The long, long odds

It should be pointed out that I – Mr. I Haven’t Watched a Game All Year and I Have No Intention of Starting Now – was perfect in selecting Thursday’s opening games in the NCAA Tournament. Yep, that’s right… a perfect 16-for-16. That’s the first time I pulled that off and I seem to be headed for my best picking since I went 14-for-16 in choosing the Sweet 16 over a decade ago. In that year Old Dominion went to the Round of 16. I think they beat Villanova, too.

Regardless, like most people I filled out two pools. One was based on probability as determined by a mathematician who crunched the numbers and the other was based on what I knew about college hoops. Guess which one was perfect?

Left to my own devices I came up with Oregon, Kansas, Georgetown and Texas A&M for the Final Four, though a Penn alum told me A&M was a trendy pick and after its inconsistent showing in the opening-round victory over the Quakers, it was hard to think they were going to be in the tournament for the long haul…

Yeah, exactly. Sour grapes.

On another note regarding Penn and its basketball team, Stephen Danley, the starting forward for the Quakers, had been contributing to The New York Times’ college basketball blog called “The Bracket.” In his first entry, Danley wrote about how he and his teammates deal with cliché questions from reporters on their Ivy League pedigree and how they are so-called true “student-athletes.” Needless to say, it was pretty funny including the parts where Danley revealed the fun they have to the dim reporters doing those pad Ivy League stories.

But reading it I was struck by the clichés within the clichés. Like a riddle wrapped in an enigma covered in a conundrum. Or whatever.

How’s this for a cliché: Penn, or any other Ivy League school, in the NCAA Tournament. There, I said it. What’s the point of having those teams in the “Big Dance” when all we get to read about come March is how no Ivy League school has won a tournament game since Princeton beat UNLV in 1998 or how Princeton upset UCLA in 1996 and almost beat No. 1 Georgetown and Patrick Ewing.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Penn made it to the Final Four, and I think I know the reason why. Ready? Because it was nearly 30 years ago!

Here are some handy dandy facts from the same blog Danley contributed to:

But in the eight seasons since Princeton beat the Rebels, Ivy teams have lost by an average of 14 points and haven’t been seeded high than No. 11. That doesn’t bode well for Penn.

And:

Here are the results of the Ivy’s eight-game N.C.A.A. losing streak:

2006
No. 2 Texas 60
No. 15 Penn 52

2005
No.4 Boston College 85
No. 13 Penn 65

2004
No. 3 Texas 66
No. 14 Princeton 49

2003
No. 6 Oklahoma State 77
No. 11 Penn 63

2002
No. 6 California 82
No. 11 Pennsylvania 75

2001
No. 2 North Carolina 70
No. 15 Princeton 48

2000
No. 4 Illinois 68
No. 13 Penn 58

1999
No. 6 Florida 75
No. 11 Penn 61

Just once I’d like to see Penn – or any other Ivy League school – tell the NCAA Tournament, “thanks, but no thanks. We’re not going to travel across the country to be a first-round hors d’oeuvres for a potential national title contender. We’re going to take our chances in the NIT where we have a chance to win. We don't need to play the No. 3 seed and lose so everyone can call us 'scrappy.'”

Yeah, I know this probably isn’t a popular sentiment, but I can’t understand the logic of a team going to tournament that it has no chance of not just winning, but also being competitive. Sure, Penn could get lucky and win a game, but the thing about the NCAA Tournament is that those No. 13, 14 and 15 seeds don’t last too long after the first upset. In fact, I’d like my odds of winning the Powerball over Penn’s (or Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell or Dartmouth... not Harvard -- they have it all figured out) chances to win two games in an NCAA Tournament.

But then again, what do I know. Obviously those smart kids from Penn know what's going on.

Hold on: didn’t they let Penn into the Ivy League because they were good at sports or was that Cornell?

Come on Penn folks, laugh for once. Everyone else is.

Anyway, my mathematician (an Ivy Leaguer, but not from Penn) claimed that the Quakers had a 3.8 percent chance to win a game in the tournament this year and only six other teams had worse odds.

His Final Four? Kansas, Florida, North Carolina and (ahem) Texas A&M, with Carolina beating Kansas for the championship.

Then again, he had Duke in the Sweet 16.

Didn't we do this last year?

This is the week when the casual sports fan can pretend to be the biggest know-it all out there. He can pontificate on defenses, offenses, match-ups, coaching and other intangibles. He can shout all of this with such alacrity and conviction that everyone must listen and nod their head in agreement not because the shouter is making valid points, but because they want the guy to shut up.

In other words, life imitates sports talk radio. And, yes, the NCAA Tournament is about to begin.

That means everyone has their bracket filled out, checked twice and if that doesn’t work, they complete an “upsets” sheet. You know, because it’s all so scientific.

But make no mistake about it, aside from the Super Bowl, the NCAA Tournament is the one sporting event where even the casual observer or worse, the non-sports fan, can have an opinion and participate. All they have to do is fill out one of those brackets and turn it in to the sketchy guy running the office pool who always seems to win the damn thing every year.

The best part about the NCAA Tournament is that you don’t have to watch the games to be involved.

What? Don’t have to watch the games? Such sacrilege! What about the upsets and the last-second shots, and the Cinderellas, and the corny song they play at the end with all of the hightlights….

!

Yeah, well, whatever.

As one of those folks slowly morphing into a non-sports fan, I believe that the NCAA Tournament is beginning to become a parody of itself. Or a cliché. Or worse. Oh sure, the last-second shots are exciting and the upsets are cool, but it’s getting to the point when it doesn’t occur every time, the drama gets forced. Not every ending can be NC State beating Houston or Freddie Brown passing the ball to James Worthy.

Worse, the whining and complaining about what team got into the tournament or improperly seeded has reached such a pitch that it’s become completely unwatchable and unlistenable. So Drexel didn’t get invited to “The Big Dance.” I guess it shouldn’t have lost to Rider and I doubt Drexel as a bastion of academia will figure out how to trudge on even though the basketball team has to play in the NIT.

Now don’t get me wrong, I used to go crazy like everyone else about the NCAA Tournament. In fact, it’s really interesting to me that Georgetown has John Thompson as the coach and Patrick Ewing as a star player. It makes me feel like it’s 1984 all over again.

Better yet, for the last 20 years in a row, I spent the second Sunday in March in front of the television with a legal pad and a pen and marked down where, when and who each of the 53, then 64 and now 65 teams were going to play. There was no so-called bracketology involved, no whining about who was left out or wrongly seeded (though Temple’s No. 4 seed in 1994 was wrong), or no hand-wringing, boisterous and hyperbolic rants about which team was going to go to the Final Four. Simply, it was an annual ritual in its purest form.

The result was what mattered. It was that simple. There was an air of mystery about the teams and the players because the only time we (I) saw them was on TV. I didn’t know anything about Ewing, or Bird, or Sampson, or Jordan, or Bias other than what they offered during a basketball game.

Somehow, though, that mystery and pureness soured and was ruined and those old notebooks have been moved from a box in the garage to a big green plastic receptacle at the end of the driveway. Was it the corporatization and greed that has pervaded big-time athletics? Have my priorities changed that much? Has it just gotten so boring? Whatever the reason, this year I decided that all traditions must come to an end. Sure, the fact that the only reason I paid attention in the past few years was because it related to work and the Big 5 teams were a threat to make it past the first weekend of games. Then there is the fact that I haven’t watched an entire college basketball game since… gee… when was that?

I guess that’s the way it is when one gets older. Maybe those priorities and interests change because they find their proper perspective? Memories shift, too. I can still recite the Final Four from the late 1960s to about the early or mid 1990s. As for last year or the year before that I have no idea.

And this stuff used to matter – relatively speaking, of course.

Here’s the point: I’m old, and who wants to listen to Billy Packer whine or Dick Vitale get tangled up in the lies of the mission of college athletics? Not me.

But man oh man those games used to be a lot of fun. I’m sure they still are to a lot of people, so excuse this old man as he steps aside to let others have fun without another know-it-all boring everyone to tears.

And if you’re looking for help on the bracket, try this Final Four: Oregon, UCLA, Georgetown and Memphis with Georgetown and Oregon going all the way to the end.