It was a good administrative evening for the Lunatic. Part of that is thanks to the Southland Conference semi-finals.

I had just finished watching Santa Clara run out of steam as #12 Gonzaga went on a run to take the lead and win the WCC conference championship. It is kind of fitting that Gonzaga won one more time before heading to the Pac 12, but it was a tough loss for Santa Clara who played a fantastic game and now has to simply wait and see if what they did was enough to get picked by the Selection Committee.

I quickly checked the scoreboards to see if I could catch the end of the MAAC championship, but it had ended. Siena had completed the upset of regular season champion Merrimack by 10 points to claim their ticket to the dance.

But I was working on my Bracketology and wanted something to listen to in the background, so I flipped over to the Southland semi-final between McNeese St nd UT-Rio Grande Valley, which was tied. And then the game went to overtime. And then the game went to double overtime. And then the game went to triple overtime. I could probably write several paragraphs as what was intended to be something to keep me awake in the background had now captured my full attention.

In the last minute of triple overtime, McNeese St got the ball into the lane to Larry Johnson, who made a layup to put the Cowboys up by two points with 28 seconds to play. And then, UTRGV decided that it was going to try to either end the game or send it to a fourth overtime by running one last play. The seconds ticked down before they started to try to run a play where they hit a player at the top of the key coming off a screen. But Larry Johnson jumped the passing lane, stole the ball and drove down the court for a slam dunk to end the marathon and send McNeese State to the Southland final.

The game didn’t end until 12:30 pm EST. I had really only planned on staying up 10-15 minutes past the WCC conference game. But in that extra hour, I got to watch what probably was the most fun game of the day while typing up my first attempt at establishing a bubble on my bracketology page.

Thanks to CoPilot, I also got some suggestions on how to pull the basketball box scores on the ESPN site, and so I also finished pulling all the scores. I have no clue if they will match the audit I do with the NCAA official records. I am not sure how I am going to summarize the data. But I have it pulled, which is typically the long part.

So, got to watch a great basketball game, continued to get the blog pages up, and gave myself a chance at getting the data for building all my models that fail when I change my mind and pick Purdue to win.

It was a good night. But as I type this before going to work, I am super tired. The sleep deprivation has begun. And I am getting old – I don’t know that I can be sleep-deprived this early in March.

Anyways, if you want to see the initial formation of what teams are locks and what teams are on the Lunatic’s bubble, click the Bracketology link on the top of the page. Please realize this is not where I think the teams will end up. It was simply an attempt to make sure I had a full list of the teams with a chance to make the tournament as well as an initial starting point of where the teams will fall based on history (for example, teams in the top 25 of the polls and the top 25 of the NET typically hear their name called on Sunday – so they are locks).