been built by pulling names out of a hat. I'm sitting here eating a "plant based" bratwurst (not one of my the best decisions I hope to make today) with the the second ingredient being "pea protein" (right behind water) and it tastes better than what the committee did. I'll cover that better in a blog on
http://porterstarrbyrd.blogspot.com/ where much of my wisdom is on display, maybe all of it I had.
As an aside, I want NBA teams to get a point for every quarter they win and a bonus point for winning the game. It would reward the fans who are left instead of players who take part of the game off. I will continue to have other thoughts until I am apprehended.
Nobody is going to get it perfectly right, but based on what the rankings of college sports teams, pretty much across the board, have been for at least a decade or so, something needs to be done differently. I'm not sure what the best answer is other than
D. Not this one but if I were having lunch with minds that might be able to wrap themselves around the problem, I'd have to invite a representative from the team that puts up the Sagarin ratings. They are doing pretty much what I designed years before they relieved me, probably due to my procrastination, of the drive to test it. I never had the time or the team to follow through.
I'm going to stop now and go find my fly swatter
oregon.rivals.com
