Friday, March 19, 2010

Random NCAA tourament thoughts...



Welcome to the NCAA tournament, where half the fans at the arena are dressed as empty seats! Some of these arenas are half full at best.

Just remember sports fans, first round upsets, while exciting, lead to crappy 2nd round and Sweet 16 games.

Did not watch the afternoon games, but apperantly Villanova lucked out for the 2nd straight year. Otherwise the Big East would have been winless on day 1.

Good to see Eddie Munster, I mean Billy Donovan, cashed in on his 2 NCAA titles with two straight NIT appearances and a 1st round NCAA exit. Its looking like Anthony Grant was a bigger key to his success day after day, since he recruited all those kids to Gainesville for the national title runs before leaving for VCU. I bet Billy wishes he had kept the Orlando Magic job.

Bruce Pearl must be livin right. Draws the incompetent Steve Fisher & SDSU in round 1 and now get a 14 seed Ohio in round 2. He's headed to his 5th Sweet 16 in 6 years between UT and UWM.


As for today, I'll be watching the Temple game and thats it. Taking the kids to the Alabama Gymnastics (#1) meet this evening vs Michigan (#10).

Temple-Cornell Preview: This shoould be a great game between two underseeded teams. Temple should be atleast a 4, probably a 3 and Cornell is atleast a 10 or better.

I was thinking about this last night, but outside of the SEC and Temple, I really can't name any players on any of these teams, except for Cornell, mainly because I watched them come into Coleman and beat Alabama 71-67.

Louis Dale is an excellent point guard from Alabama (again, Jeff Lebo, Mark Gottfried, why did you not recruit this kid) and matches up well with Temple's Juan Fernandez. Ryan Brooks should cancel out Whitman (kid shoots like Jimmy Chitwood) for Cornell on the outside which takes us to the post players. Temple's inside game is much improved compared to the past two years, they can actually score and run plays for the inside men. They did a good job running sets in the A-10 Tournament. Problem is Cornell has a 7 foot center, who doesn't score much but he bothers alot of shots in the middle. Considering Temple is very deliberate on offense, he could disrupt the Owls.

Other concerns, Fran Dunphy is 1-8 in NCAA games, granted 6 of those losses came at Penn. His lone win is over Nebraska, but does that really count?

60= number of point Temple has been holding their opponents under during this win streak. See no reason for this to change today. Tough game, but hopfully the cherry and white will pull it out against the trendy 5/12 upset pick, Temple 62-57.

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