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This makes a lot of sense too when you think about what this coaching staff asks of players: work your butt off, never take a play off, sacrifice for the team, pass up shots to give your teammates better shots, etc. I’m sure that’s a big change for players and can be frustrating at times...

“Winning back-to-back championships in 6 years and then telling Kentucky to pound sand” is so far beyond the best-case scenario when UConn hired Hurley, I can’t even wrap my head around it. We were coming off a sub-500 season where we lost to Arkansas by 35 on a neutral court! Also, Hurley...

The NCAA tournament had 8 teams through 1950 or so and 16 teams through 1974. Plus it was less prestigious than the NIT up until the 1960s. So making the Final Four before 1975 just meant you won (at most) two games. Eight of Ohio State’s 10 Final Fours are pre-1970. Four are from when the...

Why does it make sense to use the fibonacci sequence here? Winning a championship counts for way more than the relative number on the chart. Ask any fanbase whether they would rather lose in the championship game two years in a row — or miss the tourney in Year 1 and win it all in Year 2. The...

The real questIon now is who the 2nd best team is in the modern college basketball era. We all know who the best is. UConn has more National Championships since the advent of the shot clock / 3-point line (in the mid-80s) than any other team.

We’re already tied for first with Duke for most National Championships since the NCAA introduced the shot clock and the 3-point line. I could care less about how many championships your school won 80 years ago throwing a ball into peach basket.

Well, we changed our mascot to look like a wolf and it looks like it’s caught up with us.

Enjoy it! Even if we win, the season is over after the Final Four. Making the Final Four is a huge accomplishment. We get to enjoy it AND look forward to more basketball this week.

Wow the whistle is going Tennessee’s way on every call down the line here.

Big East Tournament Record (2023-24): 15-3

Seriously, how great was that first half?

If Timberlake is a little more coordinated and does not completely lose his own balance and slam into the court, that foul may not have been called. (Then again, it’s Kansas.)

In UVA’s case it would be the TBAAY metric (they’ve been ass all year).

Quad One Games: St. John’s (4-10, 29% win rate) Ave. Score: 76-77 (1 point loss) UVA (2-7, 22% win rate) Ave Score: 52-69 (17 point loss) LOL. Has there ever been an at-large team with a worse Q1 loss margin?

UVA’s resume was atrocious. They played a total of 3 teams in the Top 25 of NET all season. All double-digit losses for UVA. 2-7 in Quad 1. And they lost those 7 games by an average of 21 points! On the plus side of the ledger there’s. . . nothing. Not a single win against a team that finished...

Last year the Big East refs seemed to understand this, and made sure we “shared” our non-conference success with the other Big East schools. So let’s be careful what we wish for.

The simple answer is that the Committee got lazy and didn’t adjust anything based on conference tournaments. Kenpom is just a data point. Would you prefer NET? Here’s Top-10 NET teams by region: East: 4 / South: 2 / Midwest: 2 / West: 2 You mentioned resume-based. Fine. Here’s Top-10 BPI...

Wins against Top-5 Kenpom teams needed to reach Final Four (to chalk): UConn(1) = 2 Houston(1) = 0 Purdue(1) = 0 UNC(1) = 0 Iowa State(2) = 2 Arizona(2) = 0 Tennessee(2) = 1 Marquette(2) = 1 Illinois(3) = 2 Creighton(3) = 1 Baylor(3) = 0 Kentucky(3) = 1 Auburn(4) = 2 Duke(4) = 1 Alabama(4) =...

People hate price discrimination and surge pricing, but like discounts and deals. Same thing to an economist - all depends on how you frame it. That’s why stores have “sales” and not “randomly-pay-30%-more weekends.” Not very smart on the part of Wendy’s.

You’re going to root for Duke over a team we played and beat? Two issues with this: 1. UNC is a team we played and beat. 2. It’s Duke!

Purdue’s resume is significantly better than ours right now. They have wins over NET #2,5,6,9,17. Our best wins are #10 UNC and #35 St. John’s. They’re #2 SOS in both BPI and Kenpom. We’re #48/#134(!). It’s not really a close call. So the extent 1000% better means “absolutely” better, I think...

Seton Hall limited our freedom of movement on offense with aggressive physical guarding. Our response was to further limit our own movement by standing around. We played right into Seton Hall’s hands. As for refs, some crews will call a bunch of fouls on SH’s style of defense. Others won’t. You...

I’m with you 100%. My point is the NCAA has all these (frankly dumb) supposedly objective bracket “principles” to try to make what they are doing seem objective — but then if you look at the output, it’s obvious that they are moving teams up and down all over the place because they feel like it...

Why is this an important principle? Hilarious that the committee has these intricate principles designed to make the process look objective — and then every year the Committee Chair gets on TV and spouts nonsense about how they actually made their decisions. This year it was dinging Kansas bc...

That is the worst shooting game we are going to see from Hawkins. 1-8 from three. And if he was shooting a little better tonight it would have been 0-8 bc he doesn’t get the bank on the first shot (which was off by a country mile). You gotta pull for him to just move on and put it behind him.

We didn’t see him down stretch bc we got into single bonus and he’s a 50% FT shooter.

Creighton is #6 in the country in home attendance at 16.6k per game. They outdraw a handful of NBA teams. Not something you’d see if the fanbase was just alumni. They basically won either the regular season or tournament every year in the MVC. Tougher competition in the Big East of course...

If UConn is in the final, rival fansbases will want to sell their tickets. But even more UConn fans will want to buy those tickets, so the price will go up (happened when UConn made the Regional Finals at MSG in 2014). Of course if you buy now and UConn doesn’t make the final, the price will...

God I love the Big East tournament.

We should host Yale every year as long as they continue to be top-half in the Ivy. If we wanted to game the NET a bit we could even play a “neutral” site game against them in Bridgeport or Mohegan Sun occasionally. We’d have to work out the financials with the venue - not sure if it’s...

What SOS number is that? Is that for rest-of-season games? Our season SOS is 30s to low 40s, which is perfectly respectable.

It’s definitely on the coaches that we had the ball up 1 with 50 seconds left and did not play for 2–for-1 possessions. We just ran the clock down under 30 and gave Seton Hall the last possession to win. Woof.

Seven straight weeks as a Top 10 team is impressive! It’s been a great season so far and great exposure for the UConn brand. The AP poll doesn’t affect seeding, so I’m just going to enjoy the team being Top 10 and not care about whether we’re 4, 5, or 6. And given that Hurley likes to...

The coaching staff has shown impressive flexibility in their approach. Yesterday, against a team they thought we were clearly better than, they played vanilla to limit mistakes. Against BC they blitzed like crazy. Charlton has dialed up a variety of trick plays in games against tougher...

FIU’s FG decision was foolish, and a perfect example of coaches seeking to delay the moment of truth vs maximizing their chances to win. At some point, you need to win the game. With a FG down 19, FIU still needs 2 TDs, plus 2 do-or-die conversions (50% each) plus an OT win (50%). That’s just...