NCAA March Madness (discussion and pick 'em)

#1
The NCAA men's basketball tournament is almost here. Use this thread to discuss the tournament.

I've also started our yearly Pick 'em group again. I've moved from Yahoo! to ESPN this year. Why? Because Yahoo required a mobile phone number and some extra work to opt out of marketing and other messages. That's too much hassle for me, and ESPN was the only other mainstream site I was aware of that did brackets, so that's why we're there.

Click here to join the KingsFans league on ESPN.

The password is: vivek


Unlike the last few years, we won't have alternate scoring, as ESPN doesn't seem to have that option. Please note that the deadline to submit your bracket is the morning of Thursday, March 20.

I set the group to allow two brackets per person, so you can try twice if you want. The first four games don't count, it's just the other 63 you have to pick.

Should be fun and good luck!
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#5
I'm pretty sure 99% of NCAA fans.
I probably should have reworded that:

Is anyone besides me rooting for Mercer, because they're actually rooting for Mercer? Not as in, "I'm rooting for Mercer because **** Duke," not as in, "I'm rooting for Mercer because I like to root for the underdog," but actually rooting for Mercer because they're pulling for Mercer?
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#7
I guess that's because you're not from Georgia... Mercer is a thirty-minute drive from where my mom grew up. And it's a really good engineering school. It's the school that I should have gone to, would have gone to, if I'd had the sense at eighteen that I had at thirty-eight, and wasn't a snot-nosed little punk, who was too stuck up to accept a scholarship from a school that none of my classmates had heard of.
 
#8
None of us have the sense at 18 that we do as we near 40. Cripes I'm not even sure I had good sense a half dozen years ago.

I was a last minute change of heart from Arizona and since my school has a marginal athletics program outside of hockey they have always been my "team". Pretty cool to have even a tangential connection to Mercer on this day.
 
#9
Mercer's win is a classic illustration of the fact that experience can trump talent. Whoever the Kings get in the upcoming draft, don't expect them to immediately transform the team.
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#11
Okay, so I'm a little more than five minutes away from losing any further interest in the men's draw.

What's really weird to me is how the men's tournament is, basically, the inverse of the women's tournament: the men's draw, due to the potential for upsets, is most interesting during the first weekend (really, just the first round, actually), and becomes progressively less interesting, as it gets chalkier and chalkier. By comparison, because of the talent disparity between the haves and the have-nots, watching the first weekend of the women's draw is a waste of time, unless you have skin in the game, but becomes progressively more interesting, as the teams become closer in talent level.
 

VF21

Super Moderator Emeritus
SME
#12
My bracket is a train-wreck but all of my final four picks are still alive. Of all the games I've watched so far, I think I enjoyed the Kentucky-Wichita State one the most.

Based on the games I watched today, I'm not at all sold on Andrew Wiggins. On the other hand, I'm even more fascinated by Cauley-Stein.
 
#13
Happy with Arizona and Stanford which are the only two schools I really give a crap about advance (Boston U, wellllll, someday they may be relevant - they were actually in the final 5 for Patrick Ewing back in the day, something I only learned while watching Requiem for the Big East, I can only imagine what would have happened to the program had they landed him considering their coach at the time was an up and coming guy named Rick Pitino).

Also was happy to see Dayton go through on account of Sean's brother Archie.

Wiggins was invisible. As much as I hate Duke I've never been a UNC fan either but I must say Roy Williams took the explanation of the end game with grace and class. All in all I'm pretty happy with the first weekend.
 

Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#16
There's a possibility that I'm the only one here even watching the Women's Final Four... but, can somebody ****ing beat UConn, please?
 

VF21

Super Moderator Emeritus
SME
#17
There's a possibility that I'm the only one here even watching the Women's Final Four... but, can somebody ****ing beat UConn, please?
UConn has a good chance of sweeping both sides of the tournament - and I may puke. Go Stanford! Go Kentucky!

Pretty bad during today's Kings game when Jerry and Grant said they were rooting for UConn because of Ray McCallum. Have to wonder how DMC felt about that.

(EDIT: Okay, now that I think about it, why the hell would they say they were rooting for UConn because of Ray?)

(EDIT2: I looked up the UConn grads who are in the pros. Oops. They must have said Gay and I misunderstood... :p )
 
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Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#20
Disclaimer: I don't really want Geno Auriemma to "die in a fire," but if his program were to be put on probation, and banned from postseason play for the next decade or so, I think that that would make me happy.

As I see it, there are three types of people who root for UConn's stranglehold on women's college basketball:

  1. People who went to Connecticut, and/or have "framily" who went to Connecticut.
  2. People who find Geno Auriemma's particular brand of assholery to be a desirable character trait (i.e., the "He may be an ass****, but he's my kind of ass****" types).
  3. Frontrunners.
For various reasons, I find all three of these types of people to be objectionable.
 

Glenn

Hall of Famer
#21
Disclaimer: I don't really want Geno Auriemma to "die in a fire," but if his program were to be put on probation, and banned from postseason play for the next decade or so, I think that that would make me happy.

As I see it, there are three types of people who root for UConn's stranglehold on women's college basketball:

  1. People who went to Connecticut, and/or have "framily" who went to Connecticut.
  2. People who find Geno Auriemma's particular brand of assholery to be a desirable character trait (i.e., the "He may be an ass****, but he's my kind of ass****" types).
  3. Frontrunners.
For various reasons, I find all three of these types of people to be objectionable.
Geno can recruit. He has built the brand, UConn, to the highest level. He no longer has to share the recruiting wars with Tennessee and Stanford doesn't have the clout. I don't follow women's college basketball anymore because there is no local pro team but I presume as long as Geno coaches, the best will flock to UConn. The dominance of UConn makes NCAA basketball far less interesting than in the past when at the least there was UConn, Tennesse, and Stanford on a regular basis. These are the elite year after year.
 
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Mr. S£im Citrus

Doryphore of KingsFans.com
Staff member
#22
Yeah, I guess I'll give the devil his due: I don't know how great a coach I'd say Auriemma is, but he's the best recruiter in the history of the women's game, hands down. When you can get a Top 5 prospect to agree to come to your program, and sit on the bench for two years behind another Top 5 prospect, that's salesmanship!