March Madness - Response to Some Gripes

ESPN.com - NCB/NCAATOURNEY06 - 2006 Men's NCAA Tournament Bracket

I don't want to write that much about the NCAA tournament (UCONN, TEXAS, UCLA, VILLANOVA in the Final Four, with UCONN over UCLA for the championship), but I heard a lot of nonsense from some old school analysts during selection shows yesterday and I think they are missing something huge here.

Their gripe is about the percieved snub of major conferences in favor of mid-majors who are computer constructions. Billy Packer led the argument on CBS and I think his points make sense if you don't think about them with any depth. The chairman of the selection committee answered him with all the verbal ability of an academic, which is to say not effectively. So, lemme use this space to take it apart.

Billy's first argument was about past results. The mid major conference in question, the Missouri Valley, has one tournament win in the last three or four or five years, from something like 14 bids. The ACC, which also had 4 bids this year, has some large number of sweet sixteen teams in the same period. The chariman of the selection committee said that history has no place in the argument about teams this year. While I agree, I don't think that's the crux of the argument. The ACC has traditionally been seeded very high. Hell, Duke is a 3 seed if they show up and a 1 seed if they are any good at all. The MVC teams are lucky to get a seed above 9 in any given year. Despite the big output this year, Wichta State peaked the league with a 7, which might be the highest seed in the tournament for an MVC team since Larry Bird played for Indiana State. Certainly during the ESPN Era, coincidentally the same period CBS has carried the tourney. I think this is key. We should talk about the results individual seeds have produced (like HALF of the national champions have come from #1 seeds), and the expectations of the various seeds and then compare conference results with them. Since it has been rare that the MVC has been expected to leave the first round, the fact that they have one win is probably better than expectation. How well have ACC teams seeded below 8 done in the last five years? I don't have the time to look it up, but I suspect it's probably not much better than MVC teams. If you take out the 9 seeds, it's probably even lower. So, since we're talking about teams that are expected to lose in the first round, what difference does it make if we take Missouri State or Notre Dame. They're both supposed to lose.

The other thing that Billy Packer complained about is the RPI number. Let's look at UNI (Norther Iowa) and compare them to Notre Dame. UNI played, outside the conference (the relevant schedule because you can control it), the following schedule achieving these results:

11/20	W Carolina	W 68-46
11/23	at W Michigan	W 69-63
11/27	Upper Iowa Universit	W 72-47
11/29	at Iowa St	L 68-61
12/03	Loyola-Chi	W 72-56
12/06	#13 Iowa	W 67-63
12/10	UMKC	W 87-64
12/17	Florida A&M	W 76-53
12/19	at LSU	W 54-50
12/22	HawPac	W 81-47

I see wins @LSU (4 seed, Atlanta Region & 1st in the SEC West), against Iowa (3 seed, Atlanta Region, 3rd in the Big 10, and Big 10 tourney champ). Not listed above, they beat Bucknell who was ranked #24 at the time, in February. They also played Iowa State of the Big 12. The rest of the non-conference is junk, but they played the people who would play them and they beat three of em.

Notre Dame, perennial bubble-out team, produced the following non-conference results:

11/20	Lafayette	W 84-66
11/22	Hofstra	W 69-50
11/26	NC State	L 61-48
12/03	Michigan	L 71-67
12/07	at #19 Alabama	W 78-71
12/10	Fla Int'l	W 81-47
12/18	at IPFW	W 65-63
12/21	Niagara	W 80-59
12/23	Columbia	W 75-68
12/28	Fordham	W 85-49
12/30	Wofford	W 74-71

They played two quality games outside of the Big East (Michigan and Alabama) and won one of them. The rest of the schedule is junk. We should reward themn for pounding Fordham, Niagra, Columbia, and Florida International?

Now you might say that no one was looking at the Irish this year, but let's think about this. You're telling me that the only teams that the great Notre Dame can schedule are these patsies? Honkey, Please. I'm willing to accept that it's hard to get teams to do a home and home that involves going to Cedar Falls Iowa (it's only a five and a half hour drive from Saint Louis), but South Bend? I can't imagine that ND can't set a better schedule. You'd think, after being left out of the dance for the last two years they'd think long and hard. Basketball isn't like football where it takes years to book the game.

The Irish weren't on the Bubble you say. Let's take the beloved ACC's beloved bubble-heads, Florida State.

11/19	at Jacksonville	W 78-48
11/21	Alcorn St	W 85-67
11/25	at #15 Florida	L 74-66
11/29	Purdue	W 97-57
12/02	La Monroe	W 85-62
12/07	Tex South	W 90-59
12/17	BGU	W 71-60
12/20	Stetson	W 75-57
12/22	Campbell	W 108-73
12/31	Nebraska	W 74-60
02/12	UMass	W 73-63

Florida is a nice loss. Purdue and Nebraska are major conference teams that suck. Maybe you credit them for getting those plus midmajor Umass late, and you can't blame them because they only played one decent team outside of conference (despite scheduling four majors), and got creamed by that one decent team. You're telling me it's hard to get home-and-homes to Tallahayseed? Harder than Cedar Falls? You're telling me more mid majors won't score a mid-level ACC team. That's a no-lose proposition for the team coming to Tall-a-Hay-Seed. If they win,
all the bracketologists love it. If they lose, at least it looks like their trying. If FSU is up, your Strength of Schedule looks great. If their down, you couldn't know that, but at least you're trying.

One last nail to Florida State: Against the teams from their conference that are going to the big dance, they went 1-4, playing only Duke twice. So, they had a soft ACC schedule, lost tight games to the top teams in the conference, and managed to eke a win at home. UNI swept Wichita State, split with Missouri State (visitor winnings both, and UNI getting the rubber match in St. Louis in a game where MSU couldn't hit the ocean or buy a call), split with SIU (home and home, and lost the rubber in the MVC tourney in Saint Louis, SIU being a 15 minute drive away) and got swept by Creighton. In their own conference (which is not as good as the ACC, admitedly), they went .500 against the top teams. You're telling me a team that schedules well, and wins games agaisnt the best people they play should have to defer to an ACC team, just because they are in the ACC and beat up on the weaker teams there? You're going to make an argument that UNI should be in the ACC or the Big Ten? Cause if you think FSU belongs in over UNI, that's what you're saying. You're saying that geography and league matter more than winning.

My bottom line is this: Does Florida State beat UNI head to head? Maybe, maybe not. If you like the big conferences, you probably think so (I like the bigs, I do). But we don't know. So, what can we base our assumptions about who's a better team on? Who they play and how well they play them. Since FSU won a grand total of one game against good competition and scheduled very few teams that would offer them such comeptition, we don't know how good they are, other than they lost to the good teams they played, particularly on the road. Since UNI played more good teams, and fared better against them, I gotta pick them for my bracket. And that goes for Cincinatti and Seton Hall and all the other majors who don't play anyone and cry come Selection Sunday. Enjoy the NIT, losers.

No More Flavor to Savor - Flavor of Love Finale

The odd thing about the series that I love is that it is hard to write things about the final episodes. Perhaps it's because the future is more interesting to me than the past. I dunno. Vh1 seems to agree with me, since they rerun past episodes incessantly, until they run the final episode. At any rate, it might be because there is no future to it, but it might be because there is simply too much to assimilate. Either way, I don't think this post is going to be up to my usual standards of length. But, I never know when I start em.

First off, I want to extend my congratulations to Hoopz for winning the worst prize in all of reality TV, the love of Flavor Flav. I guess you could also suggest that she got a blingy set of teeth and a tacky necklace with her nickname on it for her troubles. Maybe it's cultural bias, but as a white man, I can't understand why anyone would want a piece of the mess that is Flav. He's in bankruptcy. He's a divorcee with a large number of children from a number of baby mommas. If you were looking at an internet personal for him, I think you would scroll by fast. In fact, I'd be more likely to be interested in having a relationship with Big Rick, his large black manservant. The Silent Bob to Flav's Jay. So, I suppose we can maybe try to puzzle out why Hoopz, an otherwise pretty level headed lady, would want any part of this mess.

The primary motivation has to be competitive drive. You put 20 women together and tell them to compete for a prize, regardless of whether it's Flav, Joe Millionaire, or that broke guy on Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. Some part of the attraction has to be the competition. Something in the lizard part of the brain that says, "Fight for this." I understand this. When I get in competition, I'm very competitive. I can give you a list of references, from teammates from business school to friends who've suffered the pain and shame of playing trivia games against me. Hell, ask me about the time I was on "Win Ben Stein's Money" sometime. It's not a great story, but my explanation of why I didn't win is very revealing. So, this makes sense to me.

I think there is a secondary motive pushing Hoopz to want to win Flav's heart and unlimited access to his collections of pimp canes, goofy hats, gold teeth, giant clocks and funny sunglasses. And all the Hydro wear you can wear. The hatred of her rival for said prizes, New York. Maybe you don't want the prize that much, but you have a rival and you'd hate for her to get it, even if it is the prize equivalent of a flaming bag of crap. I can understand this, intellectually, even if I can get with it. Flav and New York deserve each other, in the same way that Osama bin Laden deserves a very Dante inspired Hell. Richly. So, getting in the way of that is bad, at least in my view. Since Flav eliminated every real person on the show, save one, we can surmise that he is as phony as the phonies he claims to detest. Deep down, the things we hate in others are the things we hate in ourselves. I suspect that Flav doesn't like the shadow of himself that he's become and it probably kills him when/if Chuck D calls him on it. He's got bills to pay and the PE money isn't rolling like it used to, so he's gotta pimp himself to Vh1's advertisers. But he's gotta know. He used to be a fool in the sacred sense of the word, the type of fool who showed the world it's hypocrisy through his antics. Unless I'm missing something, he's just a regular old fool now. The ultimate irony here is that he picked the more real girl, not because she was more real, but because she light the fires of his loins more.

The third motivation is the most unfathomable. She actually wants to spend the rest of her life, or at least some portion of it, with Flavor Flav as her lover and companion. I have no handhold on that one, so all I'm gonna say is, it's possible.

I want to try and decode Flav's choice here too. While it makes the most rational sense to pick Hoopz, in the Flav world, it probably made the most sense to pick New York. His claim is that every little thing she does is magic. And I guess that's the definition of love, right? I can tell you for sure that everything my wife does is magic, even her in-store bicycle test rides. But some part of my brain doesn't want to accept that. There are a couple of instances that put a lie to Flav's testimony.

The first is the joint date with Hoopz and Pumkin. At the end of the day, he ditches Hoopz and probably shags Pumkin. After the day they spent together, I think Flav is probably expecting sex from whoever he takes up to his room to "cap the night." If Hoopz is the one who lights your life, why are you going to take Pumkin back to your room? You're not. Even if you don't think she's gonna put out, you take Hoopz, because she gives you fever. Maybe I'm nuts or I've watched too many chick flicks, but if you get the flames inside from one girl, why are you hanging around with the other. If it's just animal lust, then he should stick with Pumkin. Even if she is fake. Maybe she's just a bad lay. I don't think so, but it's possible.

The second is the end of the night with New York. If New York is to be believed, and I don't see any reason to disbelieve, she and Flav made beautiful music together that night. Dismissing the slim odds outcomes (New York has a penis or is also a bad lay), why'd he do that. Especially after the dinner where it became clear that Hoopz hated New York. If I'm Flav and my thinking cap is properly adjusted, I'm thinking everyone hates New York, after Pumkin spit on her and Hoopz talked all kinds of smack about her. Oh yeah, and she's at the center of EVERY FIGHT IN THE HOUSE (Side note here: That is NOT Flav's house in any sense of ownership. Too many things don't add up to him owning it, much less living there.). Maybe it's her. Maybe she's crazy. Hell, she wants to have sex with you when her crazy mother (crazy could be genetic) threatened to disown her. If your bullshit detector is on, even at its lowest setting, you think she's nuts, phony or both. But you shag her anyway, taking extra care to not touch her penis. Maybe he's undecided this late and he bangs her and she's a bad lay too. But sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Maybe she wasn't good enough to merit keeping around in the face of all of her mental problems (The OCD, the paranoia, the jealousy, the bunker mentality, the quick temper, and everything else).

Maybe it's like this instead. He knows that New York is a jealous lunatic. Hoopz brings it up as a point of contrast. You don't have anyway of knowing if she's being truthful when Hoopz says she can handle him being around other women. So, you put it to the test of tesses. You sleep with the hosebag that your would-be-paramour HATES. If she sticks with you and doesn't say anything about it, she's the one. If she goes nuts, then you know all the bodies you have left are nuts, and you take New York, because she'll make the best sycophant. I dunno if that's what he's thinking, but if it is, he's an even more worthless human being than I currently believe him to be. Either way, this is the kind of sick game that makes reality TV all the things it is:

• Highly Addictive
• Fun to Watch
• Morally Contemptible

In the end, I think Flavor of Love was all of these things in as large a presentation as I've ever seen. I'm sorry to see it end but on the other hand, I'm thrilled I can't debase myself anymore by watching it. On the other hand, Vh1 is putting a transvestite celebrity into the Surreal House and is making Hulk Hogan go tampon shopping with his teenage daughter starting next week.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I wanted to somehow try and tie Flavor of Love to Breaking Bonaduce, which was the best reality show I've ever seen, bar none. The humanity, ugly and pretty, of Danny and Gretchen stand in stark contrast to everyone else on Vh1's reality shows, and possibly to everyone else on TV. The way that Danny could be needy and monstrous and pathetic and lovable and everything is something I just can't reconcile with Flavor Flav, who is just gross and amusing in alternating waves. There is an odd lack of humanity to Flav, as if he is just a construct of the zeitgeist. And yet, as two of my favorite shows from the last year, it's hard not to think of them together. If Danny is no longer with Gretchen (seemed headed there but I missed the final episode due to Charter's incompetence), maybe we should do a dating show with Danny Bonaduce as the prize. It wouldn't be the same as Flav. In fact, it might be the exact opposite. But I think it would be, if anything, more compelling. You could replace Big Rick with Dr. Gary and have Gretchen give the contestants lie detector tests. Now that's a show worth watching.