Man, that was quick

Friday morning, I'm writing confidently about the Cardinal's chances to win against Texas.

Monday evening, or about 80 hours later if you're keeping score, the Trees have been embarrassed by Texas, which was in turn embarrassed by Memphis, and the season is over. Oh, and the best two players, not to mention collectively over half the team's offense, are skipping town.

That, friends, is a crummy weekend. 

Although my disciplined failure to pick Stanford over Texas in that game might end up earning me the big bucks in the office pool if Kansas wins the whole thing. I actually aced that region, which is nice since I blew five picks in each of the other three, for a solidly mediocre 75% prediction rate. From this point on, I promise that I will not refer to anything office-pool-related until next spring, because rule #1 of office pools is that absolutely no one but you cares about your success or failure in them.

Looking back at the Texas game, I'm wondering where my analysis broke down. I'm not sure it did, other than that Texas shot a whole lot better than Stanford did. The Cardinal were, trying to remember here, something like 10 of 55 on the game on jump shots, which is utterly horrific. Virtually all of their points came on layups and tip-ins. Good teams simply won't give you enough of those to win a game in which you give up more than about 50 points (I include the caveat so as not to be disproven by the UCLA-Texas A&M game from last weekend).

One thing I definitely remember-- both teams had an identical number of shots from the field. Texas made 10 more of them. That's really bad, particularly when you consider that Texas is not a particularly hot-shooting team in its own right. For one night, anyway, Stanford was just ice cold. Brook Lopez tried to carry the team, but he fatigued down the stretch under the pressure of designated fatso Dexter Pittman, and no one, his brother included (Robin was a -20 in points for this game when he was on the floor) picked him up.

Now comes the news that Robin Lopez is declaring for the NBA along with his brother. The loss of Brook was as much of a lock as anything in college ball, so I can't really be despondent about it, but I feel like Robin is making a mistake here. His stats for this year are significantly depressed by the fact that Brook played so many minutes and took up such a high percentage of the team's offense. His offensive rating was actually not much lower than his brother's, although ratings do tend to go down with greater possession usage, so take that with a grain of salt.

But imagine the kinds of numbers he could put up playing 30 minutes a game as the primary inside scorer, rebounder and shot-blocker. Probably not equal to Brook's this year on the offensive end, but it's hardly a stretch to envision 15 points, 10 boards and 4 blocks a game from Robin at this level, and those are absolutely lottery-pick numbers from a 7-footer who's only 21. As it is, his much less impressive stat line from this season will not impress NBA GMs, most of whom probably have not absorbed the full range of analysis that Mssrs. Pomeroy et al have developed over the last couple of years. To be sure, he had a good NCAA tournament (and looked good on semi-national TV) and can still impress people in workouts (and he will), but I don't see him rising higher than a late first-round pick... although that does create the odd potential scenario of both him and Brook being drafted by the same height-challenged lottery team. Perhaps that's the notion they have, but I don't think it's terribly likely.

In any event, I suspect that by declaring early, he's cost himself somewhere around $3-4 million in guaranteed money when all is said and done (obviously a rough estimate, and we'll see how much it turns out to be when the draft actually rolls around). He can still play his way into the NBA-- but it's a lot easier for him to play his way out of it.

I watched the Stanford women's game tonight, which was pretty fun-- they were insanely hot shooting the ball (what, 67 percent from 3?), and Candace Wiggins, who I've decided is pretty much the most awesome athlete ever, dropped 41 points on a very good Maryland team. The team as a whole scored 98, which is near-ridiculous for a high-level women's game (for perspective, the other regional today was 56-50). It's going to take a near-repeat effort AND better defense to beat UConn, which already beat the Stanford women on a neutral court earlier in the year. So, uh, go Rutgers, I guess.

Still, it's nice to see her break through to the Final Four. She deserves the chance to be honored on that kind of stage. I might post a wrap of that game once it's over, or perhaps a mixed Final Four Saturday/Stanford women wrapup on Sunday. I'd better write as much as I can in the next 8 days, because after that it's a prolonged college hoops wasteland until next fall (and given how the roster looks right now, probably more like fall of 2009... although perhaps that's a good thing considering that I'll be in law school next fall and probably pretty busy). We'll see whether the muse takes me.

Breaking Down the Horns

Let's go position by position to analyze this matchup.

PG: D.J. Augustin-- Alright, if you care at all about college basketball, you know who this guy is. Close to 20 points a game, deadly range, and great passing ability. An underrated part of his game, and of Texas's game in general, is that on offense they virtually never turn the ball over. (This is actually true in reverse for them defensively-- they don't turn people over much. I'd expect a pretty clean game tonight.) He's not an excessively efficient scorer (1.34 points per shot) but Texas's strong offensive rebounding game helps this out somewhat. He's unquestionably a great assist man-- 5.8 assists a game. Texas clearly has the edge here matchup-wise, and I'd expect to see Anthony Goods given Augustin as a defensive assignment.

SG: A.J. Abrams-- For a guy with as pure a stroke as this guy, you would expect him to post better than 1.20 points per shot. That's efficient enough, I guess, but it doesn't really seem to warrant the hype around him. He's not a slasher (60% of his field goal attempts are 3s) which will make him much easier for Stanford to defend than Jerel McNeal. Still, they can't give him open looks. This position is an edge for Texas, but not as much of one as one might think. Johnson, who lacks quickness but is otherwise a good defender, will probably man up with him.

SF/Wing: Damion James-- Justin Mason typically plays most of the minutes as the #3 guard. I don't think he'll be seeing a lot of action today, though, because Texas will have to put bigs on the floor to stop the Lopez twins. James is a dynamic rebounder, averaging a double-double. He's also a knockdown 3-point threat, making it the more odd that he can't shoot free throws. He's just 56% on the season. At 6-7, he'll have a height edge over Fred Washington, meaning that Fred's goal will be to push him to the perimeter rather than allow him to post up and collect misses. Definite edge to Texas here.

PF: Connor Atchley-- A guy who kind of came out of nowhere this year, Atchley is an efficient big who doesn't score or rebound a ton (9 points, 5 rebounds a game) but avoids turning the ball over. He's an excellent spot-up jump shooter, so he can probably pull one Lopez out of the paint if Augustin needs to drive the ball. Nonetheless, he doesn't have remotely close to Brook Lopez's scoring power and ability to take over the game. Huge edge for Stanford here.

C: By committee-- A group of guys including the big, big, big Dexter Pittman, the lanky but undersized Alexis Wangmene, and Gary Johnson (OK, some of these are not literally going to be playing the 5, but it's the best way to conceptualize the group). It's hard to characterize this bunch-- let's just say that they combine for about 10 points and 8 rebounds, which is decent, but are undersized. Big edge to Robin Lopez, who's developed his offensive game to go along with what should be a major defensive edge at this position.

Overall I actually like this game better from a matchup standpoint for Stanford than I did Marquette. Texas plays a lot of zone defense and doesn't force turnovers, meaning that Stanford should be able to get post entries to the Lopezes and rack up offensive rebounds, not to mention move the ball on the perimeter so that they can get open shots there. Texas is good at challenging shots but not particularly great at other aspects of defense, and since Stanford can't shoot anyway, their offense may not be overly affected by this.

On the defensive end, Texas has a lot more spot-up shooting than Marquette does-- Augustin is a great guard in all respects, of course, but Abrams is an outside guy and Justin Mason, their usual third guard, probably won't play as much as usual due to matchup issues. Atchley is hugely outclassed athletically by the Lopezes, so most of their frontcourt production is going to have to come from James. Overall I think the smaller number of threats enables Stanford to create pseudo-double teams (a guard and a Lopez) on inside shots without as much fear of Texas exploiting a mismatch somewhere else. Texas is not an up-tempo team, which really plays into Stanford's hands-- while not as slow as Stanford, Texas was below average in possessions per game this year.

However, let's not kid ourselves. Texas is a very good team and they're playing a semi-home game. The latter, plus the generally higher quality of Texas's players, certainly makes this game no easier to win than the Marquette game and probably a bit harder. Stanford is the underdog here, but not by as much, perhaps, as one might think.

Pac-10 note: Washington State fell yesterday; they were simply outclassed by North Carolina's scoring ability. I'd like to recognize just how good their senior class was this year. That program had nothing-- but nothing-- when Low, Weaver and Cowgill showed up. Their steady improvement and the great coaching of the Bennetts turned that program completely around. My hat is off to them.

Match Point

Meaning:

1. The final point in a tennis, volleyball, or other volley sport which, if won by the leading side, will result in a victory for that side,
2. A somewhat clever and ironically appropriate Woody Allen film which includes Scarlett Johannsen (who I still cannot believe is not at least 30 years old by now, and no, that's not a comment on her looks, obviously) and several musings on the role of luck in human affairs, viewed by the author a week or so ago,
3. The new Official March Madness Certified Greatest Shot in Stanford History (eclipsing the absurd Nick Robinson runner to beat Arizona and keep the unbeaten season alive in February 2004).

Stanford 82, Marquette 81 (OT)

I don't know how much more there is to say about the game. Obviously, I was both right (that these teams were a razor's edge apart talent-wise) and wrong (in thinking mid-game that the game would fall on the other side of said razor's edge). Perhaps if I keep at the writing thing long enough, I can learn to contain my neuroses a bit better-- or perhaps not; it may be unavoidable. I still have no idea whatsoever who would win a seven game series between the two teams. I do know that there's no possible way such a series could have been this gut-wrenching, thrilling and historic unless it went to game seven, which is why March Madness is unbelievably awesome and the NBA playoffs, frankly, suck.

I'm sure there will be more pseudo-mystical musings on the nature of luck and its long-term effects once the season is over, but right now there are still more games to play. I'll be back in the next day or two with a full breakdown of Texas and a matchup analysis. My first glance take is that Texas may actually be a better matchup, because they're more dependent on stationary shooters than penetrators, and because their depth sucks, particularly in the frontcourt. Augustin is still a huge problem, though.

Incidentally, the Pomeroy Ratings see this game as a literal coin flip-- 50% for each team. It's going to be mighty fun, and unlike the agonizing runup to last Saturday, at this point the Cardinal are playing with house money-- they've gotten over the second-round hump, they've gotten as far as their seed indicates they ought to and they're playing a higher-seeded opponent. There's nothing to lose-- and no talking head can ever take away the glorious reality of Saturday's finish.

What was that about the nightmare scenario again?

Halftime, Marquette up by 6 points. Stanford can't hit outside shots (Anthony Goods had, I think, one point in the half), Brook Lopez is in foul trouble, and the defense has completely fallen apart over the last 10 minutes or so, as Marquette scores at will on penetration and kickouts.

Oh, and Trent Johnson, who had been changing up defenses on the fly to try to keep Marquette contained, just got tossed from the game on consecutive technicals (following, I might add, a truly atrocious call in which a Marquette player who tripped trying to split a double team inexplicably received a foul against Lawrence Hill). This handed Marquette four points, by the way, and they promptly proceeded to reel off a bunch more before Stanford finally got things under control to end the half down only six.

This is one of those "Cassandra moments" where you predict the worst, no one else apparently seems to notice, and then it happens exactly like you expected it to. At least it will probably all be over in an hour. Unfortunately, so will the college career of Brook Lopez, and quite possibly that of his brother as well. What a shitty way to go out.

Feel free to panic now

Yes, the nightmare scenario for Cardinal fans has come to pass-- despite getting a 3-seed in the Tournament, the team is matched up in the second round with an opponent which is a. guard-dominated, creating a mismatch (upsets happen far more in mismatches than in situations where teams play similar styles), b. faster and press-happy (we saw how well that worked out last season), and c. severely underseeded (Marquette ranks 12th in the Pomeroy rankings at last count).

Stanford 77, Cornell 53

Some quick thoughts on this game before I move on to the real heart of the matter, the Marquette breakdown/panic attack:

Ivy League quick is nothing like Pac-10 quick. Stanford's players were sticking like glue to virtually every Cornell player, with the result that until the scrubs came in at about the 30-minute mark, Cornell barely got off an open shot of any kind. Louis Dale, the Ivy League player of the year, went approximately 0-for-50 in the first half, and their other shooters weren't doing a heck of a lot better.

If Stanford can bottle some of their outside shooting from this game and sprinkle it over the court before Saturday's throwdown, they should win easily. It's been a while since the team looked like a genuinely good shooting club from beyond about 10 feet, but all three of the major outside threats (Anthony Goods, Landry Fields, and Kenny Brown) knocked down a couple of 3s.

The team continues to suffer some rebounding lapses at times on the defensive end, which I find kind of inexplicable. For the first, eh, 10 minutes or so, Cornell was hanging around on the glass. Eventually the team exerted themselves, but given how well Marquette rebounded against Kentucky, they're going to need to avoid lapses like that or risk finding themselves on the short end of scoring runs. Both of the last two losses (UCLA in the Pac-10 tourney, USC the week before) were at least partly the result of being severely outworked in rebounding by smaller teams.

Now, the panic-mongering:

Granted, Stanford has played and beaten guard-happy pressing teams before, but none of this caliber. Dominic James is healthy and looks as explosive as ever, on top of which he's shooting well from outside. Jerel McNeal is like a sped-up arcade version of Louis Dale, the guy Stanford disposed of yesterday. And while none of their players is very tall, they have some Joevan Catron-type long-armed guys to at least confuse the issue on the glass and allow for gang-rebounding.

The keys to the game are very simple-- shoot well, avoid turnovers against what will inevitably be a strong press, and find a way to stop guard penetration. These are the three things that this Stanford team, otherwise an extremely strong squad, is the absolute worst at doing. They'll get some easy buckets for the Lopez twins, but I'm not even sure they're going to be able to put both of them on the floor at once. Perhaps a station-to-station approach could beat the press, using the Lopezes as "bases" for the smaller guys to work around to move the ball upcourt? As far as I know, this has never really been tried.

In the halfcourt defense, I think the team is going to have to use a zone. It sucks that Marquette is going to get open 3s off of it, but the alternative-- tons of layups and fouls on the Lopez twins-- is that much worse.

Let me put this in as blunt of terms as possible. I think Marquette is the favorite in this game. Not by a huge amount, mind you-- it's basically a coin flip. But the favorite nonetheless. It's hard to believe that Stanford could have the bad luck to be paired with what's not only the most underseeded team in the entire tournament, but also a stylistic nightmare. Then again, bad luck-- in one form or another-- is pretty much the story of the NCAA tournament for Stanford since the last Elite 8 run in 2001. It's going to take real skill to play around this. Let's hope the Cards exhibit it, because I don't think I can bear to see another round of we-told-you-so finger-wagging from self-righteous media types who don't bother to look under the surface and realize that Marquette is, you know, actually frigging good at basketball.

Big Red, or Big Red 11?

That's the question that tomorrow's game will answer. (In case the reference is opaque, here's a hint. One of the Stanford players is number 11. I'll let you guess which one.)

OK, so Cornell really shouldn't be able to hang in this game. That doesn't mean they won't, of course. This is March Madness. Here's the deal on Cornell-- they're a highly balanced offensive team whose offense stems from the play of their point guard. He averages about 13 points a game, shoots 90 percent on his free throws (and gets quite a number of them) and dishes to the team's leading scorer, a 6-6 sharpshooting wing of the species forwardus midmajorus. Translation-- he's a knockdown shooter but no threat off the bounce.

So you've got your defensive matchups. Anthony Goods needs to play good perimeter D on Cornell's point, while Freddy Washington and Lawrence Hill dog the small forward position to prevent any open looks from the outside. Sounds simple enough. Cornell also deploys a 7-footer, kind of a project player but one who's put together a pretty nice season despite having spent his first 2.5 seasons of athletic eligibility on the bench at two separate colleges. Somewhere about December, the coach called him up and he responded. I think Stanford can pretty much shut off penetration from Cornell's exterior, meaning the game will hinge on their ability to pressure the 3-point arc.

The key Stanford offensive player? I'm going to say Robin Lopez, who's going to be guarded by a man who is several inches shorter than he is. If Robin can make Cornell pay for double-teaming his brother, Stanford should have a pretty easy time scoring in the paint. There's little reason for Stanford to go extensively to the outside shooting game in this one. I like the concept of shooting high-arc midrange shots which will bounce high off the rim if they don't go down-- Mitch Johnson is pretty good at this-- and letting the Lopezes play volleyball on the interior.

Overall this is a strong matchup for the Cardinal, but no game in the tournament is easy. Meanwhile, all Stanford fans need to dig out their rabbits' feet for the first game of the Anaheim set, in which Marquette (very good team, horrible matchup) plays Kentucky (mediocre team, near autowin). Somehow Kentucky has clawed their way into the picture this season after being essentially left for dead at the side of the road in early January. Can they claw one more win out of this season? Best hope so. Marquette's perimeter quickness is going to shred Stanford's defense. If the team has a bad shooting game in that putative matchup, or Marquette puts on a lot of full-court pressure, it could get ugly.

Speaking of big, red and the numeral 1, the Big Red One is the longest serving divisional combat unit in the U.S. Army and served a major role in World War II, fighting in North Africa, Sicily and at Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings. This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but at least you can say you learned something.

Bracket Thoughts

Some general notes on the bracket before I dive into the Stanford-Cornell pairing:

1. As some have noted, the committee did a really, really bad job of creating interesting mid-major vs. high-major matchups. Consider this: in the bracket, there are seven teams seeded 8 or better that are not from a Big Six conference.

Guess how many of those are playing major-conference opponents. Answer: two. One of those is the bizarre Xavier-Georgia matchup which came about because of an automatic bid. The other one is an 8-9 game.

Quite frankly, this bugs me. It seriously limits the number of predicted mid-over-high wins in the tournament. It's very possible-- depending on the matchups-- that there may not be a single game in the tournament where a non-BCS team other than Memphis or Xavier is actually a favorite over a BCS team.

It took me literally a minute to figure out a scenario where Drake plays Villanova instead of Western Kentucky. (Switch those two, then switch UConn and Vandy.) Butler-South Alabama could have been fixed (and another anomaly avoided, see below) by simply flipping Arizona and USA! Arkansas and Kent State can then be flipped to eliminate another needless mid-mid pairing.

I don't have much of a problem with treating Xavier and Memphis like high-majors, since they basically are. Ditto Gonzaga, which would easily be Davidson's biggest scalp in recent memory. But seriously... Drake-WKU? I thought BracketBusters was a month ago.

2. Someone please pass a rule exempting West Coast schools from the 9:30 AM time slot. Saint Mary's and Gonzaga are massively disadvantaged in their first-round games by this factor. (Gonzaga gets to play a semi-away game to boot... see below.) So is Portland State, if anyone cares. There's just no reason why those games have to be put in those time slots.

3. What looked like an anomaly last year (Louisville getting Texas A&M in Kentucky) now appears to be a full-blown, ugly trend. Far too many lower seeds are gaining advantages by receiving cushy draws close to home. It's not quite as bad as the women's tournament, where if you're lucky enough to host you get home games even if you're a 12 seed, but it's getting there. There are, depending on how you reckon it, between 4 and 6 "semi-home" games in the first round. 2-4 of those are #1 seeds. The others are a pair of #10 seeds, which is ludicrous.

Ultimately, these gaffes give the bracket an air of rushed carelessness, which is exactly what you'd expect. The committee had to create eight contingency plans for games on the last day. Is it any surprise that these weren't exactly well thought out?

It just makes no sense to me that the selection show has to immediately follow as soon as the last game is done. Seriously, CBS, would it kill you to give them a frigging hour to look things over and tweak the bracket to produce better matchups? I spent, max, 5 minutes figuring out a small number of bracket tweaks that would have made a far more interesting bracket (IMHO, of course). I understand that this year the conference tournaments were a perfect storm of nightmare scenarios (literally a perfect storm, in the SEC case), so I don't really blame the committee. I do blame CBS. Do they have such contempt for their viewers that they think an hour of pre-selection debate and discussion would destroy the show's audience? I just can't see that happening. People will tune in because they want to see where their team is playing, whether it's on at 3 pm, 4 pm or 4 am. (The latter not suggested for other reasons.)

Oh well. At least it makes my 7-10 upset picks easy.