Tournament Take from Arizona

So even though I am out in Arizona for spring training baseball (article to come), I still think I need to give a quick opinion on the NCAA tournament selection before the field is set Sunday. The Pac-10 is by far the best conference in the country and 7 teams (Arizona, ASU, Oregon, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and Washington State) all deserve tournament bids.

The Pac-10 plays a balanced schedule where every team plays each other in the conference at home and then on the road. There is no escaping Pac-10 play; there’s no getting lucky by not having to play a difficult opponent twice. In other conferences, teams can have the fortune of not facing a difficult opponent twice or even just on the road once.

For example the Big 12 only plays 16 conference games, thus allowing each team to avoid 6 teams twice. The same goes for the ACC, whose conference also has 4 out of 12 teams with losing records. The Big Ten has 5 out of 11 teams with losing records and each team doesn’t play 2 teams twice.

Teams in the Big East have inflated records that make them look better due to beating up inferior teams that don’t even belong in the league. The Big East has 6 out of their 16 teams with losing records. The Pac-10 has 1 of 10 teams with a losing record. So where teams in the Big East, Big Ten, and ACC get easy victories, which allows their overall record to look better than a team from the Pac-10. However, a Pac-10 team has to grind out each and every game of league play with only one weak conference opponent on the schedule.

A team like Arizona took on the toughest schedule in the country this year, taking on Kansas and Memphis on the road, as well as beating Texas A&M at home. Arizona then had to take on the Pac-10 conference schedule, and ended the season with a very respectable 19-13 overall record for such a tough schedule.

West Virginia played no ranked opponents on the road and lost to the two BCS conference opponents they scheduled at home. In the Big East a team plays only three teams twice during the season. The three teams West Virginia took on were USF, Providence, and St. John’s. So West Virginia was able to skate through conference play by not having to face the upper tier teams in conference more than once.

Oregon has taken on a difficult schedule winning at Kansas State. They finished with 18-12, 9-9. They have a better tournament resume than another Big East school, Villanova. (Who I am a fan due to spending the night in their campus drunk tank, even though I have no recollection of the night, when I visited a friend my sophomore year.) Villanova played no ranked teams as well as playing no BCS conference opponents on the road. They played Syracuse and Pitt twice (both respectable but not the elite of the conference) and also got to beat up on Depaul twice. Villanova finished with a 20-11, 9-9 record. Oregon clearly comes off as the better team of the two by playing a much tougher schedule and only accumulating one more loss. They also had the same conference record in a much more difficult conference.

I hope the selection committee does the right thing (put 7 Pac-10 teams in the tourney) and reward teams for scheduling difficult opponents, for scheduling road games, and for playing a full conference schedule.

Ugliest Men in Basketball

1. Lorenzo Mata UCLA
2. Charlie Villanueva Milwaukee Bucks
3. Josh Boone New Jersey Nets

Boone and Villanueva played together at UConn to create ugliest front-court in the history of basketball. They only reason it appeared they were credited with playing defense was because opponents were too frighten from the slight of these ugly men to drive inside.

Chase Budinger is a candidate for this list, but I wouldn’t want to throw a fellow La Costa Canyon alumnus under the bus. Even though these guys weren’t blessed with looks, they will/due have money. As normal folks may not have millions of dollars at the age of 20 like these guys, but at least we don’t have to worry about girls trying to get a large child support check every month. But I do someday plan to make my millions someday, maybe by 25, 27, or 40.

Please send me submissions for this list.