The Shailesh-tival

Yesterday I’m flying back to Detroit from Washington DC and I’m sitting in the airport bar at National Airport. The guy next to me is talking to the 2 guys next to him. It turns out the two guys are Michigan State alums, and the guy next to me is an Iowa alumnus, and they’re talking Big Ten smack.

Then they notice my Illinois T-shirt and I jump in on the Big Ten smack too. As it turns out Michigan State fans love Luther Head and Dee Brown (only because he went to High School with Shannon Brown) but they hate Deron Williams and James Augustine. None of this really surprised except the Deron Williams thing. Then again I’m surprised they like Dee so much considering he usually played the game of this life against them.

The other funny thing was that they thought it was so frustrating to play us because we beat them so much. I can clearly remember when Assembley Hall would be going crazy because our up-and-coming Illini were hosting the mighty Spartans who were National Title contenders year in and year out.

Anyways, this is something unique to the Big Ten and possibly the Pac-10. There is a certain level of respect that transcends athletics because every school in the Big Ten also has an incredible Academic reputation — even Ohio State.

I was just looking at prices for Final Four tickets on eBay and I was shocked to see how cheap they were. Especially after last year. But I dug a little bit deeper, I think there’s a number of things at play here:

• Distance: Last year, the total distance from all four schools to St. Louis was 1738 miles. This year, UCLA alone is more than 2000 miles from Indianapolis. Last year the schools were, on average, 431.5 miles from Saint Louis. This year, even if we remove UCLA from the equation, the schools are a total of 2199 miles from Indianapolis, or an average of 717.3 miles apiece. If we add UCLA back into that equation, the schools are 4411 miles from Indianapolis, or 1103 miles apiece.
• Participating schools. Last year featured North Carolina, and Michigan St, who are notoriously big-time basketball schools. It also featured Illinois, which has the largest alumni association and has never won an NCAA basketball title, thus leading to a very hungry fanbase. If you think I’m drinking the Orange Kool-aid in stating that argument, I’ll also add that the Illini drew 35,000 fans for their Final 4 PRACTICE SESSION on the Friday beforehand. This year, the final 4 features Florida, a school with a huge fanbase, but also a football school who has had recent success in revenue sports. Also participating is LSU, who is yet another football school, and whose fans might not have the dispensible income for a trip to Indianapolis with all that’s happened to Louisiana in the past 6 months. Finally, we have George Mason. While their enrollment is 28,874, many of these are commuter students who maybe pursuing second degrees. Also, the fact that the school is only 34 years old lends itself to having a smaller fanbase.

This isn’t a knock against any of the schools aforementioned. Noone could every seriously question the loyalty of LSU and Florida fans in my opinion. UCLA doesn’t need to prove it’s athletic history to anybody. And George Mason showed against UConn that they can easily fill an arena. I just thought it would be interesting to point out why tickets may have less demand this year.

I decided to try my hand at seeding teams for this year NCAA tournament.

(Link has been removed)

Here is the process I followed:

To seed the teams, I used 4 metrics: 1) The average of the team’s AP and Coach’s poll ranking; 2) RPI Ranking of the team; 3) Pomeroy Ranking of the team; 4) Sagarin ranking of the team. For each team, I dropped the worst ranking of the four and averaged the other three rankings. If a team was unranked in one or both polls, I automatically dropped the poll average in my average.

For instance, Illinois is number 11 in the Pomeroy, 13 in RPI, 8th on the Sagarin scale and 9th in both polls. In this process, I drop the RPI ranking and use the average of the other three, which comes to 9.33

Anyways, I did this calculation for all 31 conference champions and then took the top 34 at-large teams. I ranked all 65 teams and did my brackets using the NCAA guidelines. The only regulations I didn’t consider were avoiding non-conference rematches in early rounds, and limiting travel.

I *DID* make it a point to place teams from the same conference in the bracket correctly with respect to NCAA guidelines.

Many conference championships have not been played as of me writing this:

• Southland: This will only affect 13-16 seeded teams, thus an upset wouldn’t change things dramatically. I’ve projected Northwestern St. as the winner.
• Mountain West Conference: This will only affect 12-16 seeded teams, thus an upset wouldn’t change things dramatically. I’ve projected San Diego St. as the winner.
• Big West Conference: This will only affect 12-16 seeded teams, thus an upset wouldn’t change things dramatically. I’ve projected Pacific as the winner.
• ACC: I already have both finalists in my bracket, no matter who wins. I’ve projected Duke to win.
• Big Ten: I already have both finalists in my bracket, no matter who wins. I’ve projected Ohio St. to win.
• Big 12: I already have both finalists in my bracket, no matter who wins. I’ve projected Texas to win.
• SEC: This one is dicey. I’ve projected Florida to win this game. If they don’t win, South Carolina will be the SEC Tournament champion. They would take the place of Oklahoma State (12 seed in the Washington DC region) in the NCAA bracket.

Oh yes, in case you are wondering, my last four teams in the tournament are Texas A&M, Hofstra, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma St.

My first four out are Michigan, Air Force, Creighton and St. Joseph’s.

Edit: I just realized that I had Georgetown and Marquette in the same group of 8 (which is against the seeding rules). I shuffled some teams to fix this. I also had Illinois and Pitt swap first round pods (Illinois gets Auburn Hills, Pitt gets Dayton). Dayton is closer to both schools, but Pitt is a 2 seed and Illinois is a 3, so Illinois gets to travel further.

Yesterday Trevor and I went to East Lansing to watch the Illinois – MSU basketball game. We got to the arena about half an hour before the game and took our seats.

MSU’s arena is really nice (probably the nicest arena in the Big Ten), but I think their fans have been a little spoiled by the teams recent success. The arena never got particularly loud, except maybe till the 4 minute mark of the 2nd half. Worse yet, whenever the Illini fans in the upper deck started the ILL-INI chant, the MSU fans did nothing to drown us out.

At OSU a couple of weeks ago that was never the case.

I will say, however, that Michigan State fans are the most respectful and knowledgable fans in the Big Ten.

Trevor and I happened to be sitting right next to three other Illini fans, so that just added to the fun.

Anyways, the Illini were trailing by one at halftime, when we got to see the infamous halftime show. Roughly 20 middle aged men with beer guts came out wearing wife beater shirts, small green shorts and holding folding lawn chairs. One other man dressed just the same but wore a hat and yelled out military calls at these 20 men. Together, the men marched single file around the court a few times and did some bizarre motions with their folding chairs, similar to what you’d see a soldier doing with their rifle. This went on for roughly 10-12 minutes and the crowd simply stared at this halftime show in confused amazement. Some comments from the people around us:

• “Someday I’m going to be 70 years old and I’ll be sitting on my couch with my wife and my mind will wander back to this, and all of a sudden it’ll make sense.” – Me
• “I’ve been going to Michigan State basketball games for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything this bizarre.” – MSU fan in front of us
• “They should give the 2 points just for the halftime show.” – Me (Jamar Smith hit a 2-pointer at the end of the first half to give us a 1 point lead. The refs reviewed the play and originally said the basket counted. Later, they decided he didn’t take the shot in time)
• “No one is going to believe this when I tell them about it. I have to take a picture.” – Illini fan sitting next to us

After doing some research, I found this information about the halftime show:

What could be funnier than a group of Dad’s marching down the street with black socks, American flag boxer shorts and white tank tops? How about barking out cadence like: “She don’t know and I don’t care, I’m wearing yesterday’s underwear.” Or “All our wives say we are lazy, our laying around just drives them crazy”. Many people jump out and hand off a cool malt beverage to our group. We perform twice as hard for those people. Why wouldn’t we?

They have a website at http://www.lawnchairdads.com/.

I guess the embarrassing part of the whole situation is that, as it turns out, these guys are from Illinois.

Anyways, Illinois won the basketball game. After the game Trevor and I were driving around the MSU campus and joking about going to the Triangle house.

Right then, we drove right by the Triangle house, so we decided to pay them a visit. We rang the doorbell and one of the brother’s answered the door. It was their spring break, so the house was pretty empty, but the one brother decided to give us a tour of the house. We saw the main living areas, basement, kitchen and got some information on the house. Then, he decided to show us a room, so he opened up one of the doors and the person inside screamed, “Oh God, Nooooooooo!”

There was a confused silence for just a moment, but then the brother giving us the tour inquired, “Are you looking at porn?”

And the other MSU Triangle brother replied, “Yeah … sorry, I thought the door was locked.”

We closed the door and hurried away and continued on the tour. When we got to the next part of the house on the tour, there was an awkward moment of silence before anyone said anything.

Trevor and I went out to grab some food with 2 of the MSU Triangles. Since these brother’s were so nice to show us campus, we decided to buy pitchers at the bar. The waitress came by and I asked if I could buy a pitcher. But apparently this place doesn’t sell pitchers. They do sell ‘buckets’ of beer. Now, most of the time when you think about buying a bucket of beer, you think of an aluminum pail, with lots of ice and 6 12-oz. bottles.

I asked the woman if I could mix beers in the bucket and she gave me a blank stare. She said I could but that would be kind of wierd. At this point I was confused.

“What’s wrong with mixing beers,” I asked.

“Well nothing, I guess. It’s just I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything like that.”

At this point I am really confused so I just decide to stick with one beer, and I order a bucket of Newcastle.

A few minutes later the woman comes out with our bucket. Imagine a bucket you’d use to wash your car. Now imagine filling that bucket with beer straight from under a tap. Yes … the beer was poured directly into the bucket, like mop water.

Then we also got a pitcher that we used to scoop out the beer, a rag to wipe down the pitcher, and some glasses to pour the beer from the pitcher to the glass.

We drank a bucket of beer.

So I discovered Illini Torrent yesterday. Basically it’s a BitTorrent site that lets you exclusively download Illini clips and entire Illini games. Of course this thing became very famous during last year’s dream season in basketball.

So I downloaded some stuff, namely:

• Highlights from the NCAA elite eight Arizona game
• Season highlights
• The Georgetown game

I was at that Georgetown game and as I watched the mpeg of it, I noticed something interesting. With about 13:20 left in the 2nd half, Georgetown was shooting the 2nd of two free throws when the camera zoomed in on some Illini players. Who is in the background? Lo and behold, it’s me!!!
 
(This post used to have a screen-cap of the aforementioned image, but it’s been lost in one of the many times my blog has changed platforms.)

I love the Illini. Seriously. The Illini men’s basketball team played Penn State last night, and I didn’t want to miss the action. I called all of the sports bars near my apartment and couldn’t find a single one playing the game. Finally, I found a BW-3 about 20 minutes away had would be showing the game (which tipped off at 9:00 PM ET). Unfortunately, the Michigan State Spartans were playing at 7, and the Pistons at 8, which meant that if the Spartans game ran late, I was out of luck for Illini tip-off.

Anyways, I left the apartment at 8:10 or so and got to BW-3 at 8:30 or so. The Spartans were ahead of Northwestern comfortably with 8 minutes left to go. The Pistons had 8 minutes left in the 2nd quarter. Anyways, I figured that maybe I’d miss the first 2-3 minutes of the Illini game, but the Northwestern Wildcats started fouling the Spartans with about 7 minutes left. When the Pistons went to halftime at roughly 9:00, the Spartans still had 4 minutes left in the game. Remember, that when I started watching, both teams had roughly 8 minutes on their respective clocks.

Anyways, the Spartans finally finish off the Wildcats at 8:20 and I ask the bar to put on the Illini game. Alas, it has started snowing and their satellite dish isn’t receiving a signal. Unfortunately, I’ve already ordered my dinner. So I down my dinner and head out, hoping to catch the end of the Illini game on the internet back at home.

I walk out of the bar to find that it’s snowed about 5-6 inches in the hour I was in the bar. I slipped and slided my car back to my apartment. I took about 40 minutes, and I was seriously scared of ending up in a ditch on multiple occasions. Anyways, I get home hoping to catch the end of the Illini game and I learn that I missed the end of it.

And how did the game end? The Illini blew a 14 point lead, at home, against the worst team in the Big Ten. They trailed 66-65 with 3 seconds left. They shot a desperation 3 at the buzzer. The shot went in, Orange Krush stormed the court and then the refs reviewed the shot and it turns out the ball was still in the shooter’s hands (the name of the shooter evades me right now) at the buzzer. The shot is called off, and Penn State wins.

This leads me to a few points:

1) Northwestern University — You suck at basketball. Stop delaying the inevitable. Michigan State is way better than you, you’re not going to overcome a 15 point defecit in 7 minutes. Get off the court and let me watch the Illini.

2) DirecTV — You should look into putting heating coils on the back of the satellites, kind of like the defrost on the back window of a car. I know that when I had DirecTV, I once had to clean the accumulated snow off of the dish to get my picture. That BW-3 probably didn’t have a signal well after the storm ended.

3) Orange Krush — You people are idiots. Even if that shot does count, Penn State is not exactly Michigan State or Wisconsin. If you were one of the people who stormed the court last night, you are an embarrasment. I realize some of you had no other option because you didn’t want to get trampled, and I understand, but the rest of you are idiots. And you’ll probably never admit, but deep down, you know who you are …

On Saturday night, the Illini trailed the Arizona Wildcats 75 – 60 with 4:00 remaining in the game. The instanity that ensued will likely have a permanent place on my TiVo and is something I will not soon forget. Read the rest of this entry →

I mentioned Bruce Pearl in my last entry and I thought I’d actually go further in depth on this whole angle of the Illini game on Thursday. In the early 1990’s, the Illini and Iowa both competed to recruit Deon Thomas, who was Illinois’ Mr. Basketball. After Thomas chose Illinois, Iowa assistant coach Bruce Pearl called him to question his decision to attend Illinois. Read the rest of this entry →

Last Thursday my phone starts ringing at roughly 11:30 PM. I’m ready to go to bed but I pick it up. Its Trevor, and he has an extra ticket to see the Illini in the NCAA tournament in Indianapolis on Saturday and he’s offering it to me. I agree to go and we decide to all meet up in Champaign. Read the rest of this entry →

Illini 74
Hoyas 59

Tonight Rahul, Brian, Ben and I saw the Illini defeat the Georgetown Hoyas at the MCI center. Somehow Ticketmaster was actually good to us and we got baller seats in the 2nd row behind the press right behind the basket. The Hoyas played us well in the beginning, but we ended the first half with a 12-2 run and never looked back. We led by as many as 20 before finally winning by 15. Read the rest of this entry →