March Madness - Day 2 First 4 games

This is what the tournament is all about!!!!  I love it.  I love the Mercer Bears.  I was taking some notes while watching the games this morning, and about 5 minutes into the Duke game, I wrote down, "If Duke misses 3's, they have NO chance.".  Well, I looked at the box score, and it looked like Duke actually made a good percentage of their 3's.  The only problem was that shooting 3's was their only offense.  They made 14 3-point baskets, but only 7 2-point baskets.  Honestly, I don't remember any time during the game they threw the ball into the post.  It was all drive and kick for 3, or get an offensive rebound and kick it out for 3.  That seemed like not a real recipe for winning games, and it turned out it wasn't.

This is the first really big upset of the tournament.  All the other upsets yesterday were against teams that weren't supposed to make it any further based on seeds.  Duke was supposed to go to the Sweet 16, which is where 203 brackets had them.

Here are the 9 people that had Mercer winning this game:

Chris L. #3

David S. #4

Jay H. #1

Klei R. #1

Marissa W. #4

Peter J. #5

Ray W. #3

Stephanie P. #5

Virginia L. #2

On the flip side, here are the 5 people that just lost their champion in the first round:

Dan D. #1

Brent S. #2

Bosun S.

Adam E. #2

Klei R. - RND

I think what this proves is that dogs (Bosun) and random bracket generators are not good judges of basketball talent.

In the other games, Baylor looks pretty solid against Nebraska, holding Nebraska to only 16 points in the first half.  I thought it was a little weird for Nebraska to have to play Baylor in San Antonio.  I know Texas is big, but that has to pretty much be a home game for them.

Also, does it strike anyone as strange that a matchup like this can happen in the first round?  I remember when Nebraska and Baylor were in the same conference.  Same thing with the Villanova / Connecticut game in the next round.  It's strange to me to think of them not being in the same conference, even though Nebraska has been in the Big 10 for a few years now.

In the third game of the day, I guess someone forgot to mention to Stanford that they were supposed to be nothing more than a speed bump on the way to the inevitable New Mexico / Kansas potential upset in the 2nd round.  There's probably something to that.  All of the coverage I've seen barely mentioned Stanford as a team in the field at all.  Everyone was talking about New Mexico is playing so good and that they were under-seeded at 7, and that Kansas really needs to look out.  Stanford could easily play the "no one believes in us" card, and they seem to be doing it to great effect (at least in the first half.

The last game of the morning just started, so I don't have much on that one, but Weber State did start out on a 7-0 run, so maybe they will give Arizona a game.  I doubt it, but I can dream.  As soon as those games are done, I'll post the updated standings.  In the mean time, here are the distributions for the next 4 games:

Massachusetts: 125
Tennessee: 122

Creighton: 231
Louisiana-Lafayette: 16

Kansas: 243
Eastern Kentucky: 4

Oklahoma State: 147
Gonzaga: 100

True to my word, I'm wearing my EKU T-shirt today.  I know I've already been spoiled for upsets with Mercer over Duke, but I'd really like to see Kansas lose as well.  Actually, I like to see lots of upsets, so I'll take ULL over Creighton and Tennessee over UMass too, but those are a little less interesting.

Good luck to everyone....  Updated standings in the next post!!