Unfortunately, the evening games weren’t as exciting as the afternoon. But there was still some good ones. WatchingMichiganStatecome back like that – started to have a feeling they would pull out yet another amazing victory. Credit has to go to UCLA for holding on. We also had one of the locations watch an 11 (Gonzaga), 12 (Richmond) and 13 (Morehead St) all win their games to advance to the Round of 32.

I am sorry that I am a little behind with everything. But I promise to catch up over the weekend, as well as send out an e-mail on the overall standings.

Until then – congratulations to Brent Peterson and Stephanie Palermo – who both managed to get 15 of 16 games right today to be the early leaders of the pool!!!!! The Lunatic has not done well – but that is to be expected!!!!! Lets all STOMP THE LUNATIC!!!!!

I can only hope the games continue like this – well except for the Purdue game where we blow out our opponents.Morehead   Stknocks offLouisvilleto be our first Cinderella candidate,TempleandKentuckywin on their final drives to the basket. And then of course, everyone’s favorite Butler Bulldogs found a way to get an errant shot and put the second chance in at the buzzer.

One can only hope that this madness continues!

If my site is correct (and considering the quote debacle – that is debateable), we have a record 346 entries. Normally, there is one or two e-mails waiting for me when I get home about picks that the system rejected – but that will only add to the total!!!!

At this point, there is nothing left to do but cheer for your teams. Or if you are a pessimist like me who knows his picks will get destroyed anyways – just cheer for the upsets and pure chaos to happen. That will totally mess up my picks which are sadly conservative this year – but I don’t care. Go Clemson!!!! Go VCU!!!! GoRichmond!!!!! GoBelmont!!!!! Go – put your favorite underdog here – !!!!!!!!

It is what March is all about. Hopefully, another Cinderella will provide us a similar excitement thatButlerdid last year. At a minimum, I am sure we will have lots of great basketball!!!!

So good luck to all – enjoy the games – and I hope that everyone STOMPS THE LUNATIC!!!!!!!!!

There seems to be a glitch popping up for a couple people. When you are on the entry page and entering your picks names, please do not use a single quote in the name (like calling them Tom’s picks). This creates a SQL error when loading the entry to the database because it ends the query.

I have also had a unknown error happen that I believe is being caused when two people submit exactly at the same time – shouldn’t happen often – but when people are entering at the last minute, it is always possible.

Worst case, if you are having trouble getting your entry in – print your picks and send me an e-mail – I will try to help you when I am not in meetings.

Well, the Lunatic has entered his picks – as he thoroughly is enjoying the game. So glad that VCU didn’t deserve to be in the tournament – now that they are stomping on USC. Although then again, I guess you could make your arguments about if USC was the right pick either. To be honest, I hate all the media work to try to criticize teams that they don’t believe belong in the tourney – and the teams they thought were snubbed. Do I believe teams likeColoradoor Virginia Tech should have made it – sure! But to be fair – you should not be blaming any of the Last 4 teams in. For some reason, 16 of the 37 at large bids went to two conferences – the Big East and Big 10. I understand that many believe these were the best two conferences this year, but there is a large part of me that just doesn’t believe you should be allowed to get into the tournament if you can’t even finish in the top half of your conference.But I digress.

In the Lunatic’s Sane picks, he really took a lot of the chalk. I had to convince myself to change one of the Elite 8 games just so I didn’t put all 4 top seeds through. In the end, I haveKansasbeating Duke, withOhioStateandFloridajoining them in the Final 4.

In the Lunatic’s insane picks, I had to back my Boilers to the Final 4. Then, reality sank in and I decided it probably was too gutsy of a choice to pick them to win. So, I took Duke to repeat as champions by beatingPittsburgh. Then, the Tar Heels from UNC joined Purdue as the other Final 4 teams.

So, there you go! Now you know what you have to do – I apologize in advance to Jayhawk and Blue Devils fans, we know what effects exist from the Lunatic choosing you to win it all. By the way, last time I checked, we have over 232 entries – lets see if we break 300! Good luck to all in Stomping the Lunatic!!!!

 

OK – for those of you who don’t want to have to build a statistical model and just want a quick way to evaluate the teams – the Lunatic is here to help you as well! I have created a summary page, which for each game, provides some nice summary statistics about the teams playing in a side-by-side format. So you can look at adjusted scoring margin, RPI, strength of schedule, games vs. Top 50 opponents, or bad losses.

If you want to do your picks quickly, it isn’t a bad tool – go check it out!!!!

Very short message since it is late! But after much cursing myself for trying to improve the site, I have the registration page and entry form up – just look at the 2011 Entry links (Register and Login). Please remember the email that you use when you register – not only is it the email I will send updates to, but it is also your login password! If you have problems with the site, let me know through email atthomas@tehodgson.com- I will check at night to see what people need. Good luck to all of you in stomping the Lunatic!

Admittingly, I have not put as much effort into this as last year. Maybe it is just because I am more excited about getting the site up and running – hopefully, people will really like the changes such as being able to view and edit their picks after they enter. They might seem like small changes to you – in fact, if done correctly, they should be… But they will be large shifts in the amount of time I need to maintain the site – which is always a big win to me.

Anyways, I have quickly ranked the conferences – and then haphazardly merged them into a jumbled mess that would represent my version of the tournament. One of these years when I get to follow the whole season closer – like when my kids are in college – I will do better at this. But still, we will have to see what my haphazard attempt against the experts. To see who I think is in, go to the link in the 2011 Lunatic’s ramblings section.

Which means time for me to rant on the media. I am tired about hearing how weak the bubble is this year. The media obviously has an agenda against the NCAA for expanding the tournament. If you read some of the ESPN analysts, you hear the comments like – thank goodness they didn’t go to 96 teams, we don’t have enough good teams at 68.

But then, when you look at Lunardi’s first 7 teams knocked out of the tournament – they include the following: Alabama – SEC West champ at 12-4, Missouri St – MVC champ (RPI 42), UAB – Conf USA champ (RPI 31), Harvard – Ivy champ (RPI 32). Not to mentionGeorgiaandBostonCollege.

I am sorry, but when you are leaving out 3 regular season champs with RPIs lower than 50 and a SEC West champ that has the crime of scheduling poorly, but has beaten bothKentuckyandTennessee- you have no right to say this is a weak field.

I don’t know that I have time to do the bracketology thing again this year – not to mention I did so poorly at it last year. And they do a good job of understanding the committee. But saying the bubble is weak is an insult to some really talented teams. You can argue whether or not these teams deserve one of the last spots in the field over other deserving teams – they all have flaws which is why they are in that conversation. But don’t take away from these talented teams and say there aren’t enough good teams out there to fill a field of 68 – when you are leaving that many regular season champions out with good RPIs, you lose the right to that claim.

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, the way I have been going this year with trying to innovate the site, I will likely being doing the same thing late on Wednesday night.

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, in the 2011 Statistics section is a link to an Excel file with the basic box score numbers for each game for every Division I team.

My classic caveats on this data are the following: I have only checked that standings match with ESPN’s page. I don’t have time to error check over 5000 box scores. I also tried to identify all the neutral court games – I believe I have done that since I was able to match the March 6th RPI standings, which uses site of games in the calculation as a weight. But no guarantees. Also, obviously, the 4 championships on Sunday are not in the file. 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!!!!