lavuuk153 said:
Marcus White doesn't get his shot stuck between the backboard and rim and Uconn pulls it out in 2003. It woulda been nice to play against MSU for the right to beat Cuse for the 3rd time and take away their only title* *I don't know who Helms is, but really who cares. Also, how did a 5 loss team from the Big East only get a 3 seed? We got a 3 seed in 11 with like 9 losses.
Francisco "Frank" Helms was a childhood friend of James Naismith and a mathematician by trade. He was somewhat of a legendary figure in math circles from the first half of the 20th century. He was a reclusive character, so much so that people often called him "the J.D. Salinger of math", a comparison which would often make him bristle. "Salinger is in preschool, for cripe's sake," he was once overheard saying. "Catcher In The Rye won't even come out for 30 more years."
This was an era before TV, radio, telephones, and consistent newspaper coverage, so when Helms developed an interest in following Naismith's fledgling sport of college basketball from a distance, he had a difficult time finding out results. After several years of frustration, he decided to pay couriers to relay scores to him by horseback to his home in the Adirondack Mountains (math was a much more lucrative field back then, and couriers were cheap). As all these scores came in, his mathematical mind started to study the numbers. Long before Vegas was a twinkle in Bugsy Siegel's eye, Helms would compile the data and figure out mathematical trends, handicap future games and pick winners. He became such an expert and so confident in his knowledge that he would wager large sums of his personal fortune on his predictions. Usually he bet against local squirrels, since fellow gamblers were hard to find back then, especially for a recluse. He was also slowly, as we now know, becoming insane.
After many years of studying all this basketball data with very little practical use for it, and with his mental faculties gradually fading, Helms decided to put all of the results from each season into a spreadsheet, which back then was some columns drawn into a patch of dirt with a stick. Fortunately, there was a lot of dirt in the Adirondacks. I say fortunately, since doing all of the math on his new project helped exercise his mind and was probably the one thing that stopped him from descending completely into madness. Despite fighting his demons, Helms was detailed in his work - he would chart which 20 teams his data showed were the best from that season, including the one with the most dirt scratches of all, a team which he declared the "Helms Champion", since he actually had a pretty sizable ego for a reclusive half-sane mathematician. He would have his couriers deliver his rankings to every school, most of which by then had real newspapers and ignored him as just being a kook. But a few schools kept copies of the strange pronouncements delivered to them on horseback for sh!ts and giggles. They'd have a good laugh, file it away in a drawer, and say "who made this guy an expert on anything?" Years later, though, collegiate researchers would stumble on many of these old files, and some places, with lots of vacant space in the rafters where things like banners might go, declared that these Helms Championships were actually a real thing (remember that the next time you think nobody is reading your blog).
Much like Vincent Van Gogh, another tortured artist, Helms sadly wasn't around to see the fruits of his labor accepted by the public. The Great Depression resulted in the end of the math cash cow, and he could no longer afford his couriers, who could no longer afford their horses anyway. An elderly, senile and destitute Helms disappeared into the Adirondack wilderness, mumbling something about why that Boeheim kid always seemed to be picking his nose, and was never heard from again. His name lives on, though - both in banners in the Carrier Dome and even in modern lingo. Back then, when someone made a blunt statement as a self-proclaimed expert on a topic, folks who knew him would often mock him by saying "to be Frank, I think that..." Somehow, that stuck. Another little Frank Helms contribution many folks don't realize.
