SE Missouri State looked like they were on their way to the NCAA Tournament. They led most of the game, and extended their lead to 7 points with just 1:12 left to play. Then came chaos.

Tennessee Tech’s Jayvis Harvey starts chipping away at the lead. First a 3 pointer cuts the lead to 4. Then, a layup to cut the lead to 2. After a turnover by SE Missouri St, Harvey dribbles towards the FT line and finds Brett Thompson wide open for a three pointer to give Tennessee Tech the lead with 15 seconds.

Chris Harris tries to hit a game winning 3 pointer with 3 seconds – and gets fouled by Jaylen Sebree. Harris calmly hits all 3 free throws and the Redhawks are up by two points. But it looked like Sebree would redeem himself. With no timeouts left, Sebree takes the ball out, and launches a baseball pass to the other side of the court. Tech’s Diante Wood would rise above multiple players, turn towards the basket and launch a three pointer as time is slipping away. As the clock strikes 0, Wood’s shot goes in and the Tennessee Tech’s bench runs onto the field in celebration.

Only one problem – the official review shows that Wood’s right foot is on the line. The game winner was only a game tying shot. We are going to overtime!

Tennessee Tech continues off their momentum to take a 4 point lead. But this time, SE Missouri St leads the comeback. Phillip Russell would make a nice move to the basket and lay the ball in to give SE Missouri St the lead. And then he would hit his final 5 free throws to send SE Missouri State to the NCAA Tournament!!!!

The Cyclones were flying high. On February 4th, they upset Kansas 68-53 and moved up to 11th in the polls. And then they went into a free fall.

Iowa State went on to lose 6 of their next 7 games – now I understand the Big 12 is a brutal conference, but this streak included a loss to 7th place Oklahoma State, two losses to 8th place West Virginia, and a loss to last place Oklahoma.

Then, they announce that 3rd leading scorer senior guard Caleb Grill, due to a “failure to meet the program’s expectations.”. Grill then took responsibility for it and that he said something he regrets and is dealing with mental health issues.

So, of course, when everything is falling apart, what do you expect on your schedule to finish the season. That’s right – a road trip to 7th ranked Baylor. You have to figure this is going to be a train wreck – right.

A train wreck for Baylor. Because the Cyclones traveled to Waco and beat the Baylor Bears 73-58. Not sure how anything that has happened to Iowa State after winning against Kansas makes sense – but sometimes reality doesn’t make sense. Part of the beauty of college basketball.

Well – game 1 of rugby didn’t go well but the kids played hard and that is all you can ask. Annoyed at the parents from the other team that decided since we gave a couple extra feet between the sideline and our chairs that this meant it was OK for them to stand in front of us and block our view the whole game. At one point, one of the parents who was wearing a cape actually turned to head back to her kids sitting elsewhere and hit Elizabeth in the face with her cape. When someone told her what she did, she snidely said sorry – almost more like “I guess it was my fault but how dare you be sitting there”. Between the game being a blowout and the parents being jerks, was not a good start to the rugby tournament. Still super proud of Katie (a 7th grader), taking the ball and charging into freshmen HS boys and slightly moving the pile before getting tackled.

As for basketball, the best noon game might be Texas A&M vs Alabama – where the Aggies have jumped out to a 26-13 lead on the 2nd ranked team in the country. There are also some bubble teams fighting. The more interesting one is Iowa State playing 7th ranked Baylor on the road (and currently up 22-14). Then, in the Big 10, Michigan State is up 30-23 in a trap game against Ohio State. The Buckeyes are certainly good enough to pull the upset, but Michigan State probably won’t get a lot of credit for winning. But it certainly could hurt their resume if they lose.

At 2 pm, the SEC is the conference to watch – as 12th ranked Tennessee goes on the road to Auburn, who really could use a win. Then, 23rd ranked Kentucky goes on the road to Arkansas – who also could use a win. Not saying that the ranked teams don’t need more wins, but the difference is between seeding vs. dancing. Pressure is always on the team trying to show they deserve an invite.

The Big 12 has an interesting game as well where West Virginia hosts 11th ranked Kansas State. The Mountaineers are a fascinating bubble case. Their NET ranking of 24th suggests that they are a lock to be in the tournament. But being 6-11 and in 8th place of the 10 team Big 12 suggests they might not make it if they lose again (since that number of losses along with a loss in the conference tournament would tie the most number of losses by an at-large team).

Hopefully, the afternoon rugby game will go better for Katie’s team. For everyone else, enjoy the basketball games!!!

The Lunatic will be blogging from Katie’s rugby tournament. Lots of waiting and watching other games while we wait for Katie to play.

But idle time means blogging time. And to start with, we already have our first casualty of March. That is because Morehead State went 14-4 in the Ohio Valley Conference to win the regular season championship.

Then, last night, they were upset in the OVC semifinals by SE Missouri State. So now, the 5th seeded Redhawks (18-16) will play 2nd seeded Tennessee Tech (16-16) for the Ohio Valley championship and the first automatic bid for the NCAA Tournament.

There might be bigger games today. At 4pm, #3 Kansas plays #9 Texas. At 6 pm, #16 Miami plays #25 Pitt with the winner earning at least a share of the ACC championship. They will know by tipoff if #13 Virginia won their share by taking their game at 2 pm at home against Louisville. And if you are willing to stay up late, you can’t miss #4 UCLA try to make their case for a #1 seed when they host #8 Arizona at 10 pm. Most of the time, the East Coast misses some of the great basketball that is played out West – but this should be a game worth staying up late for.

And of course you can’t forget the huge bubble games and rivalry games – 6:30 pm will see North Carolina try to save their season as they host Duke in what is possibly the greatest rivalry in the sport. I am sure I could find more great games today, but Katie’s game is about to start!

So much good basketball today! Hopefully, I will also enjoy 2 games of rugby by the Richmond Strikers! It must be March!

For those who have not been following, while there are major games going on – including UCLA vs. Arizona State right now, the college basketball world almost saw history made in Youngstown, Ohio as Detroit Mercy was playing top seed Youngstown State in the quarterfinals of the Horizon conference tournament.

That is because Detroit Mercy’s Antoine Davis needed 25 points to tie “Pistol” Pete Mavarich’s career scoring record of 3,667 points.  While Mavarich did his amazing feat in only 3 seasons at LSU, by averaging 44.2 points per game without a 3 point line, he has set the NCAA standard for multiple generations of players.

Unfortunately for Davis, his bid for history fell just short.  With Detroit Mercy behind 5 points with 10 seconds left, Antoine hit two free throws to get to 22 points for the game and cut the lead to 3.  After fouling, Youngstown State hit two free throws to bring the lead back to 5 and setting the stage for potential history.

Everyone knew the ball would be in Davis’ hands, and he got a three pointer off with 4 seconds left.  But this history buzzer beater did not go in, and Davis fell 3 points short of tying the long-time record.

Still, you have to tip you hat to Antoine Davis for coming so close to the record.  Unfortunately, with Detroit Mercy at 14-19, it is likely that this game ended Davis’ NCAA career.  But any time that a player can bring such attention to a Horizon conference quarter-final, it is good for the game of college basketball.

Congratulations to Antoine Davis on an amazing NCAA career!

So happy that the Boilers have won the regular season Big 10 title outright!!!!   Maybe now that pressure is off, they can go back to winning games, since it has been a rough stumble to the finish.

Of course, you never know what is going to happen in the Big 10.  The Boilers on Saturday night found their lead down to 1 game over Northwestern.  By Sunday, Northwestern lost to Maryland to lock a share of the title for Purdue but put them 2 games ahead of 4 teams.  And by midway through the first half, Michigan lost in double overtime to Illinois to join Northwestern, Indiana and Maryland in losing their games this week to give the title to Purdue (and create a 7 way tie for 2nd place).

And it would have been an 8 way tie if Rutgers didn’t blow a 10 point lead with 1 minute left to 8-20 Minnesota on a buzzer beating 3 pointer (that then took 10 minutes for the refs to look at replay after replay to finally verify that the Gophers had pulled the upset).

That is why I love college basketball so much – you just can’t make this stuff up.   Going into the final weekend with one game left and 7 teams are tied for 2nd place in the Big 10.  Awesome!

The last few days have had tons of excitement. Teams clearly on the bubble winning on last minute shots (like Vanderbilt on the road at Kentucky and Penn State on the road at Northwestern).

And we have had some shocking results as well as struggling Notre Dame sent off long time coach Mike Brey with an upset victory in his last home game against then conference leading Pitt.

And we had Alabama clinch the regular season SEC championship with an exciting overtime win over Auburn.

Lots of great basketball leading into the last games of the regular season and the first conference tournament championships this weekend!

For those of you who like me love their data almost as much as college basketball, you have probably noticed the 2023 Schedule link is already available on the site.   This is our traditional Excel spreadsheet with the standings and rankings in one worksheet and the full NCAA schedule with scores in another worksheet. I have continued with the approach that conference tournament game are counted as conference games instead of post-season games.  As we did last year, I have merged the NET rankings from the NCAA website to have the updated rankings on the spreadsheet, along with listing of records for the 4 quads. I then have used that information to validate that my records are correct. It is a relatively simple check to match the records, home records, away records and neutral court records between what the schedule data says and what was in the NET rankings, so take the data for what it is…….

The NCAA Archive site used to have this great document called Team Pages – it had a page for each team with their computer rankings (including NET, KenPom and Sagarin scores) and then all their schedule listed by quad. But unfortunately, I have not found anything that is like that, so I am going to let you simply use the Excel document that I have created if you want something similar to the team pages from before.

I will also give you a link to the NCAA Statistics site – this is where I pull all my data from, and it has some nicer views if you want to simply look at the data in a web browser instead of Excel.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t give you the details of things like the KenPom, Sagarin, and BPI scores that provide other statistical analytical rankings.  But as I have mentioned, things are a little crazy for the Lunatic, and so we will likely stick with this.  If I come up with a better option, I will provide it, but most likely, what you see right now, is what you will get.

But that does have the benefit that there is now only one file to update. No promises that I will update the Schedule Excel file every day, but wanted it to be available to everyone as early as possible. I will update as I have time throughout the week – the spreadsheet has a page that says when it is last updated.

Obviously, remember the traditional Lunatic disclaimers.  I have done some basic cleaning and quality checks that the records from the schedule I have match the official NCAA site – but there are thousands of games, and so I will not make the claim that I have checked every piece of the dataset.  To be honest, I simply check to make sure the records match – I figure if I can get lucky enough that all 363 teams have the correct records, the rest of the data is probably right.

That being said, one really interesting thing that this file does create is a side-by-side comparison of the old RPI calculation (which my tool still calculates – as does some other webpages) vs. the new NET model that the Selection Committee is using to rank games into the quadrants.  I do think that the NET score is giving the Selection Committee a better ranking, even if I still don’t understand it.  I will probably blog about some of these differences later in the week.

For those of you who are not familiar with this tradition of me doing insane data pulls to grab all this great college basketball data, 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 pick Purdue to go far and just randomly pick the other games 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.

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!!!!

I will eventually some time in the upcoming week send out an email to invite you all to Stomp the Lunatic!  But I can’t send out an email stating that it must be March if it is still February.  Not to mention we all know that I am horrible at managing my email lists.

That being said, Selection Sunday is just two weeks away.  March 12th will be here before we know it.  Especially for the Lunatic since this is a super busy time for the family with Katie’s rugby season and Charlie’s high school JV soccer season are both starting.

But busy can not stop March!  The Lunatic is back for another month of sleep deprivation, looking through stat sheets in a foolish attempt to show he can predict college basketball games.  This will likely end in a thorough stomping, but it should be a wild and entertaining ride.

With my Boilers starting off 22-1, I actually debated if I should not do the tournament this year.  They looked like such a special team, and I am so desperate to see my Boilers win for once.  Could I actually let something as imaginary as the Lunatic curse impact this special season.  And I can’t pick against them – if there really is a Lunatic curse, that evil wouldn’t be fooled by that trick.  And then the losses started to come.

How sad is this – after Purdue couldn’t knock off arch-rival Indiana yesterday at home, I sat today happily hoping that Maryland could help us out and beat Northwestern so we could back into the share of a Big 10 championship that we couldn’t wrap up on Saturday.  How desperate can I be that I was hoping that Northwestern would lose a basketball game so that a team that started the season 22-1 wouldn’t need to win their last 2 games to win the conference outright.

At the end of the day, I had to remind myself that as much as it is fun to joke about, I do not have the capability of influencing what happens on the basketball court – that is up to the amazing athletes playing the game.

So have no fears – the Lunatic came to his senses and he is ready for the abuse of March to begin. The Website is currently ready for the NCAA Tournament to start. While it is certainly not necessary, the registration link is live for this year’s tournament (that being said, it is typically easier to register when you enter your picks). And I have managed to pull all the box scores through Saturday’s games. The smaller conference tournaments start tomorrow as I am sure there will be lots more drama as teams fight to earn the opportunity to play in the NCAA Championship. And we all will get ready – because it is time to watch an amazing month of college basketball. And of course, it is time to Stomp the Lunatic!!!

Since it is Valentine’s Day, I figured I should start something that I love. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be working on getting the site up and running for this year’s tournament. If you see weird things, such as the ability to make your picks even though the committee won’t announce the tournament field for another 4 weeks, please do not register. I will be testing the site with fake information to make sure all the pages are pointing to the right databases and files.

In the meantime, enjoy going to the past standings.