March Madness 2023: May Recap

Let me start this off by acknowledging that I am posting this recap more than a month after the conclusion of the 2023 NCAA basketball tournament.  I intended to post this soon after the NCAA championship game, which was played on April 3.  Obviously, this did not happen.  But as the saying goes, better late than never.

In my previous post, I previewed this year’s NCAA basketball tournament and outlined how the games might be different if the Elam Ending were used instead of the traditional method of playing games (usually with lots of fouls at the end) until the clock hits zero.  This post here will serve as a brief analysis of what would have happened if the Elam Ending had been used in the tournament, as well as a recap of how my NCAA brackets turned out this year.

March Madness: The Elam Ending

It’s that time of year again.  The 2023 NCAA basketball tournament brackets are out, and it’s time to enter a bracket contest and make your picks.  While this will be the third consecutive year that I am posting something on this blog related to March Madness, I wanted to introduce a new concept here for you to think about when you are watching the games.  While the format of college basketball games remains unchanged with two 20-minute halves, an idea regarding a new way to end basketball games in the future seems to be quietly gaining some traction.  This alternative, known as the Elam Ending, has me wondering what would happen if the NCAA used this method at the end of the game.

Before I get into the Elam Ending, I would at least like to take a moment to mention my previous March Madness entries on this blog.  My March Madness post from 2021 focuses on the long-standing tradition between my friend Brian and myself of picking winners based entirely on which school’s mascot would beat the other school’s mascot.  (For example, who would win between a Wildcat and an Aggie?)  And my March Madness post from 2022 provides other lessons on how to predict the winners (such as picking teams that wear blue, or picking the Peacocks to win on National Peacock Day).  Feel free to re-visit these posts for general tips on how to fill out your 2023 bracket.  But, after you fill out your bracket and the games actually start, here’s some more food for thought for when you are watching the end of one of the upcoming NCAA tournament games…

Greatest Pacers Games: A Top Ten List

As a basketball fan growing up in Indiana, I have been a fan of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers as long as I can remember.  Admittedly, my level of interest over the years has varied based on how good the team has been, so I should preface this by acknowledging that I haven’t paid much attention over the past couple of years.  But for a certain period of time during the 1990s and early 2000s, plus another window during part of the 2010s, the month of May became associated with exciting Pacers’ playoff runs.  As the team has not been very good in recent years, I got to thinking as the calendar turned to May this year of how I missed good Pacers playoff basketball.

Back in 2020, I made a list of what I considered to be the top ten greatest games in the history of my favorite football team – the Indianapolis Colts.  Inspired by that, I thought I would take a walk down memory lane and make a similar list here – a top ten list of the greatest games in the history of the Indiana Pacers.  I figured that creating this list would give me an opportunity to go back and re-live some good Pacers moments from previous years, most of which came during the month of May.

2022 March Madness Recap

With the 2022 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament having concluded this past week, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some thoughts about the tournament and lessons I have learned on how to pick the winners going forward.  As I previously shared during last year’s tournament, I fill out a bracket each year with my friend Brian, in which we pick the winners based entirely on who would win a fight between the team’s mascots.  (For example, who would win a fight between a wildcat and a peacock?)  This bracket never actually does well, and this year was no exception.  The rules for how we fill out our bracket can be found on my previous March Madness post from last year.

Before I go any further, I also want to present a riddle for you to figure out.  This is a problem that I used to give my math students back in my teaching days, called the “Big Loser.”  I’ll present the problem here and then give you the solution at the end of this post, as a reward for actually reading the whole thing (or for at least taking the time to skip down to the end).  We know by now that Kansas won this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  But who was the “big loser” of the tournament?  For the purpose of this problem, we ignore the extra four teams from the official 68-team field, as we are not counting the four teams that lost in the “play-in” rounds.  (This was so much better back when the tournament was a perfect 64-team field.)  So, out of the final 64 teams, who was the big loser?  It’s one thing to be Texas Southern, lose to Kansas in the first round, and then watch them win the championship.  They can at least say, “We lost in the first round, but the team that beat us won the whole thing, so there’s no shame in that.”  But which team lost in the first round, only for the team that beat them to lose their very next game, to a team who would then lose their next game, and so on, for each round of the tournament?  Only one team has that claim to shame each year.  So, who was it?  Take a moment to figure it out, then keep reading, then I will give the answer at the end.

The McNuggets: The Story of My College Basketball Career

Watching March Madness this year brings back memories of my own college basketball career.  No, I never played on the basketball team at my college…or at my high school…or even at my middle school.  Still, although I never played school-sponsored organized basketball, I am reminded of my own days as the captain of the 1999 college intramural basketball team known as the McNuggets – the basketball version of the Bad News Bears.

2021 March Madness Brackets

The NCAA basketball tournament brackets are out.  After last year’s tournament was cancelled, I’m glad to see March Madness come back this year.  The fact that the entire tournament will be taking place in Indiana this year makes it even more interesting for me, even though I won’t be actually attending any of the games.  I’ve already attended the biggest stage anyway; I took the picture above at the 2015 NCAA men’s basketball championship game between Duke and Wisconsin in Indianapolis.

With this year’s tournament field now complete, it’s once again that time of year to fill out your own bracket and see how good you are at predicting the outcomes of college basketball games.  Perhaps you might enter some sort of contest this week and compare your results with the results of other people’s brackets for bragging rights.  Sometimes even those who don’t follow sports participate in the fun by filling out a bracket with complete guesses, and end up doing better than some of the “experts.”  If you’re planning to fill out a bracket this year and looking for some tips, you’ve come to the right place.

Every year at this time, my friend Brian and I collaborate on our own bracket.  Except, our predictions are based entirely on the ferocity of the team’s mascots.  For example, who would win between a Wildcat and a Cougar?  Never mind which basketball team is actually favored to win.  Don’t worry about whether you are predicting a 16 seed over a 1.  After all, upsets happen all the time.  Just compare the schools’ nicknames.