- When the NCAA releases a list highlighting the best players, teams, and moments in the 75-year history of the NCAA Tournament it gets our attention. Now this probably merits its own post because we have several issues with their selections, but given our time constraints we will start here and if we have the time and inclination we may make this into its own post in the future. We will start off by saying that overall it is a pretty solid list, which frankly shouldn’t be that hard when there are so many obvious selections (Laettner, Alcindor, etc.) We won’t get into the player selections too much other than to point out that there are some interesting selections for the players including picking one-and-dones (Carmelo Anthony and Anthony Davis) as well as one player who we would never have even considered (sorry, Shelvin Mack). The team selections appear to be solid as well although it was interesting that they apparently fell asleep during 1999 and made a few other interesting selections, which we will let slide because they only included NCAA Champions. Our biggest issue is the heavy bias towards moments since 1973 (only three of the 35 listed moments come from before that and involve either civil rights issues or the very first championship despite accounting for almost half of the NCAA Tournament’s history). Most observers will be biased toward recent events, but we would have hoped that the NCAA would have fought this off to have some other memorable moments to potentially educate fans of the game.
- With all the conference realignment going on, one group is getting left out: the mid-majors. If that group, which contains some of the best and most unique programs in the country hadn’t suffered enough with the movement of teams between conferences they just got a little extra salt in their fresh wounds with the announcement that ESPN was canceling their BracketBusters event after this season. In its 11th season, the event was originally intended to help mid-majors add a quality victory to their resume either helping them get an at-large into the NCAA Tournament or at least move up a line or two on the S-curve. Some opponents have criticized the event for a variety of reasons including the fact that it might hurt a team’s chance of getting an at-large if they lay an egg in front of a national TV audience or the fact that sometimes the match-ups are not optimal as they may have two exceptionally strong mid-majors playing in different games against vastly inferior opponents leading to two dismal games that makes mid-major basketball overall look bad.
- The New Year’s Eve game between Gonzaga and Oklahoma State was already a highly anticipated game, but oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is trying to raise it to another level. Pickens, who you may remember from this amazing tweet at Drake, has purchased 4,000 tickets for the game that will be given away on a first-come, first-serve basis starting this morning at the Oklahoma State ticket office with a maximum of six tickets being given to any single individual. Given how this giveaway is set-up we expect to see quite a few of these tickets wind up on the secondary market, which we would consider disappointing except for the fact that a capitalist like Pickens would probably approve of it.
- There might be a coach of a major program that regularly schedules such a challenging non-conference schedule as Tom Izzo does, but you will not find many. Now it appears that Izzo wants to up the ante as he is looking at scheduling several home-and-home series. We are not sure how he is going to do it, but we applaud him for it. According to Izzo, Michigan State is trying to schedule home-and-home series with Arizona, Florida, and/or North Carolina. For some coaches we would view this as just posturing, but given Izzo’s reputation for taking on all-comers on land or sea and in some cases abroad we tend to believe him.
- One of the great things about social media is that it can be used as a force for the public to have its voice be heard by the powers that be. So you would think that in the case of an idea that was almost universally derided the public would win out, right? That does not appear to be the case for Mark Hollis’ four-games-at-one-time idea as the Michigan State AD is continuing to defend the concept. To be fair, we would have been surprised if Hollis had backed out of the idea that quickly as it would have made it clear to everybody just how ridiculous the idea was in the first place. Our disapproval of the idea has nothing to do with our thoughts on Hollis as we think he has done a great job with a number of unique sporting events, but more to do with the practicality of it. You can play a game on the moon if you want, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.