Sports Then and Now

Seeding the Underdog Lover’s Best Tournament Ever

33-year-old Brad Stephens has led Butler to the Final Four.

The only thing that would have made March Madness an absolute straight flush for underdog fans is Duke losing to Baylor last night. But they came close enough for underdog fans. And this being the tournament in my memory with the most upsets and the most low seeds advancing to the Sweet 16 makes it the Underdog Lover’s best tournament ever.

The great thing about being an underdog fan is that even a nail biter, having to wait until the last minute to know the outcome of a David/Goliath match-up is almost as good as victory.

Now that Duke enters the Final Four as the only surviving one-seed, underdog lovers everywhere can begin focusing our voodoo attacks on a single target and hope to see them crash in the semi’s.

Before going any further with our March Madness analysis, it is necessary to explain the criteria we use to evaluate underdogs in a sort of reverse seeding. In other words, the top seeded dog would be the lowest seeded competitor.

What Makes an Underdog?

There are classic underdogs, and there are relative underdogs. That is why we can only get excited, early in the tournament, about the smaller schools, the long-shots, and the new arrivals.

For the first round we favor “Firsts,” “Worsts,” “Small,” and “The Wall.” Read the rest of this entry →

Cornell made it to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history.

Whenever it was going to come to an end, the Cornell Men’s Basketball team wasn’t going to go quietly this year. The most successful season in program history saw the Big Red post victories over Alabama, Massachusetts, Vermont, Davidson, and St. Johns in the regular season. After winning its’ third straight Ivy League Championship it was onto the NCAA Tournament for the third straight year where they notched their first ever NCAA win with a 78-65 victory over fifth-seeded Temple.

Their second ever NCAA win followed with an impressive 87-69 win over Big Ten foe Wisconsin (No. 4 seed) which sent Cornell to their first ever NCAA Sweet 16, the first Ivy League school to do so since Penn in 1979. Along the way, The Big Red set a school and Ivy League record with 29 victories, finishing 29-5. While Cornell’s NCAA Tournament run ended with a 62-45 loss to top-seeded Kentucky in the NCAA East Regional Semifinals at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY on Thursday March 25, the Big Red played with Kentucky nearly the whole game. Refusing to let the Wildcats run away with it, Cornell gave a spirited performance behind the leadership of its’ senior laden team and 10-year veteran head coach, Steve Donahue.

To say the 12th-seeded Big Red were the underdog against Kentucky would be accurate, but not do Cornell justice. Being the lowest seeded team to reach the Sweet 16 certainly meant that they were going to face tougher competition. Yet it didn’t bother the Big Red.

This was a team that took preseason No. 1 Kansas to the wire this year on the Jayhwaks’ home court before coming up on the short end, 71-66. Kansas earned the tournament’s top overall seed and was favored by many to win it
all before losing to ninth-seeded Northern Iowa 69-67 in the second round. Against Kenutcky, the Big Red was in the game nearly the  whole 40 minutes and controlled the tempo throughout the majority of the game.

Read the rest of this entry →

While John Calipari may be on the verge of his third Final Four, according to NCAA records, his teams have never been there.

As the amount of time superstar athletes spend in college has dwindled over the last couple decades, the NCAA and high profile member schools have recognized that it is coaches and not the players that will ensure long-term success and continued billion dollar television payouts.

What that has created is a culture where often the most powerful person on campus is not the President or even the Athletic Director, but instead the marquee football or basketball coach.

The salaries for top-level head coaches have grown to the point where many of them are paid more money than it takes to run some entire departments at the colleges they represent.

These mega-salaries have come with a price. The pressure on coaches to win now is so great that it appears the days of coaches staying 20 or 30 years at the same institution is going the way of the two-handed bounce pass.

While there still are a few coaches enjoying success that have been at the same school for more than two decades like  Joe Paterno and Frank Beamer in college football and Jim Boeheim and Mike Krzyzewski in basketball, they are becoming the exception, rather than the rule.

Instead, the hot coaches are those like Lane Kiffin, Nick Saban and John Calipari who are little more than mercenaries hopping from job to job and pillaging all the riches during their stop.

The tale of Calipari, who is poised to reach the final four with a young Kentucky team that features a number of freshmen seemingly destined to spend just one year in college basketball, is a perfect example of how while schools certainly want to run a clean program, the most important thing is winning on the court. Read the rest of this entry →

Cornell faithful cheer on their Cinderella team.

Back in the day when I was not even a teenager yet, I developed a strong interest for sports. Soccer was my first interest and the first sport that I played competitively. Soon to follow was football, basketball, volleyball, softball, baseball, field hockey, and swimming.

While I did not compete in all these sports, playing just some leisurely, I had developed a fascination for sports to include even croquet, ping pong, badminton and bowling. Growing up in Ithaca, NY, the small city did not have any minor league, major college, amateur, or professional teams. To this day it still does not.

Cornell University and Ithaca College have provided most of the local sports scene along with the high schools generation after generation after generation. Ithaca College has won three Division III national championships in football (last in 1991) and Cornell has won three national titles in lacrosse (last in 1977) while reaching that sport’s final four two of the last three years. Coaches like the late Jim Butterfield of Ithaca College football and Richie Moran, who coached Cornell lacrosse back in the 1970’s, stand tall in the history of the schools. Read the rest of this entry →

Northern Iowa is just one of several lower seeds that have crashed the party at the 2010 NCAA Tournament.

Whew, it is finally time to catch your breath after an amazing weekend of college basketball in the first two rounds of the Division I Men’s Championship.

As could be expected considering the lack of great play among the top conferences this season, the opening games included lots of surprises and big names going home early.

Below are some observations from the opening rounds:

REVENGE OF THE MID-MAJORS: Much has been written in recent years about how the five BCS conferences seem determined to conquer the college sports world. They have made it almost impossible for a non-BCS league school to win the College Football Championship and have also done everything possible to ensure that as much money from the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament stays with the big boys as possible.

Until this season, the number of at-large teams in the tournament from non-BCS schools had been making a significant decline in recent years. That number increased to eight this year (after only four a year ago), but part of that reason was that the BCS leagues (especially the Pac 10) were appreciably weaker than in recent years. Read the rest of this entry →

Northern Iowa harassed top seeded Kansas throughout their improbable victory over the Jayhawks.

If you had any doubt that there really was no “great” team in college basketball this season, Northern Iowa’s shocking 69-67 victory over number one Kansas in the second round of the NCAA Tournament should confirm the fact.

While it isn’t the greatest upset in tournament history based on seeding, it is definitely notable simply because Kansas was the prohibitive favorite to cut down the nets in Indianapolis (40 percent of participants in ESPN’s Bracket Challenge picked the Jayhawks to win the title).

The last time the overall number one seed lost in the second round of the tournament was in 2004 when Kentucky lost to Alabama-Birmingham in the second round. Interestingly, that year was very similar to 2010 in that there were a number of very good teams, but no team considered to be great. Of the four number one seeds in that tournament (Kentucky, Duke, St. Joseph’s and Stanford), Duke was the only one to reach the Final Four and they lost in the semifinals to eventual champion Connecticut. Read the rest of this entry →