Running 2023-24 NCAA Basketball Thread

This is a great final four. I really am sick of seeing Duke, Carolina, Kansas, Villanova, Michigan State, Kentucky...

 

Nice to see Edey playing the every coach overlooked me card.

Dude you're 7-4. If you any semblance of talent as a high school, more than Purdue, Baylor and Western Kentucky would have offered.

You were at IMG Academy, not hiding under a rock.

According to stats put out by IMG, as a senior you averaged three rebounds per game.

 

Dude just went for 40 points and 16 boards in a regional final. Looks to me as if lot of coaches did miss. Very badly.

 

Did they measure the lines, or is that outsourced to someone else?

 

But we still have UConn, so we’re not completely free of all the usuals.

 

To be fair, Connor has been doing floors for the NCAA without incident since at least 2006. I don't know how they botched this one, but they have been very quick to trumpet their product to any media source within 500 miles, so hopefully they'll be transparent about it.

Heck, looks like they have a "how we do it" video on their website:

In these cases, a big reason these floors are manufactured in the middle of nowhere like this is they are within close proximity to hardwood forests, so there's minimal transporting. Two of the other major floor manufacturers, Horner (whole bunch of NBA clients, including the All-Star Game floor just about every year and several NBA franchises) and Robbins (Duke, UNC, the Lakers, and several other clients all over the place), are also deep in the U.P. I believe they are milled, built, marked and assembled in the factory.

I had read some tonight that the 3-point line for college has changed within the last couple years. Best I can imagine is that someone painted one half of the court to the current specs and someone else was going off a bad template.

As mentioned, Connor is located in Amasa, which is just across the border from Wisconsin. Horner is in Dollar Bay in the Keweenaw Peninsula and was a 15 minute drive, tops, from my previous shop. Robbins is in Ishpeming, about 20-30 minutes from Marquette. They're all about two hours apart from each other with a whole bunch of jack squat in the middle of that triangle.

 

In a previous career lifetime, I hosted both NCAA Men's and Women's tournament games in my home and local NBA arenas and the experiences were at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

The men's tourney staff was wonderful to work with and assisted me with every little problem that we had.

The women's tourney staff was a nightmare, focusing more on little non-essential details and worrying about how they were being treated vs the men's tourney. It was awful.

For example, on the practice day, the local NBA team was in the building practicing before heading out on the road. One of the players -- an Olympic gold medalist -- came into the arena to say hello to a women's coach he had worked with and was rebuked by the NCAA staff to stay out of the arena. It was a classic example of losing because of dumbness.

After 20+ years of working women's basketball, it was hard for me to enjoy the sport after that experience.

 

I still haven't seen one goddamn story anywhere in which the actual difference in distance is stated.

 

It is crazy. The BASIC information people would want to know isn't out there.