2010 March Madness Picks -- Part II

OK so here is part II of my 2010 March Madness picks. In case you missed it, here is read Part I of my predictions where I contemplate the Midwest and the East brackets. In this post, I will provide my thoughts on the Western and the Southern regionals.

Starting with the West, this is the bracket that I think competes with the East as the toughest brackets in the field this year, again mostly because the West contains 3 solid teams among its top four seeds. Syracuse is the #1 seed in the West, and anybody who has watched the Cuse play more than a couple of games this season knows that this is a team with a ton of skill, seven quality starting players, they can shoot the ball very well, and most of all they play a 2-3 zone defense that for most teams will be perhaps the most "different" defense they have faced all season long. As if this weren't enough to propel the Cuse to the final two teams in their bracket, the #4 seed on Syracuse's side of the bracket is Vanderbilt, a trendy pick of late but not a team in my view that can stick with Syracuse, on either side of the ball. In fact, I expect Butler at #5 to beat Vandy in the Round of 32, but either way the Cuse should have little trouble dispatching with either team in the Sweet 16. On the other half of the bracket, Kansas State is a strong #2 seed, as is Pittsburgh at #3. Although there are some other teams on that half of the regional, it's nobody who I think will have much of a chance to upend either K-State or Pitt, and those two teams seem destined for a Sweet 16 clash as well, where I would guess that K-State will win as I have seen Pitt look entirely too beatable on one or two too many occasions this season.

So for the West regional, I think we are looking at Syracuse - Butler on the top half, and Kansas State - Pittsburgh on the bottom. The Cuse should have enough to overpower Butler (or Vanderbilt) to reach the Elite 8, where I would guess they will face Kansas State in what is probably that school's best basketball team in many years.

Moving to the South bracket, here is the one regional where I think the #1 seed (Duke) does not have a good chance of winning their way through and reaching the Final Four. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the ACC had the worst year in 2010 that I can ever recall that conference having. And that's not just words on a screen or monitor somewhere -- the bottom line is that, when Duke posts a record of 29-5 and 13-3 in the ACC, people cannot help but see that and identify it with some of the national championship-type of teams Duke has had in the recent past. But this team simply did not face even close to the day-in, day-out quality of competition that it is used to facing in most years, and I think this will show through come Tournament time. North Carolina, the perennial powerhouse, was horrible this year, and offered up two easy wins for Duke that normally require the Blue Devils to claw their way to one win the season series. Maryland was the only other team in the entire ACC to to have fewer than six conference losses, or fewer than 8 total losses on the season. While Maryland might have been up, UNC was down as I mentioned, as were Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Clemson, BC, Virgina, NC State and basically every other ACC team. And outside of the conference, Duke beat bad Arizona State, UConn and St. Johns teams, they lost at Wisconsin and they got crushed by Georgetown, also on the road. In fact, throughout the regular season, this Duke squad was just 8-5 away from Cameron Indoor Stadium, and if you take out the three neutral-court wins vs. UConn, ISU and Gonzaga, they were actually just 5-5 in true road games on the year. Most dramatically, I read this past weekend that Duke finished the 2009-2010 regular season with exactly one win against the NCAA top 50 teams. That right there is all I need to know -- Duke will not go far this year and will fail to make the Final Four for the seventh straight season.

So who is going to beat Duke in the South regional this year? Well, the obvious choice is #2 seeded Villanova, not only because they are a more athletic team playing in a much tougher conference, but also because a very similar Nova team crushed a very similar Duke team in last year's NCAA tournament in one of the worst beatings of last year's Big Dance. But I actually think Duke will lose even before facing off against Villanova in the Elite 8, most likely I would guess to Louisville if they can get past their first match with Pac-10 denizen Cal.

Other than Nova and Louisville, however, the NCAA Committee really did Duke a major favor by putting them in what I think is easily the weakest of the four brackets in this year's Tournament. #2 Villanova ended the season on an extended losing streak, including losing in their first game in the Big East tournament, and the #3 seed in the bracket is the Baylor Bears, in whom I have very little confidence. And then the #4 seed is Purdue, who after losing forward Robbie Hummel for the year to injury went on to get utterly crushed by 27 points in their next game in the Big Ten tournament to a 13-loss Minnesota team. You can take Purdue out, because they are utterly, completely done for this season, and I would not be surprised at all to see them lose in the first round to #13 seed Sienna.

So the South looks to be the easiest bracket of the four, and yet I do not think #1 Duke will be around for the regional finals in the Elite 8, although I do think that #2 Villanova is likely to survive to play for the first to appear in back to back Final Fours. I do not feel comfortable with either the #3 or the #4 seed in this bracket, nor with any of the other teams on the top half of that draw, so I am leaning towards Louisville possibly busting out with a run to the Elite 8 under coach Rick Pitino who certainly has had success in this tournament in the past.

So my eight Elite 8 picks through all four regionals include:

Midwest: 1 Kansas, 3 Georgetown

East: 1 Kentucky, 2 West Virginia

West: 1 Syracuse, 2 Kansas State

South: 9 Louisville, 2 Villanova

Back tomorrow with my Elite 8, Final Four and National Championship selections.

The Death of Baseball

Quick! What's the current single-season home run record in Major League Baseball? Barry Bonds holds it, but what's the number? Seriously. Do you know it?











It's 73, set in 2001, not coincidentally the same year that A-Rod claims to have begun doping. And while we're at it, do you know the career home run record? Once again it's held by Barry Bonds, but do you know how many dingers he hit over his 22-year career in the majors? Think it over, and let's see if you know the answer.












The correct answer is 762 home runs. I will admit that I got both of these numbers wrong when I first tried to remember them. And that right there is the crime of all the steroided-up players over the past 15 years or so in Major League Baseball. These guys have literally ruined the tradition of the game, the game with far and away the best tradition of all four major sports in this country. Baseball has always been the most traditional, the most historic and the most statistic-laden of the sports in America, and now these cheating a-holes have ruined that. Forever.

Try in your mind to go back 15 years or so, to the early 1990s. Did you know then what the single-season home run record was? Of course you did. Everyone did. 61 homers by Roger Maris, besting Babe Ruth's previous record of 60 homers. And let's see...did you know the career home run record? Of course! 755, Hank Aaron. 715, Babe Ruth. 660, Willie Mays. Everybody knew these hallowed numbers, the stuff of legends, literally. How could you not know these things, growing up as a baseball fan in this country? Those records were real, and they were everything. The fact that you know the best average in the past 80 years is Ted Williams' .406 in 1941, or the 61 homers hit by Roger Maris, or the 755 home runs hit by Hank Aaron in his career, that's precisely what has made baseball America's pasttime, and exactly what set it apart from all other sports in this country.

Now, all that is gone. If I don't even know Barry Bonds' 762 home run total, then lord knows that kids today won't be growing up knowing it either. Shit, when it's time I will be teaching my girls that Hank Aaron is the home run king, with 755 home runs, before a bunch of cheating losers came along and defiled the game and the richest history of any sport widely played in America. So the days of growing up with these numbers etched into our minds are dead and gone forever. All because of a bunch of tiny-dicks (literally) and their unstoppable need to cheat and to push things further into excess than they ever needed to go.

It's sad, really, how similar this all sounds to what led us to the massive financial crisis we are facing right now as a country as well, isn't it? People's greed, their insatiable appetite for excess, has led us to do innumerable stupid things in countless aspects of our existence over the past generation, from our Presidents chasing blowies from fat Jewish chicks instead of Osama Bin Laden, right down to the average joe who takes out the $350,000 "liar loan" adjustable-rate mortgage that he can't possibly afford in realistic terms. The people of this country, and the world at large, have been treated over the past 10-20 years to an absolute clinic on what unbridled, unregulated greed and excess leads to if left unchecked for long enough. One can only hope that this is a lesson that we as a people will figure out how to stop repeating in the future.

Before I go for the day, is there anybody in America (outside of Raleigh-Durham) who does not flat-out love watching Duke lose a college basketball game, any game at all? I've got plenty of people who I wouldn't talk to if we were on a plane together that was going down, but I'll be damned if Duke losing for the fourth straight time to UNC at home doesn't bring warmth to the heart and shared smiles to even the bitterest of enemies. My college basketball team may suck balls this year, but the NCAAs will always be fun and interesting for me when there are the hated Dookies and their dorkass coach to root against.