Auburn could do no wrong – every shot they put up seemed to go in. To be fair, during multiple runs, it seemed like North Carolina was simply watching Auburn play – as they constantly got wide open three pointers or would simply drive past flat-footed defenders.

I could hear my father-in-law Fred screaming all the way from New Bern, “Call Time Out, Roy!!!!!”. UNC would have been better off calling those remaining two timeouts to try to stop Auburn’s momentum than take them back to the locker room with them. It probably wouldn’t have mattered based on the way that the Tigers were playing.

This was simply a bad matchup for the Tar Heels – most teams wilt at the pace of play that UNC plays. Auburn challenged it and ran with them – until they slowed down at the end into half-court sets to finish the game.

Of course, this could simply have been the Lunatic Curse – UNC was obviously the Lunatic’s upset pick champion. If that was the case, then Duke fans should beware…….The Lunatic’s sane pick champion plays next (and the announcers just mentioned that Cam Reddish will not be starting due to a knee injury – not a good start). Blue Devils and Hokies getting ready to tip off.

Congratulations to Auburn on making it to the Elite 8!!!!

LSU had an early run to see if they could do better than Tennessee’s run last night. And then Michigan State went on an 11-0 run to extend the lead back to 15 points and never looked back. And the Big 10 champion will now wait to find out if they will play Duke or Virginia Tech.

Meanwhile, #1 seed North Carolina is down 10 points with just 7 minutes to play. Could we see our first top seed go down? Auburn has looked great all night

Is it fate – coincidence – madness. Last night, the Big 10 co-champion Purdue got out to a quick lead against one of the top SEC teams in Tennessee at halftime 40-28.

So, after one half of play, the other Big 10 co-champion Michigan State got out to a quick lead against one of the top SEC teams in LSU. After 20 minutes of play, the Spartans have a 40-28 lead.

If that game ends up anywhere close to the second half of Thursday’s game, we are all in for a treat.

Meanwhile, the track meet between North Carolina and Auburn is moving fast – with the Tar Heels hanging onto a 2 point lead.

So, I guess I need to tell more people about my plans.  As much as the Lunatic would love to only watch and rant about basketball, there are just other things going on in life.  In this case, he had to travel for work.  I was in Charlotte for meetings, knowing full-well that unless I get lucky that my meetings ended early and maybe I could catch an earlier flight on stand-by.  But it was not meant to be – when the Sweet 16 games started, I was in the Charlotte airport.

But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t going to cheer on my Boilers.  As is my superstition this year, I changed at the airport into my Purdue sweatshirt over my Purdue T-shirt.  I sat down at the gate for the flight and turned on March Madness On-line.  And my wonderful wife Elizabeth taped the game for me – so I knew I could watch the rest when I got home.  And I was quietly very happy (it would be a little weird to start screaming at my phone in the airport) as I watched the Boilers build up an 11 point lead late in the first half as it became time to board.   As I was getting on the plane, I couldn’t get the video app to work any more, but thanks to ESPN, I knew before the plane took off that Purdue had a 40-28 lead at the half.

So, I texted my wife that I was leaving but might not text her when I land in Richmond – since I didn’t want to get any alerts about the game.  I would watch the second half on tape.  And as I turned off my phone, the flight attendant said, we only have 5 empty seats so we have a very full flight.  And I couldn’t believe my luck as I was sitting next to one of those empty seats.  It was such a nice flight being comfortable in my window seat happily thinking that my Boilers were winning.

Then, a relatively poor choice on my part.  I had such a hard time getting anything to work on my phone other than text messages once I got on the plane, I figured that when we landed – I can quickly turn my phone on, text Elizabeth that we landed, and then simply turn the phone back off – none of the apps were working on the plane anyways.  So, I turned on the phone, pushed the button to write a text message, and then my phone started going crazy.

I had multiple texts from my friend (and old roommate from my days at Purdue), Dave Zimmerman.  I try to ignore the texts coming up at the top of my phone as I quickly text my wife that I am home.   As much as I tried not to read what was flashing at the top, I can’t miss the next one – “Ugh…12….”

I had no clue what 12 meant – but Ugh didn’t sound good.  And of course, as I try to turn off my phone before I get any more information, the March Madness app wakes up and all I see is “CLOSE GAME Tennesseee”  So, here I am – driving down I-64 towards downtown thinking “I must be crazy – I might be coming home to watch potentially the worst half of basketball that I ever watched.   Can I really be going home to watch the 12 point lead disappear.  Then, I see the traffic sign – “CRASH, I-95 NORTH TWO RIGHT LANES BLOCKED”  Seriously, can this be getting any worse – I can’t possibly sit in traffic for a long time thinking about if they lost.  As I get to the I-95 interchange, I made a desparate decision – I was going to go south and go away from my house to catch the Downtown Expressway.  The decision was good – traffic was just sitting (at 10:15 pm at night) on the Northbound lanes.  I think to myself – I am going to have faith – they are going to win.

I talk a little bit to my wife while we fast forward through the first half and then start to watch – and sure enough Purdue after growing the lead to 18 points was watching Tennessee chip away at it.  My wife intelligently goes to bed as I nervously watch the lead continue to shrink.  And sure enough Tennessee takes the lead.  But Purdue’s Ryan Cline hit three-pointer after three-pointer to keep tying the game.  With 10 seconds left Tennessee’s Grant WIlliams grabs an offensive rebound and makes a huge dunk to give the Volunteers a 2 point lead.

Purdue’s Carsen Edwards drove down the court, and got his shot blocked out of bounds with 2.7 seconds.  And then somehow, Purdue in-bounded the ball into Edwards in the corner – who is fouled as he shoots a last second three-pointer.  Three free throws for an 85% FT shooter to win the game.  And sure enough, the Purdue star missed the first FT.  But fortunately, Edwards stayed calm and made both the next 2 free throws to send the game in overtime.

At the start of the overtime, as one of Purdue’s good FT shooters missed another FT, I finally figured out what 12 was – it was the number of free throws that the Boilers missed (and I think the number continued).  But Tennessee wasn’t much better from the line (which was surprising from two teams who were shooting so well from the field), and Purdue had a big tip-in by Nojel Eastern, some big free throws from Grady Eifert and a nice layup from Edwards built the lead to 5 points.  Then, Matt Haarms had a great dunk to give the Boilers a 7 point lead with just 1 1/2 minutes left.  And then the missed FTs from Purdue – and more missed FTs from Tennessee – just enough to keep the lead safe but make fans crazy nervous that they were not wrapping up the game.

And the Boilers survived – we are playing again on Saturday after upsetting #2 Tennessee.  They played a great game against a great team – and most importantly, they survived and advanced.  I should probably check to see what the other texts were from Dave – although I will wait until the morning to answer….. It is after midnight (actually it is 12:42 am).  SO EXCITED!!!!   Totally not even thinking about the fact that both my Elite 8 teams in the West region lost so my bracket is probably going down.  I simply do not care!!!!!!   BOILER UP!!!!!!!!!!!!

So very excited! BOILER UP!!!!

I found myself picking the exact same teams as I did before – my Elite 8 teams are still alive – why would I think differently. And then I thought to myself – what is the point of doing a second chance pick if you choose the exact same way as last time.

So, I decided to go with what I want to see instead of what I think will happen. I love the Big 10 – and obviously I love Purdue. How fantastic would it be if Michigan State, Michigan and Purdue all made the Final 4 and only UNC made it from the ACC. Oh wait – I live in Virginia in the middle of ACC country. No one around me wants that.

But I do – I will have Michigan State beating Michigan for a 4th time, and then have Purdue upsetting North Carolina to make the Final 4. Then Carsen Edwards has a monster game to lead the Boilermakers over the Spartans to win the National Championship!!!

Don’t get me wrong – I like most of the teams left – how can I not root for the local Virginia schools. My father-in-law went to UNC and did his post-doc at Duke, so how can I not root for the Tar Heels and Blue Devils. But at the end of the day, it is still ok for a crazed lunatic to dream! Go Big 10!!!! BOILER UP!!!!!

Ten reasons to do the Stomp the Lunatic Second Chance Pool

• You no longer have a Final Four team left in your real bracket after what you thought was an awesome upset picks of top mid-majors of Buffalo, Wofford, Belmont and Murray State did not product this year’s Loyola-Chicago like you hoped.
• You want another chance to say that you had a perfect bracket after your billion dollar picks were ruined when Minnesota upset Louisville in the first game of the tournament.
• You are so excited that Games of Thrones is about to start that you want to pick the schools with mascots that would be closest to best in battles that end in total carnage.
• Your children somehow are crushing you in the pool by picking all favorites (or maybe picking where their grandparents went to school like my daughter does).
• Your favorite team has been eliminated from the tournament so now you can pick teams intelligently to show off how much you know about basketball, and you know you will be able to easily beat the Lunatic since his school, Purdue, is still alive in the tournament.
• You have always wanted to pick an all-ACC Final 4 and Duke, Florida State, Virginia and UNC is probably the closest you will ever get to doing this and having a realistic chance at it happening.
• With all the top teams remaining in the tournament, you can comfortably pick upsets and not feel like you are picking something that will happen only if all the stars align.
• Flipping a coin could actually create a feasible and interesting bracket and so you would like to really try your luck.
• It is another – and more importantly, last chance in 2019 to STOMP THE LUNATIC!
• It’s absolutely FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s right – your entry fee already covers your Second Chance Pool entry – and so there is absolutely no good reason not to do the Second Chance Pool.   Just go to the login page and once on your main page, click the Enter Bracket button under Second Chance Entry.

You even have all Wednesday and Thursday afternoon to do them, since the games don’t start until 7:10 pm EST. Good luck to all of you!!!!!

– The Crazed Lunatic

I kept avoiding this topic – but after a new story coming out, I have to rant.

It makes me sad about what is said on the court of play.  Coaches and players alike – but it is the coaches who have been spotlighted.  And rightfully so – they should be the ones who are showing a bit of decorum.  And instead are acting like schoolyard bullies.

First, there was the story about Michigan State and Tom Izzo during a timeout got so angry at Aaron Henry, that he started berating him on the court and had to be restrained by coaches and players multiple times from continuing to get in the player’s face.  Afterwards, he showed no remorse.  Here were his quotes from the press conference (sourced from ESPN)

What’s wrong with challenging a kid that makes some mistakes?  Aaron Henry — trust me — did some things that you can’t do as a starter on a top-5 team at the end of your freshman year. They were effort-related.  I did get after him. He did respond. He did make a couple of big buckets. He did make some big free throws but that’s not good enough. It’s one-and-done time. The ‘my-bads’ are out the window.”

Then, when continued to be asked about it, he said, “I get a kick out of you guys get[ing] after somebody because you’re trying to hold them accountable.  I don’t know what kind of business you’re in, but I tell you what, if I was a head of a newspaper, and you didn’t do your job, you’d be held accountable. That’s the way it is.”

So, lets put a couple things straight for Coach Izzo.  First of all, as the NCAA constantly reminds us, these are student-athletes.  You are not running a business (or otherwise, your employees are not being paid – well, at least as far as we know).  I totally understand getting upset in the heat of the moment.  I totally understand wanting to make sure that they learn from their mistakes.  But are you seriously trying to tell me the only way that you can do it is to lay your hand on him, start wagging your finger in his face, lunge at him multiple times all while verbally abusing him with words that I could not put on this blog.  You are being paid an amazing amount of money to coach a game – and you can’t figure out a better way to get your point across than that.

But lets get to his point to the press.  Because here is where he is wrong as well.  If he worked as the head of a newspaper or any other industry, and in order to hold his employee accountable for a mistake, he verbally assaulted and phyiscally threatened that employee until others came and separated them, he would likely not be the head of that newspaper or company for much longer.  He definitely would be spending a lot of time with HR as they hold him accountable.

To add to Coach Izzo, in the next game against Minnesota, as they were up 20 points, you heard the announcer say, Coach Izzo never stops no matter what the score – you can hear him yelling at the official about a missed call in a game his team is winning by 20 points.  And right after that, when his team turned the ball over, you could see him turn around in anger and slam both of his fists into the scorer’s table.  IN A GAME HIS TEAM IS WINNING BY 20 POINTS!   But this is acceptable, because he is such a good coach………

That type of reaction is simply not acceptable in any part of our society – so why is it acceptable of a head coach who is supposed to be a role model for these students.  I hear reactions from former players saying that people are growing too soft – a coach is  no longer allowed to yell at their players.  And anyone who has coached, including myself, (whether professional or youth sports) has probably had a moment (or several) where they have yelled at a player or a ref to get their attention because they were angry or upset at something (although admittedly, while yelling is not great, there is a difference between yelling about a bad play or call and being so upset that people have to restrain you from physically attacking someone).  Regardless, competition does not always bring out the best in us.  So, I was considering giving Coach Izzo a pass in my ranting of the blog.

But then I read this article about the UC-Irvine coach Russell Turner.  The questions started when the press noticed him get confronted by Oregon’s player Louis King in the handshake line, and them linger in conversation.

He admitted at this point that he tried to rattle the Oregon player by calling him “Queen” and he had encouraged all his players to call him Queen on the court.  “Double team Queen”.  We were calling him that because we knew it would irritate him and maybe throw him off his game.  Turner claimed that it was a sign of respect – that he was likening King’s importance to the importance of a queen in chess.

But lets be honest, none of us are going to get rattled because we were called the name of a chess piece.  He knew that they were saying an insult that was questioning his masculinity or sexuality – either way, something totally unacceptable.  How is that in any sense of the imagination acceptable coaching – to be telling your players to verbally say things that unacceptable to irritate the opposing team.  This coach literally told his players to display horrible sportsmanship in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage – he should be suspended for those actions.  At a minimum, the referees should have given him a technical foul for his words.  Coaches can not taunt opposing players – and it is mind-blowing that this coach thought it was acceptable to tell his players to also taunt that opposing player.

Whatever happened to sportsmanship.  Whatever happened to referees calling technical fouls for sportsmanship.  And then that leads me to be sad to think what is being said on the court – since if that type of trash talk was coming from both players and coaches towards a player, and it didn’t draw the referee’s attention to call a technical foul, how bad does the trash talking really get (and sadly the answer is much worse than what I have mentioned in this blog post).

It becomes acceptable because it is simply part of the game.  Well, I needed to go on this rant because as Coach Izzo said – we need to hold people accountable.  There is no place in the game for this – and coaches everywhere at every level need to be helping us enforce this.   At a minimum, they definitely can not be the ones encouraging this horrible behavior.  But until coaches like Izzo and Turner realize that their actions promote this lack of sportsmanship, the game will still be full of these bad stories.

The Round of 32 had a Vegas record happen.  For the first time in history, all 16 of the Vegas favorites won their game and advanced to the Sweet 16.

Normally, there is at least one upset somewhere.  Some Cinderella team like Loyola Chicago comes out and surprises a team.  Or you have a 4 vs 5 game that has a 2-3 point line that the underdog comes out on top.  Somewhere the upset happens.

But not this year.  Even in the game that #5 Auburn beat #4 Kansas, the Vegas line favored Auburn by 2 points.  So, this year, all 4 of the top 3 seeds in each region made it to the Sweet 16.  Let that sink in.  No 7 or 10 seed upsetting a 2 seed.  No 6 or 11 seed upsetting a 3 seed.  No 8 or 9 seed upsetting a 1 seed.  All 12 of the top seeded teams advanced.

The only teams that were not in the Selection Committee’s Top 16 were #5 Auburn and #12 Oregon.  And lets face it, you can’t call the SEC Conference Tournament Champion or the Pac 12 Conference Tournament Champion Cinderella.  It just doesn’t work that way.

But before you get sad that there is no Cinderella – think about the greatness of this Sweet 16.  Lets put in perspective who we have left.

• Both ACC regular season co-champions (VIrginia and UNC)
• The ACC conference tournament champion (Duke)
• The WCC conference regular season champion who is the only team to have beaten Duke while healthy and was #1 going into Champ Week (Gonzaga)
• The Big Ten conference tournament champion and regular season co-champion (Michigan State)
• The Big Ten regular-season co-champion (Purdue)
• The 3rd place team in the Big Ten that was 28-3 this season if you take away the games against Michigan State and ranked #2 in the country for 4 weeks (Michigan)
• The SEC regular season champion (LSU)
• The SEC conference tournament champion (Oregon)
• The two SEC teams that tied for 2nd in the regular season – one who was the #1 team in the country for 4 weeks (Tennessee) and the other who spent 5 weeks ranked in the top 5 (Kentucky)
• The Big 12 regular season co-champion (Texas Tech)
• The American regular season champion who went 31-3 (Houston)
• The Pac 12 Conference tournament champion (Oregon)
• The 4th and 5th Place teams from the ACC that beat either Virginia in the Conference Tournament (Florida State) or beat Duke during the regular season – admittedly without Zion Williamson, but they were missing their star guard Justin Robinson (Virginia Tech)

 

So, in summary, we basically have 11 teams that won either their regular season or conference tournament championship, 3 teams that missed their regular season championship by one game but were ranked in the top 5 of the country for multiple weeks of the season, and 2 ACC teams that went 22-3 (VT) and 24-3 (FSU) against teams who are not amongst the 14 teams left in the tournament (and also of course, have victories against teams in the remaining 14).

It is hard to argue that these are not the 16 best teams in college basketball.  And isn’t that what we should want to see – the best 16 teams playing each other for the National Championship.  We have an incredible two weeks of college basketball remaining – we couldn’t have asked for anything better.

Entering the Sweet 16, there are a lot of top teams still left in the tournament – which should mean there are lots of different opportunities for movement in the Lunatic standings next week.  But lets congratulate the people who made the best picks in the first weekend of the tournament.

We have co-leaders at this point in the tournament – Brody Atkinson and Jocelyn Knox have a 20 point lead in the Standard Pool with 570 points.  In a tie for third place at 550 points are John Woodburn, Ethan Busby, Ian Berglund, Sam Brunner, and Brad Harding.  And in a tie for 8th at 540 points are Earl McKnight, Matt Richter, Kyle Kelly, Rob Nesbitt, and Lehua Martin.  And we have 13 more players within 40 points (or one Sweet 16 winner) of the lead.

In the Upset Pool, Jocelyn Knox is in the lead alone at 232 points.  Dave Evans is in second at 223 points.  There is a tie for 3rd at 221 points between Sam Brunner and Michael Cheung.  And John Woodburn and Tanmay Gautam round out the standings tied for 5th at 217 points.

Did you pick too many upsets (like the Lunatic did)?  Don’t despair.  Because there is always the Second Chance Pool!!!!!  The second chance brackets are up on the site – all you need to do is login to your account and click on the Second Chance Bracket link.  And it is completely free – there is no reason not to do the Second Chance Pool – it is complimentary as part of the Lunatic pool, because everyone deserves a second chance.

Good luck to everyone in Stomping the Lunatic!!!!!!