No winning for tt.

And Butler beats ODU.....just saying.

I...

am...

WINNING and will be for the next 2 posts :-).

Sorry, Ashley, but IC is winning. You and I are the last two people to post.

wo, fasces, just found out that you were the Turkey in the game "YAY GUNBOAT", i was the england that survived in edinburg and clyde. we r both survivors!!

@Ashleygirl: That Buttler player did not get that shot off in time.
(I know how I spelled it)

gopher can't win

As someone who remembers the first round of 1989, does this mean that Calipari will never again come close to winning championship? As someone who remembers 1996, does this mean that Calipari is about to slide into ignominy and coaching at Rhode Island?

I wasnt even born yet in either of those dates... :P

This thread needs to dominate the top.

Then I feel sorry for you for having never seen good college basketball......or traditional big man centered NBA basketball.

so a computer programmer is going to hell, and he is stopped at the gates by satan, who demands payment. When the programmer asks why, Satan says: "syntax"

Good morning.

hardly

And I didn't start paying attention to college basketball until the season after George Mason went into the final four, so I missed that great Cinderella run, and I didn't start watching nba until a few seasons before, I believe the first season Steve Nash was in phoenix.

289

The second time, I assume?

So you missed Steve Nash's college moment when he crushed my Wildcat loving adolescent heart.

GMU was only really possible because college basketball had already gone to shit. The only real Cinderella I can think of from the before the post-Fab Five collapse of college basketball was Providence, and they only happened because of a rule change and the fact that it took a year or two for everyone else to adjust to the new rules. The fact that Pitino ran to the NBA demonstrated that he knew it was a fluke. His later dominance at Kentucky showed that his "system" was the dominant paradigm for the post-'86 rule changes and worked well with talent, especially as big man play declined after Chris Webber. Hell, even Tubby could win running it. Now talent is so thin and so little real development is going on that is it relatively easy for the Little Sisters of the Poor and Meek to make runs.

But I find it so interesting that in all of the hoopla about the Fab Five of late and especially these kabuki discussions of "blackness" that no one has pointed out how Chris Webber effective ended John Thompson's coaching career. The displacement of the quintessential "Strong Black Man" in the wake of "hip hop generation punks" has always to me been the real story of that episode, even more so than Webber's galling and near pathological dishonesty. I mean people occasionally talk about the world passing Bobby Knight by, but the story of Thompson is so much clearer.

I think that the Lebron James era of signing people straight out of high school paired with far fewer athletes staying for four years has also caused more Cinderellas. Granted, people were signed out of high school before Lebron, but for a few years, it became hot right after his signing. IIRC, the fab five were some of the first to ditch en masse after two years too. Programs like George Mason and Northern Iowa have players more dedicated to playing ball at the NCAA level, so they're succeeding more now than they did in previous years.

So far, I've only missed three in round one of the tourney, putting me tied for first in my group.

However.

Two of those three are in my final four, and one of them was my overall winner. Now, granted, that was because I'm a Spartan through and through and must pick Michigan State to win it all every year, but it's never failed me as badly as it did this year.

Webber was the only one who left after 2 years. But the fact that a big man dominated as a freshman was a sea changing event. You have to remember that Webber as a freshman was the third or fourth best player in college basketball. He would have been a top 5 pick coming out as a freshman (along side Shaq, Mourning, Laettner and Jim Jackson). It is hard to imagine in a post-LeBron era how revolutionary that was. Big men need time to develop and Webber's precocity made him draftable. Once Webber made young big men "draftable" in a manner that only swing men should be, it radically changed the bargaining solution between NBA teams and young big men, given that the evaluation of their talent involves far more "noise" than swing men. Ironically, this incentivized big men declaring for the draft as early as possible as all agents benefit from the inability of teams to evaluate them. The 3 year rookie contract destroys the incentive for teams to invest in developing big men who then leave. And since they are all leaving early or skipping college, where they typically used to be developed at Georgetown and Houston, the value of big men then increases forcing NBA teams to take bigger risks to grab big men who are declining in absolute ability. Enter Darko, Greg and Yao. College basketball used to be dominated by big men factories like UCLA, Georgetown, Kansas, Louisville and Houston. UCLA and Kansas have managed to reinvent themselves almost totally, but the others are shadows of their former selves. I am not convinced at all that Tim Duncan is really a great big man so much a well developed big man relative to the previous era. Most big men enter the NBA completely undeveloped and no team has an incentive or the coaching personnel to truly develop big men, so many wash out. I am not at all convinced that there has been the kind of decline in talent that results would seem to indicate. Look at the NBA drafts on Wikipedia ending in 1992 and those since and just look at the Centers and Power Forwards. I haven't checked, but I think Dwight Howard lead the league in blocks with a total that was like half of what Mark Eaton used to put up. And I doubt any body here even knows who Mark Eaton is. He certainly isn't in the Hall of Fame. As a Rockets fan, I have no (and never had any) hesitation in saying that Yao Ming is Ralph Sampson and Yao could reasonably end up in the Hall of Fame.

I've had bigger corn's in me crap!

http://vdiplomacy.com/board.php?gameID=935

Bigger than Yao Ming or Mark Eaton? Either way, how'd you live through the process?

Happy Friday all!!

What is all this basketball talk.

Wow, leave it to gopher to overanalyze something to the point where every ounce of fun is sucked out of it.

Just kiddin'. :)

Butterhead's winning, so hopefully he can forgive me.

Is Morehead State in Tennessee or Kentucky? Did every team from Tennessee lose in the first round?