With 4 about 4 minutes left, Jalen Hood-Schifino from Indiana cut the lead to 9.  And then, from ridiculously deep, Isaiah Wong drilled a three-pointer.  Then, Bensley Joseph steals the ball, passes the ball to Jordan Miller, who gives it back to Joseph in the corner for another 3 pointer.  And the Hurricanes have a 15 point lead with 3 minutes to go.

Indiana’s Hood-Schifino hit a few three-pointers to try to close the gap, but the lead was too much.  The ACC co-regular season champions and last remaining team from the ACC are advancing to the Sweet 16 with an 85-69 over to the Hoosiers.

With teams like Purdue, Indiana, Virginia, and Duke, I don’t think any of us would have said only 2 teams from these 2 proud conferences would make the Sweet 16 – and those teams would be Miami FL and Michigan State.

 

With 3 1/2 minutes left, FDU’s Demetre Roberts drove to the basket at lightning fast speed and made the layup to cut FAU’s lead to 3.  But as happens so often with Cinderella in the tournament, that would be as close as FDU would get.

FAU’s Johnell Davis made a jumper to make a 5 point lead, and then 1 minute 40 seconds left, Bryan Greenlee made a three pointer.  And on the next possession, Davis stole the ball and came down the court with a dunk that ended Cinderella’s chances with a 10 point lead.  Thanks to some missed free throws and late threes, the lead got down to 6.  And almost got to 4 as Roberts drove to the basket – but despite being faster than anyone on the court, his layup ended up being too hard and missed to keep the lead at 6.

As FDU called off the team to not foul, FAU’s Alijah Martin had the embarrassing moment of trying to do a 360 dunk and missing badly.  Which should serve him right for trying to dunk the ball when everyone else is just trying to let the clock run out.  But that embarrassing moment couldn’t stop time.  The clock struck midnight for FDU and the 2nd 16 seed to ever advance to the Round of 32 had their time at the dance come to an end.

Should also mention that Creighton lit it up from three – making 11 of 24 as they cruised to a 85-76 victory over 3 seed Baylor.  And that Miami and TCU are trying to knock off 2 more protected seeds in the final 2 games of the night.

The Michigan State Spartans made sure that the Big 10 at least sends one team to the Sweet 16.

Marquette kept coming back and the Spartans kept pulling away.  With 3 1/2 minutes left in the game, Marquette made it a one point game from the free throw line.  But then MSU’s Tyson Walker drove to the basket and scored.  And then MSU’s AJ Hoggard drove to the basket and scored.  Then, MSU got a key offensive rebound, which led to Tyson Walker getting into the lane and hitting a jumper.  And the Spartans had built their lead back to 7 with about 80 seconds to play.

With around 40 seconds, Walker made a steal at half court and took it to the basket with a dunk that would wrap up the game.  Michigan State would knock off the 2 seed in the East with a 69-60 victory.

With that, the East region is suddenly 3 seed Kansas State, 4 seed Tennessee, 7 seed Michigan State and the winner of the 9 seed Florida Atlantic / 16 seed FDU game.  It also means that 4 of the 8 best teams in college basketball will not make it out of the first weekend.  We have lost the Big 12 regular season champion, the Big 10 regular season and tournament champion, the Pac 12 tournament champion, and the Big East regular season and tournament champion.  Which is funny, because if Florida Atlantic beats Cinderella FDU, the only double digit seed to advance to the Sweet 16 will be 15 seed Princeton.

When I started handicapping this game, especially with the tight line, I thought to myself, I should lock the Big East champion.  The Big 10 is falling apart like it usual does.  Marquette has played so awesome to end the season.  It seems like an easy win.  And then, something that I have learned for so many years came to my head.  I still picked Marquette, but I didn’t lock the game – and that is because…….

NEVER bet against Tom Izzo in March.  Based on an article from 247 Sports, this is Michigan State’s 13th Sweet 16 since 2000.  The only schools that have that many are Kansas (13) and Duke (15).  Whenever you think the Spartans are done, Izzo’s teams find a way to win again.  Watch out Madison Square Garden – the Spartans are coming to town.

It was a very entertaining game.  For a while, it looked like 6 seed Kentucky would pull the upset.  Well, the upset according to seeds – the Vegas line-makers actually had Kentucky as the favorite – probably because of the massive amount of money that tends to get bet on Kentucky each year.

KSU’s Markquis Nowell is amazing.  Nowell is only 5’8″, but might be one of the most fun point guards to watch – so many awesome passes leading to lay-ups and dunks for his teammates.  With about 3 minutes in the game, Nowell’s ability to pass might have led to the refs making a horrible call.

He drove to the basket and started to raise his arm to lob the ball to his teammate in the lane when he was fouled from behind.  It should have been ball to KSU since it was Kentucky’s 5th foul.  But they awarded Nowell two shots for being in a shooting motion.  You just never know with Nowell and his arm was moving in a way that could have been a floater shot or a lob to his teammate.

Nowell hit both free throws to give KSU the lead.  But Kentucky came right back as Cason Wallace grabbed an offensive rebound and put it back in to give the lead back to Kentucky.

But that would be the last lead for Kentucky.  With a little over 2 minutes left, Nowell sent the ball across the court to Ismael Massoud who hit an extremely long three-pointer right next to the KSU bench.  Kentucky’s Chris Livingston got a chance to answer but his three pointer from the corner was a little off and KSU’s David N’Guessan grabbed the offensive rebound.  But in the struggle for the ball, N’Guessan had someone step on his shoe to the point where it completely came off.

For a while, KSU was playing 4 on 5, as the KSU forward tried to get his shoe back on.  He eventually got down the court, with the shoe clearly not on.  Which made what happened next amazing.  Nowell missed a three-pointer, and N’Guessan jumped over everyone and tapped the ball back out to Nowell to help KSU keep the possession.  Nowell then passed the ball to Keyontae Johnson who hit another three-pointer, and suddenly, Kansas State was up 5 points with 1 1/2 to play.

KSU’s Nowell and Desi Sills managed to combine to hit 8 straight free throws to make sure that Kentucky couldn’t come back by fouling, and Kansas State won 75-69.

 

With about 6 minutes in the game, one of the announcers got from their stat room, that Kentucky was 20-2 in games where they held their opponent to under 74 points, so the pace of this game is looking good for them as they took a 1 point lead.

The person from the stat room failed to mention that Kansas State is 18-2 in games where they held their opponent to under 74 points.

Guess what – when you hold your opponent to a low number of points, your team normally wins.  Kentucky might win the game – they have the one point lead.  But can’t we come up with something a little better.

The last four days have been kind of a blur for the Lunatic.  Normally, I stay ahead of the Handicapping so it is not that bad, but when I fall behind, it gets tough to catch up.  Thank goodness for Sunday.

I was able to finally get a full night’s sleep last night, even with the Alabama game going to close to midnight.  Alabama kind of ran away with the second half, so I honestly drifted in and out of the game.

And I was able to then get a lot of the administrative work done while Xavier ran away from Pitt.  And managed to get most of it done before the 2nd half started of the exciting Kansas State / Kentucky game (Kentucky just went on a 9-0 run to take a 4 point lead).

At this point, I believe I have caught up the site with all payments that I have received.  So, if you know you paid and the site says differently, send me an email and I will look at what happened.  The Lunatic Collection Agency is not known for its excellent accounting services, so just give me a heads up.

A special thank you to long time pool supporter Jim Carini.  He noticed that in the standings files, I had mixed up the West and Midwest regions.  I think I have fixed that error on the site (although please let me know if there are any other issues).

The handicapping site has been updated with results.  I am surprisingly doing amazingly well.  I am down 6 imaginary dollars picking against the spreads (24-20 overall – so the vig is what has me down).  But I am crushing the totals – up 282 imaginary dollars (30-14).  Of course, I already lost 60 on the Xavier game, so maybe everything is coming back to normal.  I should learn never to lock any of the games.  But at least I don’t have 8 new lines of games to have to predict – it is nice to know that I will have 4 full days to make the next 8 picks.

I also did amazingly well on the bracketology before the start of the tournament.  I think I actually beat some of the press experts, which makes me happy.  I have more research to do on that – which might have to wait for a game that isn’t as exciting as the Kansas State / Kentucky game – Kentucky just had a huge dunk to take a 41-39 lead.

And of course, at 7:45 pm Purdue will be playing Florida Atlantic.  Oh wait.  Guess not everything is going well.  I keep hoping in my sleep-deprived state that it was just a dream that FDU won.  It had to be – right.  Still, enjoy the 2nd round games on a wonderful Sunday.

Things were so busy on Thursday, and so depressing on Friday, that I totally forgot that I did this.  But the current leaderboard has sadly reminded me.

As you all remember, I had created my Lunatic simulator.  But I didn’t like the results of it – it liked a bunch of teams that were dealing with late season injuries, and it struggled with smaller schools (the games I was nervous about in the Mountain West, I was correct to be nervous…..)

Anyways, I had put so much work into it (an entire day) and so figured at the last minute on Thursday, it would be fun to see how it would have done if I went with it.  And I figured, I might as well give it a chance against a real statistical model – the Ken Pomeroy rankings.

To be fair to Mr. Pomeroy, I didn’t give it some of the flexibility that I gave the simulator.  While I am sure he has some way to weight upsets, I didn’t know it when I was scrambling to do this.  And so I simply picked the team that was ranked higher in his rankings.

For the simulator, I gave it some value to try to predict updates.  And so, if it believed an underdog based on seed would have at least a 45% chance of winning the game, it took it.  That didn’t happen often, but it happened enough so that the simulator wouldn’t simply pick the chalk all the way through.

Well, after Saturday’s games were done, the Lunatic simulator was tied with Mr. Pomeroy for 9th place at 350 points.  For those worried about prizes – don’t worry.  I put the statistical models picks in as “For Fun” entries – they can’t win the money.

That lead was somewhat short-lived.  KenPom picked Xavier and the Simulator picked Iowa State, and so the Simulator dropped down to a tie for 46th place.  But there are other places the Simulator is looking pretty smart (such as it picking Arkansas to upset Kansas)

But considering the Lunatic’s sane picks are in 248th with only 290 points, it looks like I should have taken my losses in the Utah State and Boise State games and gone with the statistics…..  I am going to keep my confidence that my picks can recover – at the end, it matters how your Final Four teams and champion does.  While I have been impressed with Houston, I am not convinced that they can cut down the nets.  Then again, my dream picks had Purdue – so I guess I could do worse than having the Cougars…..

Congratulations to Cooper Bradley – with 380 points, he ended up leading the pool after Saturday’s games.  Cooper is followed closely by Michael Wark and Ann Schumaker at 370 points.  Michael is doing well in his other picks – they are in a tie for 4th at 360 points with Mark Walsh, Matt Di Dio, Will Richter and HH (who I guess is going for anonymity based on his/her name in the registry).  Although I will use this as an important point – the registry is my way of being able to praise all of you (as well as to be able to contact you).  It makes things tougher for me if I don’t know who is actually winning…..

Meanwhile, Vivienne has taken the lead in the Upset Pool with 173 points.  Will Richter is in 2nd with 157, followed closely by Cooper Ams and Cooper Bradley with 153.

Good luck to everyone!

What at one point looked like it could be a catastrophic day for the favorites has calmed down.

I am so impressed with what Houston did. They were down 11 points. Sasser has been hurt, and still scored 22 points before foul trouble caused him to miss a good chunk of the second half. Jamal Shead also had to sit for a while with 4 fouls.

So, the Houston bench played some key extra minutes down the stretch, Tramon Mark scored 26 pointe, and the Cougars outscores the Tigers 50-23 to come back and win comfortably.

The final three games saw Big 10 schools trying to pull off an upset. Penn State came back to take a 3 minute lead with about 5 minutes left. But they had no answer for Dylan Disu, who led Texas with 28 points on 14-20 shooting. Texas won by 5, survived and advanced.

UCLA found their double digit lead disappear with about 10 minutes. But Jaime Jaquez Jr scored 24, Tyger Campbell went 12-12 from the line, and the Bruins escaped with a 5 point victory.

So that leaves us with one last game. Alabama was up on Maryland by 5 at halftime – only time will tell if the Big 10 upset bids all fall short.

Next year, if one of the 4 15 seeds is from New Jersey,  I am going to have to seriously consider breaking my rules and taking them.

15 seed Princeton just beat 7 seed Missouri 78-63, in the largest ever victory by a 15 seed (according to TNT).  Ryan Langborg dropped 22 points and Blake Peters came off the bench to score 17 (going 5-8 from three point range).

And for the second year in a row, we have a small New Jersey school that was a 15 seed surprise everyone to become the current lead for Cinderella at the dance.  As the Princeton star said in the post-game interview, “It might be cliche, but anything is possible!!!!”  The Princeton Tigers are still dancing.