What a finish. Drake up 4 with time running down steals the ball, just to lose it again as they try to fast break down the court. And the Wichita State player who came down with the ball drills a three-pointer to set up the finish with 8 seconds.

Wichita State fouls with 5.3 seconds left, Drake’s guard misses the FT, and Wichita State charges down the field, puts up a three pointer, and watches it fall short off the front of the rim.

Wichita State was up double digits midway through the second-half. But Drake went on a run just in time to take the game.

I LOVE MARCH!!!!!!

I went down for a second to get some Diet Coke and saw Elizabeth and Katie sitting on the couch. So I said, “I am going to be nice to you tonight – since the games are starting.”

And before I could finish, Katie said, “Oh no! We are going to have to watch football!”

I am truly heartbroken at this failure. Of course, then I convinced Katie to come upstairs with me to fill out her bracket – so I will keep hope that I can fix this failure.

Editor’s note: Katie wanted me to mention that she was doing better – because we had multiple conversations this week about sports. She was very sweet that she intentionally asked me questions about sports since I was watching a game.

Also, Charlie was then picking on Katie for making the blog, and so I reminded him that he will likely make the blog when Katie’s picks that she did quickly and probably doesn’t even remember will do better than the ones he agonized about.

Multiple failures I guess for myself – but I can always feel success that I have a wonderful wife and two great kids.

Texas Southern and Mt. St. Mary’s have begun!!!! The Madness is HERE!!!!! Can’t believe how excited that I am about a game between Texas Southern and Mt. St. Mary’s!!!!

You still have about 18-19 hours to make your picks!!!!! Don’t miss your chance to Stomp the Lunatic!!!! Watch the first four games tonight – make your picks – and get ready for tomorrow as the excitement ramps up to the Round of 64!!!!

I should be concentrating on coming up with a bracket. And despite knowing who I would like to predict as the overall winner, I am not as comfortable about the rest of the games.

So, why not lose time by predicting the actual games against the spreads.

That’s right – the Lunatic has begun his handicapping page. The link to my current Thursday’s picks are available under 2021 Handicapping. If I magically in the next 19 hours come up with a better way to evaluate the games, I might change my handicapping. But have to make sure that I have at least something before the games.

Enjoy the horrible handicapping and ramblings of a Lunatic.

Apparently, trying to seed over half the field between 4pm EST and 5 pm EST was not the most effective way to do bracketology.

I got 66 of 68 teams – missing on UCLA and Drake. And all the media bracketologist – and the majority of those posting brackets on the Bracket Matrix did a better job of seeding teams than I did.

I was all prepared to write a long rant about how I don’t understand how the ACC was seeded. For example, lets take a look at Virginia Tech and Clemson.

If you look at the AP Poll going into Champ Week, Virginia Tech was ranked 22nd in the AP Poll and 21st in the Coaches Poll. Meanwhile Clemson was 29th in the AP rankings and 30th in the Coaches. So, while the polls are certainly not the Selection Committee, most of them AP writers and Coaches who rank the teams thought Virginia Tech was the better team last week. In the ACC tournament, VT was the 3 seed and lost to 6 seed North Carolina by 8. Meanwhile, Clemson lost the day before by 3 to 13 seed Miami FL. So if many felt VT was better than Clemson, and while both lost in the tournament, Clemson’s loss was clearly worse. So, how did Clemson end up a 7 seed and Virginia Tech end up a 10 seed. For that matter, how did the Selection Committee find 18 teams to push over the Hokies.

I was then going to go into ranting about Louisville being in over Syracuse.

So, I thought that I could use my Bradley-Terry model to prove my point. Apparently, that was a mistake. But it means I have to give the NCAA Selection Committee so much more credit. Because the ACC makes no absolutely sense. I am going to provide you the top 8 teams, and lets look at the following: the conference standings, the conf tournament, the seeds from the Selection Committee (the only ranking that matters), my bracketology seed, and a rank ordering of the teams based on my Bradley-Terry model predictions.

TEAM	STANDINGS	TOURNEY	NCAA	LUNATIC	MODEL
Florida St	2 (11-4) #15	Lost Champ	4	4	3
Virginia	1 (13-4) #16	Forfeit Semis	4	4	1
Clemson	5 (10-6) #29	Lost 2nd Rd	7	9	2
North Carolina	6 (10-6) NR	Lost Semis	8	9	5
Georgia Tech	4 (11-6) NR	WON	9	7	4
Virginia Tech	3 (9-4) #22	Lost Quarters	10	6	6
Syracuse	8 (9-7) NR	Lost Quarters	11	11	8
Louisville	7 (8-5) NR	Lost 2nd Rd	OUT	10	7

I figured that for the most part the conference standings would stand. Most of the conference tournament didn’t give me any reason to not keep those rankings. Georgia Tech won the tournament, but was unranked. UNC and Clemson had the same conference record, and UNC made it to the semis. Couldn’t move Syracuse over Louisville because the Orange beat NC State and the Cardinals lost to Duke.

The committee saw much differently. I focused on Clemson’s losses instead of their impressive early victories against Alabama, Purdue, and Florida State. I focused on Virginia Tech’s record and AP ranking, but they don’t have quite the victories that Clemson has (though Virginia, Villanova and Clemson isn’t bad).

The Bradley-Terry model pushed Clemson over Florida State and Virginia Tech fell behind both Georgia Tech and UNC. Its clearly a mess. Games getting cancelled made it hard to compare a 9-4 team to a 10-6 team. Conference schedules aren’t balanced to begin with – but add into games getting cancelled including ACC tournament games, and it gets crazy complicated.

Guess this was my rant saying that I think my logic for my rankings made sense, but the analytics that favor pushing Virginia Tech all the way down to below UNC and GT also suggested Louisville was better than Syracuse. But if you look at those two teams closer, it is still hard to distinguish – especially since both the games between Louisville and Syracuse got cancelled due to Covid.

At the end, I have to give the credit to the Selection Committee, because there are so many ways to compare these teams, and many of them lead to different rankings. You have to give them a lot of respect for ranking a season that had so many cancellations, so few non-conference games, and many teams with only 1 or 2 top wins that still have the better records and deserve to be in the tournament.

It is four hours past the deadline for the NCAA to use one of the replacement teams, and ESPN and CBS have nothing on their site saying that someone would be unable to play.

According to CBS Sports, “the NCAA announced Tuesday that five positive COVID-19 cases have been identified out of 2,300 tests conducted so far this week ahead of the NCAA Tournament. Those tested so far include members of team’s traveling parties — not just players and coaches — as well as officials from the NCAA. The positive case count of five is up from zero positives that had been identified as of Monday.”

So, looks like you can safely pick your brackets – will let you know if I read anything different – but really would have expected the news would have happened by now.

Well, I am still relatively new to modeling on Python – but I figure why not practice. I have all this great basketball data.

I remember from past tournaments that Bill Kahn would tell me about the Bradley-Terry models that he created. And he always did very well in the pool. So, I definitely don’t have the experience that Bill has with building these models, it was at least an opportunity to learn a little about Python.

So, I figure I have an extra day thanks to the unusual this schedule – lets see what I get. And it is really possible that I made some mistakes. But I also don’t think I can use the model. First of all, it predicted Winthrop would beat both Villanova and Purdue. I can live with the first upset but I can’t pick the second one against my Boilers. Second, it created a prediction that I suspect won’t happen.

That is because its prediction for the Final 4 are all 4 of the #1 seeds. March Madness is anything but predictable – so while I have no doubt that Gonzaga, Baylor, Illinois and Michigan are the top 4 teams in the country based on the regular season, I don’t think all 4 of them will survive the regionals. One of the top seeds always goes down. It is inevitable.

If you are wondering, it finishes with Gonzaga having a 65.7% chance of beating Baylor.

I doubt that there will be a replacement team that makes it into the tournament. It looks like Virginia will go to the final possible moment to make a decision and Kansas will be able travel without three players. I was going to even to write about why I chose Louisville over Syracuse – although in researching that, I am starting to understand the logic of the Selection Committee – it was not an easy decision.

So, it is probably a mute issue. But today, Louisville rejected the #1 seed into the NIT.

The replacement team order was Louisville, Colorado State, St. Louis, and Ole Miss.

Coach Mack said it nicely – his quote when asked was “(The NIT is) a great tournament. It’s a class tournament. Maybe we would have felt a little differently had we been able to play in front of our fans and play in the Yum. But to go to Dallas, sit in hotel rooms spaced apart with seven or eight healthy players – it just wasn’t for this group,” Mack said.

Louisville went through two different Covid pauses – so I suspect that there is some honesty in this statement. But lets face it, part of it is that they don’t care about the NIT.

The NCAA should have come back and said the following: We respect Louisville’s decision to end their season to protect the health of their players. So now the 1st replacement team is Colorado State, and as the 4th top seed in the NIT, Memphis, is now the final replacement team.

It is likely not going to matter – but if you are not willing to play in the NIT, you should not be allowed to play in the NCAA as a replacement team. It is not acceptable to me that the health is the reason not to play in the NIT, but if the NCAA calls, health is no longer important – we will be there. It is that simple – if you are going to play in the postseason, you play where the NCAA asks you to play.

I am not sure that I am going to go into a detailed rambling on the Selection Committee – that might have to come another day. But all in all, I am pretty happy.

And part of that is because of the teams that I missed on. As I picked my bracket this afternoon, and nervously started realizing that I was running out of time because I couldn’t choose between the final teams, one of the decisions I agonized on was between UCLA and Mississippi. I actually at first had UCLA in the field. And then I thought to myself – that isn’t what the collection committee does. They normally like teams that have beaten more top 50-60 teams. So, at the last minute, I changed my answer to Mississippi and moved on to seeding the rest of the field. At some point, I might have to break down those profiles, but not this second.

The other team I missed on was Drake. Drake is the classic team that goes 24-4 in a mid-major conference, loses in their conference final to an equally talented team (in this case, #8 seed Loyola-Chicago), and then gets excluded from the tournament because they don’t have enough wins against tournament level teams. Drake went 1-2 against Loyola-Chicago. And then played no other teams in the at-large / bubble consideration. They did go 5-0 against Indiana State and Missouri State – which happened to be Tier 2 wins. They also had 2 losses against tier 3 teams (on the road at Valparaiso and Bradley).

Lets face it, history says that team doesn’t make it. Instead of the 24-4 team that won against almost everyone they faced, the 15-11 team from Big 10 or ACC gets in instead.

To be honest, I was worried about Wichita State and Utah State as well – I could have seen all those spots going to middle of the road teams from the top 6 conferences.

I will happily be wrong on my bracketology when an incredibly good mid-major team gets invited instead of the major conference team I picked. It might have made me wrong, but I do think that it is better for college basketball.

The 5 championship games that were played today have been updated to the 2021 Schedule file for the statistician / data scientists / analysts out there who want the complete data to do their analysis on.

But lets face it – many of us are going to go to the major media sites like ESPN or CBS Sports, read all the information the pundits have to say about the games, and then pick emotionally based on our favorite teams.

It is totally OK if you don’t have countless hours to look over box score after box score, or don’t have cool programs set up to build models to predict the games, the Lunatic still has your back.

The 2021 Cheat Sheet is available – it takes the teams side by side and summarizes records, NET and RPI rankings, scoring statistics, and looks at each team’s schedule. So, you don’t have to build a model – you basically have a one page per game overview to help you make a decision.

Just realize that on some of the statistics (such as Offense Rating or Adj Scoring Margin), that my code calculates that from the data I have collected. Those statistics are not official NCAA statistics – they are my calculation of the metric.

Enjoy the cheat sheet!