21 March 2011

First weekend notes

VCU had a 1.2% chance of making it to the sweet 16. Given that they had an extremely underwhelming defensive profile all season, the fact that they locked down two pretty good offenses in a row (plus one mediocre one) seems highly improbable. Also that they scored so much and so easily against Purdue. Who has a ridiculously good defense. In any case, the Kansas draw now is... pretty smooth the rest of the way. There's nobody ranked in the top 30 and even the potential final four matchup is probably no better than Wisconsin at #10 (BYU would have been interesting with Davies).

Less improbable things:
The ACC did very well. 3 teams in the sweet 16 and 7-1 record from 4 teams.

The Big East did poorly. 9-9 record from 11 teams with two of the more unlikely teams being the only ones left standing (ie, anyone not Pitt and not Syracuse, who were really the only very good teams in the conference, along with maybe Notre Dame).

The SEC did poorly except for Florida who had an easy bracket draw and Kentucky who's actually good. Both Conference USA teams losing immediately: also not very surprising. Memphis at least made it exciting.

Kansas looks really, really good. So does Ohio State (Big Ten generally doing pretty well as usual also at 7-5)

A whole bunch of close games were determined by some strange calls (especially the Syracuse and Pitt games), silly fouls (Pitt again), and poor out of bounds execution (especially the Washington and Texas games).

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