Running 2017 NCAA Tournament thread

Bill Self is the Peyton Manning of college basketball coaches.

 

And yet despite all that, he'll somehow get enough votes next weekend for the Hall of Fame.

 

That's just sports, really. It is very difficult for any team, in any sport, to play at a supremely high level for more than four or five games in a row. Once you reach a certain level of competition, you're pitting teams against each other that are relatively equal. Given that, it's not a stretch to think one team could rise up and another could have an off night (similar to what happened in the Kansas-Purdue game) at the same time.

 

Perhaps so, but none of the other sports determine their champion by a 68-team single-elimination crapshoot format.

Don't get me wrong, I fully get and much enjoy the whole March Madness thing, but I still think it interesting how college basketball, alone amongst sports, has selected a method for determining its champ so unlikely to land on its actual best team. And it does kinda make you wonder about the point of the regular season.

 

Dane Suttle, an 83.5 percent free-throw shooter, missed the front end of a 1-and-1 at the end of regulation that would have won it for Pepperdine. He missed another front end of a 1-and-1 with 16 seconds left in OT that would have won it. Pepperdine blew a six-point lead with less than a minute to go in the OT. NC State won in the second OT. If Pepperdine had won, I wonder if all of the Valvano tributes would still have happened. A little bit, maybe, but certainly not to the extent that it eventually became.

 

The English FA Cup would like a word.

 

The NBA, meanwhile, insists that EVERY round must go best-of-7, because we REALLY want to be sure the top-seeded Warriors (58-14) are better than the eighth-seeded Nuggets (35-37). That 23-game difference could just be a fluke, ya know.

 

I believe the NFL playoffs are single-elimination. 12 teams instead of 68, but it's 12 out of 32 instead of 68 out of, what, 200?

 

300-plus.

Edit: Looks like 347.

 

But the FA Cup isn't the end-all, be-all championship. Nobody considers Man U to be the English champs.

I wish American sports leagues would incorporate more random competitions instead of just going for the same goal all the time. Not to go all Simmons, but why can't the NBA have a cup competition running concurrently with the regular season? NO ONE DENIES THIS.

 

That reminds me of the NCAA rules/guidelines for the number of playoff teams that are allowed in NCAA Championships. It's based on the number of schools that play the sport.

So, for D1 Men's Lacrosse, back when there were only about 54 schools playing, expansion from 12 to 16 playoff teams was needed, but that would have exceeded the rules.

But, lacrosse was seen as a growing cash cow, so money talks, bullshit walks, and the tourney was expanded to 16, and eventually got a couple of play-in games to hit 18.

Now, they are not championships, but let's talk about bowl games and the 6-5 and 5-6 teams...