Stomp The Lunatic

Game of the day

West Coast Championship – #4 Gonzaga (31-1) vs #19 St. Mary’s (28-3) – This might be the easiest pick of the week.   Mid-major conference championship between two ranked teams with only 4 losses combined.   Gonzaga is responsible for 2 of those 4 losses as the swept St. Mary’s this year.   But St. Mary’s is coming off a 31 point destruction of BYU – the team that ruined Gonzaga’s unbeaten season, so they have to be coming into this game confident.   Should be a great game

Conference Championships:

• Northeast – #1 Mt St Mary’s (18-15) vs #4 St Francis (PA) (16-15) – Mt St Mary’s struggled in the non-conference season, but went 14-4 in conference to take the regular season title.
• Summit – #3 Omaha (18-13) vs #4 South Dakota State (17-16) – South Dakota St took out regular season champs South Dakota to give them a chance against Omaha to head to the dance.
• Horizon – #4 Northern Kentucky (23-10) vs #10 Milwaukee (11-23) – This has been a wild conference tournament that saw 3 of the 4 semi-finalists have losing records.   Milwaukee only won 4 of 18 games in conference, but they now find themselves 1 victory away from the NCAAs after upsetting Detroit, regular-season co-champs Valparaiso, and UIC.  Northern Kentucky was the only one of the top 4 seeds who didn’t lose in the quarter-finals, and now find themselves the favorites in a conference tournament that has not necessarily been the best position.

Other Games of Interest:

•  Wake Forest (19-12) vs Boston College (9-23) – the ACC 1st round games have started – other than enjoying fun ACC games, these are important as Wake Forest (as well as Clemson, Georgia Tech or Pitt) can’t afford a loss in the 1st round if they want to make a late run into the tournament.   Wake gets the nod because they might only need to win this game, while the others definitely need to go deep to get in consideration.

Enjoy the games!!!!

Game of the day

Colonial Championship – #1 UNC-Wilmington (28-5) vs #2 Charleston (25-8) – having two teams who have won 25 games this season should make this game exciting.   These two teams split during the regular season – more impressively, both teams won their game on the road by single digits – so this should be an exciting round 3.

Conference Championships:

• Southern – #1 UNC-Greensboro (25-8) vs #2 East Tennessee State (26-7) – co-champions from the Southern battle it out for the bid – should be another really great game
• MAAC – #3 Iona (21-12) vs #4 Siena (17-16) – the cruel MAAC is where Siena knocked off top seeded Monmouth was followed by Iona upsetting #2 seed St. Peter’s.   Iona looks to return to the NCAA tournament – this year as the favorite instead of the underdog who took out Monmouth last year.

Other Games of Interest:

•  #20 St. Mary’s (27-3) vs BYU (22-10) – this should be a great game, with BYU riding high after their upset over Gonzaga to end the regular season.   St. Mary’s swept the Cougars in the regular season, but BYU has proven they are a dangerous team.
• Vermont (27-5) vs New Hampshire (20-11) – Vermont went undefeated in the America East, but they likely need to win this semi-final game and the conference final to get to the dance.

Enjoy the games!!!!

Monmouth was upset by Siena in the semifinals of the MAAC tournament – this means that the Hawks are now 54-13 in the last two years (with 2 of their losses being in their conference tournament) and in the horrible position of hoping the selection committee will give them a chance.   The sad reality of it is that there are a few major conference teams who will likely get into the tournament with more losses this year than the Hawks have had in two.

While I hope that the committee gives Monmouth a chance over a 14 loss team, my suspicion is that if the Hawks didn’t get in last year with their amazing road victories, they won’t get in this year.  They lost on the road at South Carolina, Syracuse and North Carolina (and to be fair, many teams would lose those three road games) – but if you are a mid-major who wants to play in the tournament, you can’t get lucky enough like Syracuse to eventually have those teams come to your house – you have to win the road games when you get a chance.  Unfortunately, only the South Carolina game was close.   But before we criticize the Hawks for this, lets remember that Syracuse blew out Georgia Tech by 29 points this weekend, the same team they lost by 6 points a couple weeks ago when they had to play the Yellow Jackets in Atlanta.

Just to put into perspective how unfair this is, the three above teams are 46-7 at home, and 18-22 when they play on the road and neutral sites.   But Monmouth and other mid-majors don’t typically get the chance to get these games anywhere other than where these teams are nearly invincible.    I hope the committee looks at this, but I know that they won’t.  Most likely, the Hawks will be getting an auto-bid into the NIT.

Well, it is ready through Saturday’s games!   For the most part, the file is the same as normal – maybe a couple extra fields of information.   I have continued with the approach that conference tournament game are counted as conference games instead of post-season games.

No promises that I will update every day, but wanted to get was available for everyone – and will update as I have time throughout the week – the spreadsheet has a page that says when it is last updated.

But for those of you who want to do crazy statistical research, build models, or just have all the schedule data at your fingertips to evaluate teams, the data is there in the research links under 2017 Schedule.

Obviously, remember the traditional Lunatic disclaimers.  I have done some basic cleaning and quality checks against RPI data – but there are a lot of games, and so I will not make the claim that I have checked every piece of the dataset.

For those of you who are not familiar with this tradition, 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 just randomly pick 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!!!!

Not sure I will do this every day this week – but thought this could be fun!!!!   Here are the games that I am excited about today!!!!

Game of the day:

Missouri Valley Championship – #21 Wichita State (29-4) vs. Illinois State (27-5) – this game epitimizes the mid-major conferences.   These two teams both dominated the MVC, both have RPIs in the top 50, and both have 27+ victories this year.  But because they are mid-majors, they don’t have a lot of wins against other potential tourney teams.  The winner of the game will be dancing – the loser will be sweating out the entire week on the bubble hoping that the committee rewards their amazing success this season.

Conference Championships:

• Big South – #1 Winthrop (25-6) vs #7 Campbell (17-16) – Winthrop had to survive overtime against Gardner-Webb in their attempt to back up their regular season title with a trip to the dance.  Will they be able to finish their defense today?
• Atlantic Sun – #1 Florida Gulf Coast (25-7) vs #3 North Florida (15-18) – FGCU is another regular season champion who needs one more victory to defend their title.  Or will North Florida manage the rare feat of having a losing record but earning a bid to the tourney?

Other Games of Interest:

• #16 Purdue (24-6) at Northwestern (21-9) – how can a Big 10 fan not be excited about watching the regular season champion play the team that might be this year’s best story – can’t imagine a scenario that doesn’t have the Wildcats finally making the dance
• Minnesota (23-7) at Wisconsin (22-8) – winner claims the 2nd seed in the Big 10 tourney and a double bye.  The Gophers are another great story of improvement from only 8 wins last year.   The Badgers looked like they would run away with the conference title and now are just trying to end a skid that has seen them lose 5 of their last 6 games
• Monmouth (27-5) vs Siena (16-16) – Monmouth has a top 50 RPI this year – but they were passed up last year with maybe a better profile when they didn’t claim their conference bid.    Hoping that they can win the MAAC so we don’t have to see if that history repeats itself.
• Penn State (14-16) at Iowa (17-13) – Iowa has come out of nowhere to make a last ditch run at the tourney – they need to beat the Nittany Lions to continue
• East Carolina (14-16) at Houston (20-9) – can the American conference sneak a third team into the tournament – the Cougars can’t afford to lose at home

Enjoy the games!!!!

Last night, many people were enjoying one of the best rivalries in college basketball as North Carolina hosted Duke in Chapel Hill.  And while Joel Berry II was scoring 28 points to lead the Tar Heels to a 90-83 victory over the Blue Devils, quietly in Nashville, Tennessee was a game that might have had more significance – especially for the two small schools that were playing.  In that game, the Gamecocks from Jacksonville State upset Tennessee Martin 66-55 to win the Ohio Valley Championship game.  This victory makes the Gamecocks not only the first team in 2017 to earn an invitation to the 2017 NCAA Tournament, but it is also the first time in the school’s history that they will be dancing!!!  It also means one other thing – IT MUST BE MARCH!!!!!

And as college basketball teams play their conference championship games to kick of March, it can only mean one more thing – it must be time to STOMP THE LUNATIC!!!!!!!!!!!

The Lunatic is back for another beating, with his foolish attempt to predict college basketball games and provide entertaining commentary that could only possibly be the ramblings of a sleep-deprived lunatic.  We all know better – he is no real threat – his kids will likely have better picks by picking schools that their grandparents attended.  It needs to be all of our mission to put the Lunatic back in his proper place.

So, without any more delays, the 2017 Stomp the Lunatic contest is officially announced!!!!!!!

The most important part is ready – the website is up and ready to go for another year of bracket picks.   As always, the website will have all of the pages that make the Stomp the Lunatic great – whether it be NCAA results so the statisticians can build predictive models, poorly done bracketology that will show the Lunatic is simply a crazy basketball fan, cheat sheets once the brackets are released for those of us who don’t want to do hours of analysis, and of course, everyone’s favorite rants about the games.   I might even do my best to rant about the bubble and the conference tournaments this year – depending on how long it takes me to get all the results file ready.

I have sent out the initial email to invite everyone to join us – but as always, my skills at keeping a distribution list are worst – fortunately, many of you already know where the site is so you don’t need the email to join!!!!   If you think there is someone I missed, please feel free to forward this along – everyone is welcome!!!

Get ready!!!!  The Madness is Coming!!!!

Until Selection Sunday!!!!!!!    And Purdue is tied for first in the Big 10!!!!!   Very exciting times for the Lunatic!!!!!