Final Four Preview

Shaka Smart guided the Rams to their first Final Four

If you picked the Final Four correctly, it means one of three things: a) you pick your bracket based on flipping a coin, b) you know absolutely nothing about college basketball and made your picks at random, or c) you are a crazy fan of either Butler or Virginia Commonwealth. Beyond that, no college basketball "expert" should have any more than one of these four teams remaining, much less the three or four we all hope for. A week ago, even after the loss of Pittsburgh in the round of 32, most of the tournament favorites were alive and playing well--now, with just three games remaining, we're left with a 1-or-2-seed for the first time in tournament history. Duke, Ohio State, Kansas, Florida, North Carolina...all went down before the Final Four, something that seemed a ridiculous notion just a few days ago. Kind of makes you wonder what would happen if college football teams were allowed to have a playoff...but that's a different article entirely. So, it's left to Butler, Virginia Commonwealth, Connecticut, and Kentucky to battle it out for the national championship. How did these four get here, and how do their chances look? To see what the numbers say, hit the jump!

Elite 8 Recap

By now, I'm sure everybody has heard just how mad this March has been. The third time since 1979 that none of the 1-seeds made it into the Final Four, and the first time that none of the 2-seeds made it either--that's right, none of the top 8 teams going into the tournament made it to the final weekend. Brad Stevens might have legitimized Butler as the next Gonzaga, getting the Bulldogs to their second consecutive Final Four--an incredibly tough acheivement in this age of parity and talent throughout Division I basketball. What's interesting now is that we're left with four teams--UConn, Butler, Virginia Commonwealth, and Kentucky--that, prior to the tournament, didn't really have any arguments that they should be national champions. 

Calhoun leads an impressive quartet of coaches

UConn, even though they won the Maui Invitational in November (defeating Kentucky and Michigan State in the process), still finished only 9-9 in the Big East, including a 4-7 run in their final 11 games. Butler and Virginia Commonwealth had decent seasons out of mid-major conferences, but there's no way they could have any argument they deserved to be in the national title contender. Kentucky would have been in the top-5 had they had the services of big man Enes Kanter, but they didn't--and so they lost 6 conference road games. So now we're left with a Final Four without Duke, without Ohio State--even without North Carolina, Notre Dame, BYU, Florida, or Pitt, all of whom had national championship aspirations going into the tournament--but instead we'll see a team very few saw coming stand atop the podium to receive the trophy. The one thing that can't be said about these four teams is that they don't have good leadership. Jim Calhoun (above) is the oldest of the four, leading UConn back to the promised land, and he joins Brad Stevens (Butler), Shaka Smart (Virginia Commonwealth), and John Calipari (Kentucky). So what happened in the Elite 8 that saw these four teams get through? Let's take a look at the numbers.

On a Certain NCAA Tournament Game

How much was Jamie Dixon to blame for Pitt's loss?

As objective sports journalists, we are supposed to be impartial to one game over another. We're supposed to treat all teams equally, to try and separate ourselves from the sports themselves in order to best explain them to others. Who would take any sports journalist's opinion if they knew exactly what team he roots for--at least, without them using some sort of statistics to back up their opinion? Either way, it's no secret that sports journalists are accused of being biased towards or against certain teams, and so it's with that in mind that I share this information--while I attend Temple University now, for two years I attended the University of Pittsburgh, and thus I consider myself a fairly interested Panthers fan. Now, I share that with you because I'm writing tonight about the Pitt/Butler game that took place this evening, which had one of the most screwed-up endings you could ever imagine for a basketball game. With 43 seconds left, the Panthers got the ball back with a 1-point lead. They then made three key mistakes that led to losing the game...