After much deliberation, the Lunatic has made his crazy picks.   In the picks that he thinks are more sane, the Lunatic has Florida winning the tournament with Michigan State, Arizona and Louisville joining them in the Final Four.   In his insane picks, the Lunatic goes back to his Big 10 roots and selects Michigan State to win it all – with Florida, Creighton and Duke joining them in the Final Four.

So, sorry to any Gators, Spartans, Wildcats, Cardinals, Bluejays, or Blue Devils fans – the Lunatic has now probably officially cursed your teams.

Right now, we have 251 entries – and there always seems to be a mad rush on Thursday morning.  So, don’t miss your chance to Stomp the Lunatic!!!!!

The 2014 Schedules are updated all the way through Saturday night’s games.  So, at this point, there are only the 5 championship games remaining (Atlantic 10, Sun Belt, ACC, Big 10, SEC) – there shouldn’t be any more bid stealers hanging around – although St. Joseph’s would make their Sunday afternoon a lot less nervous if they were able to beat VCU today.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if either the Michigan / Michigan State or Duke / Virginia game ends up determining the race the for the last #1 seed (as most believe Wichita State, Florida and Arizona are safely the other three #1 seeds).  Then again, at this point, as I prepare my bracketology update, it is one of those years that I am really not sure who is going to be on the top line.  With Arizona losing twice recently, Villanova’s shocking early loss in the Big East tournament, and Kansas falling apart as their star center has been injured, it is really unclear what the committee will do.

Should be a fun day – only 5 games, but they are probably going to be really fun.  March is definitely here.

Those loyal to the Stomp the Lunatic Contest know my opinions of the Bracketology pages.  For those who don’t, I feel they do a lot of teams a dis-service.  My only hopes is that the Selection Committee ignores these folks – but it has got to be hard to not let it influence you.  If Joe Lunardi from ESPN and Jerry Palm from CBS both say that Providence should be one of the last bubble teams in, how much does that make the committee think – maybe they’re right.  If a committee member is questioning what is the right ranking for Ohio State and sees both “experts” listing the Buckeyes as a 6 seed – does that influence the ranking.

I totally think it is entertaining to read – and these guys put themselves on the line as they put their rankings out there for everyone to see.  And in Lunardi’s case, you can even go backwards in the season and see previous rankings.  But then they make these statements that just make my blood boil.

Lunardi is the one who pushed my buttons last night.  When Joe put his last update on Thursday onto the ESPN page, he had the following rankings:

1 – Arizona, Florida, Syracuse, Wichita State

2 – Kansas, Duke, Wisconsin, Creighton

After Virginia’s dominating victory against Syracuse, there was a blurb from ESPN that it looked like Kansas would move up to the top line.   That seems fair enough.  Then came Oklahoma State’s upset of the Jayhawks.  Which then included the next tweet…

“Keeping Kansas on the top line despite latest loss.  Two reasons: (1) overall body of work; (2) rules still require four No. 1 seeds.”

OK – so I realize Twitter’s lack of characters allows for a lot of lack of clarity.  But let me get this straight.  Three days ago, based on important qualities “like body of work” – Joe felt Syracuse was the 3rd best team and Kansas was the 5th.  Then, after Syracuse loses on the road to a team he currently had ranked as a 3 seed (and is now the ACC regular season champion) – and Kansas loses on the road to a team struggling to get to .500 in their conference and keep their tournament hopes alive, it becomes obvious that Kansas should be ranked higher because of only “body of work”.

I get it, a lot of top teams lost – and so it feels like no one is deserving the final top seed.  But it seems awfully inconsistent to say body of work – Kansas’s body of work before yesterday’s game wasn’t better in his mind.  So – how does losing to Oklahoma State (instead of Virginia) make that so obvious he should switch.  I think it is fair to say that now that both teams have blemishes on their resume, the fact that Kansas is still going to win their regular season championship (barring collapse) will give them a leg up in getting the last top seed.  But I don’t think you can claim body of work, when you weren’t saying that three days ago.

You might say, Tom – it doesn’t matter.  Both Kansas and Syracuse will be in the tournament as a top 1 or 2 seed – it is irrelevant.  But in my mind, it isn’t.  Because if Joe uses this type of logic on the top of his bracket, he is likely doing it on the bottom as well.  My only hope is that the committee doesn’t get influenced too much by these experts.

OK – back to getting the Lunatic site back up and running.  I only have two weeks until the madness begins.

Only missing three games – the ACC Championship Game, Atlantic 10 Championship Game, and Big 10 Championship Game.   Don’t have a good explanation why the SEC game was available and the other three were not from today – but it is the best I can do at the moment.

Obviously, take the data with a grain of salt.  I have done some basic cleaning and quality checks against RPI data – but to be fair, it is also 1 am – and so my chances for errors have probably increased.  🙂

Joking aside, I am pretty sure that all the basic information that you might need should be here.  And for those of you who are not familiar with this tradition, I will give you some more details.

As many of you know, one of my insane features is that I try to provide people with data about the teams in case they want to do research on the teams. Each year, we get several people who have demonstrated the power of statistics by building models in order to predict the games. Some of them have been extremely successful with this – especially Bill Kahn with his Bradley-Terry models, showing that even something extremely unpredictable as sports can be forecasted through good statistical techniques. But the part of this that has made me happy – and why I do this – is because a few people who were not statisticians but were taking a stats training course at work used this data for their class project and ended up having some success – including our 2006 champion, David Shaddick.

So, since that point, I decided to provide the scores to everyone in an attempt to provide people as much of a chance to try to leverage data to make their decisions. I realize that most of you will probably spend three to five minutes just looking at the teams and figuring who will do best – I probably don’t need a model to decide that the number 1 seeds will beat the 16 seeds… In fact, I typically spend so much effort maintaining the site that I just randomly pick late Wednesday evening.

However, if I can give people a chance to try to learn something about statistics in a very fun environment, it is well worth the effort. So, just click on 2013 Schedule in the Admin menu and get an Excel spreadsheet with summary box score and standing / RPI information for each game for every Division I team.

One potential error – I did not have the RPI data available to help me error check the final week of games.  So, I made some educated guesses on venues – for example, considering Vanderbilt, St. John’s and Tulsa as hosts of their conference tournaments since the games were played in the same city as their schools.  Not sure this is how the NCAA considers it, but I figured it was probably an accurate reflection.

If you notice something terribly wrong, let me know – no promises I have time to fix it, but at least everyone will know.

Enjoy the data!!!!

 

Well – I have now validated that I have all the games through March 10th correct.  I also know I have the games between March 11th – 14th are correct as far as scores – not 100% sure about venue – my interpretation from other neutral court games is that Vanderbilt playing the SEC tournament in Nashville, TN actually counts as a home game for them because it is the city of their school.  But don’t have any final rankings to compare against.

So, I know the games missing from Friday and Saturday.  Now, it is just a time issue.  I should hopefully be able to get the full set of stats up some time late tonight.  I am really sorry if that messes anyone up.