{"id":1180,"date":"2018-03-05T01:41:25","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T01:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2018-03-05T01:41:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T01:41:59","slug":"four-more-bids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/?p=1180","title":{"rendered":"Four more bids"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Congratulation to our four conference champions crowned today.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Loyola (Chicago) is being thanked by many bubble teams as they did not allow the Missouri Valley auto-bid to be stolen by Illinois State.\u00a0 Loyola had a top 30 RPI and a road victory against Florida &#8211; so it would have been an interesting case.<\/li>\n<li>Radford claimed the Big South in dramatic fashion &#8211; by hitting a buzzer beating three pointer to win against Liberty<\/li>\n<li>Lipscomb managed to get up by 29 points at halftime against regular season champion Florida Gulf Coast, and managed to hang on to win the Atlantic Sun Championship.<\/li>\n<li>Michigan made me sad by taking down my beloved Boilermakers to claim the Big 10 auto-bid (although the Wolverines and Boilermakers were both already safely in the field).\u00a0 But the Wolverines deserve some praise &#8211; they hit some amazing shots on offense, killed the boards, and completely shut down Purdue&#8217;s star guards &#8211; it was a pretty impressive victory for Michigan.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That being said, my friend Dave came over to watch the championship with me and cheer on our alma mater.\u00a0 I think to be safe, Dave and I can not watch any of Purdue&#8217;s tournament games together, since that is the worst that I have seen Purdue&#8217;s back-court shoot the ball (to be fair, I am sure it was more due to Michigan&#8217;s tenacious defense &#8211; but why risk it).\u00a0 Then again, it was probably also a blessing that Dave was here &#8211; it probably prevented me from saying a lot of bad things at my television set since my kids were still at swimming practice and would not have heard the bad words.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow will see two more championships with completely different feels.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Southern Conference Championship will pit their top two teams against each other as #1 UNC-Greensboro (26-7) will play #2 East Tennessee State (25-8).\u00a0 Pretty impressive to see a conference final have two teams that have combined to win 51 games.<\/li>\n<li>The MAAC Conference Championship is Cinderella&#8217;s dream &#8211; right now, #4 Iona is the top seed left in the semi-finals, and they find themselves down to #9 St. Peter&#8217;s 53-49 with about 7 minutes to play.\u00a0 \u00a0The second semi-final puts #6 Fairfield up against #7 Quinnipiac.\u00a0 So, the top 3 seeds all went down in the quarterfinals.\u00a0 And right now, the MAAC has a 50\/50 chance that their champion will have a losing record this season &#8211; as winning the semi-finals and finals can not give St. Peter&#8217;s or Quinnipiac enough wins to get to .500.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Congratulation to our four conference champions crowned today. Loyola (Chicago) is being thanked by many bubble teams as they did not allow the Missouri Valley auto-bid to be stolen by Illinois State.\u00a0 Loyola had a top 30 RPI and a road victory against Florida &#8211; so it would have been an interesting case. Radford claimed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1182,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions\/1182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}