ncaa post pickings

Major points from pre-tournament. The Pitt bandwagon was a good one to go against the grain on. Picking them to lose to ORU was a stretch, but nevertheless, having them knocked out quickly was no surprise. Clemson did of course lose out quickly as well. So the conference tournament seeding still shows it’s colors as a useful criteria. They did come out fast and furious against Nova, but blew it anyway. That was impressive and apparently forgettable.

Bad road teams losing 1st round: Vanderbilt, Oregon, UConn (with some help from a blown ACL).
2nd round: Notre Dame, Pitt (vs MSU though), UNLV, Kansas St, Marquette, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Purdue. Michigan St was the only Sweet 16 poor road team and beat a subpar team to get there. Kansas St over USC by this theory was really the only surprise, but they were playing in Omaha.

My upsets that did well: Siena over Vandy. West Virginia over Duke (I goofed this one the same as last year with Wisconsin and took the other 1st round team to win). Kansas over Carolina was a big shot later. In a weird way picking Memphis over Texas was a big deal, same with Michigan St over Pitt.

Seed breakdown: UCLA was the weakest 1. Carolina was weak on D, UCLA couldn’t score and it showed throughout the tournament. Memphis did get the worst draw, but won anyway. Kansas had an easy time of it.
2) Tennessee was probably the weakest, but managed to win because Butler missed about five million layups. They got destroyed by a good Louisville team as their "reward". Duke losing was more due to matchups (as is usually the case with Duke) and West Virginia being a very underrated 7 seed. Georgetown loss was a bit of a surprise, but in retrospect, Davidson was just pretty good and Hibbert had a way of disappearing.
3) Louisville turned out to be pretty damn good. By the numbers they were supposed to be, but the eye test wasn’t there when I’d seen them play. They looked too herky-jerky on offense to go places. Stanford almost proved out well with Marquette (overtime games are tough). I can’t quite figure how Wisconsin looked that bad on offense versus Davidson, but obviously they’d have had the toughest draw anyway (USC or K St, then Davidson or Georgetown, then Kansas, no thanks). If they’d have won, I’d have about half my sheets that would have nailed the Elite Eight.
4) Both Vandy and Pitt were predictably and obviously weak.UConn’s best player blew out his knee in the first half which didn’t bode well for the rest of the game and overtime. Only Washington St was decent here.
5) Only Michigan St looked particularly strong. Clemson looked ok but had other factors that precluded a strong investment of pickings. Drake was the ’weakest’ link but none of these teams looked great, merely better than the 4s
6) Marquette was the best 6 and probably should have won the Stanford game but stopped attacking the twins inside (both had 4 fouls). Oklahoma was weak. And OJ Mayo is perhaps the most annoying name in history for an overrated recruit to have.
7-10) Davidson looked pretty damn solid, especially playing essentially home games early on. BYU-AM game was the tough one.
In retrospect Indiana-Arkansas should have been easier for me to call.

Pot odds looks:
Picking someone other than Carolina looks to be working out well. I picked Kansas 90% of the time, Memphis the others. Go Jayhawks in other words.
Picking Michigan St worked.
Picking Oklahoma didn’t.
Picking against Vandy worked (if I’d taken Nova more often)
Picking Washington St worked.
Picking USA would have been stupid, so despite the temptation I didn’t.
Should have picked against Duke more (the anti-UCLA strain showing there, nobody other than Duke could have beaten them in that bracket)

Arizona, Gonzaga went cross country and lost.
Duke, Stanford, and Indiana all did rather poorly (Stanford did get 2 wins at least) for the 6 of 10 teams.
SEC predictably sucked. Big Ten may have won the NIT but didn’t manage much beyond that. Billy Packer needs to shut it on the ACC or whatever the RPI thinks is the best conference each year. That should have been the Big 12 and Big East anyway, or the Pac 10.