2015 NCAA Tournament thread

UCLA was a massive consensus favorite to win the NCAA tourney during the Alcindor/Walton seasons. It was a huge shock when they lost in the semis in 1974.

I don't know what the exact Vegas numbers were, but UCLA was almost universally expected to win in those seasons.

 

You might be right, but Kentucky was defending champion and had a 30-4 record going into the tournament. Then again, Derek Anderson's knee injury probably took some shine off their chances.

 

Betting on games? Absolutely. Futures on odds on individual teams for the whole tournament? I don't think so. I'd love to be proven wrong. Things have changed a lot in vegas sports books just since I've been going since the mid '80s.

 

How is Obama's women's tourney bracket looking? (don't reply)

 

Duke in 1992 was considered a pretty strong favorite. Probably more than any Kentucky team of the '90s, and probably third behind Georgetown and UNLV in the span from '76 Indiana until now. Defending champs had all five starters back (I think), won their first 17 games and finished 25-2 in the regular season.

I'm with poin in that I don't think futures odds were available in pre-Internet days. I thought it was a law that since they could theoretically involve teams from Nevada, they were illegal.

 

Yeah. Only lost one regular season game and was jobbed at Mizzou. Paul Pierce, Raef LaFrentz, who people forget just how dominant he could be in college before his knees went bad in the pros, Jacque Vaughn, Scott Pollard all were picked in the top half of the first round, I think. UAB coach Jerod Haase was the fifth starter and played with a broken wrist in the Arizona game. Roy stubbornly tried to give him significant minutes even though he couldn't do anything and he had pretty good options in Billy Thomas and Ryan Robertson on the bench.

My parents still have a picture hanging over the hole I punched in their basement wall after that game.

 

Haven't seen this posted anywhere and I'm kind of surprised it hasn't been opened for discussion if that's the case...

Bob Huggins’ Daughters Tweeted and Yelled at Dez Wells, Calling Him a Rapist [UPDATE] | The Big Lead

Apparently Bob's potty-mouth, classless daughters are a great example of the apples not falling far from the tree.

 

Duke in 1999 was a pretty big favorite, too. Entered the tourney 32-1 after crushing Carolina in the ACC finals. Lost to UConn in the final.

 

I got back from covering minor league hockey on my first newspaper job.

"They lost?" when someone at the paper told me Arizona had won. That 1997 Kansas team was so dominant.

I had a job interview in Lawrence the following Monday. Ghost town.

I didn't get the Lawrence job but did work in Topeka the next year. Covering the 97-98 KU team was like covering the basketball Beatles.

 

Those two years were probably the peak of expectations for KU basketball outside of the Wilt era. Two years in with a bunch of Danny's leftover Miracles Roy beat three top five teams, including one of those great UNLV teams to start the season. Then he made a couple of Final Fours with a lot of local KC and Wichita guys, a Northwestern transfer nobody knew of and some mid-level recruits.

So he starts getting top-shelf recruits like Pierce, Vaughn and LaFrentz and everybody in Lawrence was thinking Roy would bring multiple national championships, but it was a decade before he got back to the Final Four. Now Self is getting similar tournament results with similar recruits.

 

Better than the first perfect season since Bobby Knight's Hoosiers in '76? Nope. It's really not.

 

At the start of the tournament, 538's model had Kentucky as 40ish percent favorites to win the tournament, which was the high for the last couple years that they've been doing projections. For comparison's sake, Louisville and other favorites from 2013-14 were around the 10 percent range, at best. (Also to compare - the UConn women won in 70 percent of the projections they ran.)