The NIT Final Four is set — Colorado, Alabama, Wichita State and Washington State — and four contestants are still alive to win the 7th annual Living Room Times NIT Pool: Mike Quinn, Jeff Morrison, Matt Thomsen and my 3-year-old daughter, “Loyette.”
Quinn, a 2001 Illinois State alum, currently leads with 176 out of a possible 252 points. He got three of the Final Four right: Colorado, Alabama and Wazzu. Morrison, a 2004 Iowa State alum, is second, with 169 points. He also picked three of the semifinalists: Colorado, Alabama and Wichita. Morrison has Alabama winning the title; Quinn has Wazzu beating Alabama in the title game.
Thomsen, my 1999 Newington High School classmate and a 2004 University of New Haven alum, and Loyette, who is currently attending preschool, are among those tied for third with 154 points. They have identical picks going forward, and will finish tied with each other no matter what. The only question is where on the leaderboard they’ll be tied. If Colorado wins the NIT title — which both of them predicted — they’ll tie for first.
If Alabama beats Wichita State in the title game, Morrison will win. If it’s an Alabama-Wazzu title game, or if either Wazzu or Wichita wins the title, Quinn will win.
At least I get to cheer for the MVC, without actually picking them.
Well, technically you should root for Wazzu over Wichita in the semis, as a Cougars win increases your changes of winning the pool (it might even clinch your pool championship before the title game, if Bama wins the other semi). But IF Wichita wins, then you definitely cheer for them against the Bama/Colorado winner in the final.
Basically, you either need Wichita to lose in the semis, or win the title. If they finish as runner-up, you lose the pool.
That NIT Final Four is unusual. Historically, the teams who have their NCAA bubbles popped — landing them in the NIT — typically do not go very far in the NIT. Thus, I’m surprised to see Colorado and Alabama still there, and to some extent, Wichita State.
Btw when are you going to update the LRT Women’s Pool for the Sweet 16?
My favorite part is where you announce “Loyette, who is in preschool”. Pretty crazy. Have you ever won one of these, Brendan? Would Loyette, at 3, have a chance to accomplish something that has eluded her father for years? Would this cause a PANIC!? These are the hard questions that must be answered.
I don’t know what would be worse, losing to a 3-year-old or watching Colorado win a tournament (even if it IS the NIT).
(Pauses, thinks) Probably losing to a 3-year-old, no matter how adorable she is. 😉
/not over near-conferencepocalypse
NIT & NIT? Is the tourney an accounting firm now?
DavidK:
One of the reasons I don’t attack you is that you do such a good job of beclowning yourself. It is clearly “NIT & NIT Pool” not “NIT & NIT”….both the NIT and NIT pool are down to four competitors.
Gahrie, there’s no need to be rude; I suspect David knew that and just thought it looked funny. Which it does. I blame Obama.
Brandon, that was my favorite part too. 🙂 And I did win, once, in 1997… the 1st annual women’s pool… which had all of 10 contestants. I clinched when UConn lost.
Andrew, I just (finally) updated the women’s pool. You’re tied for the lead. But watch out for the Auriemma kid! LOL
P.S. to Andrew: I agree with your point in general. However, Wazzu was closer to the bubble than Wichita State. If they’d beaten UW and Oregon, and thereby made it to the Pac-10 title game, some bracketologists thought they might sneak in, a la USC (though I suspect they needed to beat UW and UCLA, i.e., not have the Ducks upset the Bruins, to really have any kind of shot). I never bought it, myself, but they were at least on some folks’ radars. Wichita was quite clearly doomed, with Missouri State being the only quasi-viable Valley bubble team (thought to be on roughly the same level as VCU in terms of likelihood of getting in).
Gahrie, there’s no need to be rude;
Dude….seriously?!?
You’re calling me out on this? Given what David writes on a regular basis?
I’d say there is a double standard, but it would be more accurate to say there is a standard for the Right, and no standards at all for the Left.
Here is your co-blogger on the Gray Fox thread:
Here’s a sentence for you Alasdair, and one you can use anytime you wish: Die in a fire.
Gahrie, in all honesty, I haven’t read a word of that thread. The double standard is more that I don’t read everything on my own blog, especially right now, when what free time I have is focused on basketball. On political threads, I expect it to get needlessly & pointlessly nasty between y’all, and I tend to ignore it unless I’m really interested in the topic. The sports threads, I actually read consistently. 🙂
In any event, this particular comment by you just seemed so out-of-context & unprovoked. When you, David, Alasdair, etc. etc. are arguing about politics, it’s like a running insult-fest that just sort of picks up where it left off with each new political thread and topic. But here, we were talking about the NIT Pool, for heaven’s sake, and you decided to open up a can of “David’s an idiot” in the middle of it. Just seemed unnecessary.
Wichita was quite clearly doomed, with Missouri State being the only quasi-viable Valley bubble team (thought to be on roughly the same level as VCU in terms of likelihood of getting in).
You might be right. From my vantage point, all MVC teams that end in “State” start to sound the same to me. 😉
Brendan:
Well, if you did read your political threads, maybe you’d discover just who is getting needlessly and pointlessly nasty instead of accusing us all. And since he is in fact a co-blogger of yours, you might even do something about it.
No, you, David, Alasdair, etc., the lot of you, are needlessly and pointlessly nasty to one another. I read enough to know that. That’s a fact.
No, you, David, Alasdair, etc., the lot of you, are needlessly and pointlessly nasty to one another. I read enough to know that. That’s a fact.
I renew my call for an impartial review of the comments posted on this blog.
Indeed, the endless child-like sniping among you guys is a big part of the reason I often don’t read all the political threads on my own blog. (That, and the fact that I don’t really have time.)
That said, I’m sorry you feel so, uh, persecuted and oppressed, by my gently pointing out that you were being rude…when you were, in fact, being rude. You seem to have that persecution, why-oh-why-are-you-criticizing-ME, you-should-be-criticizing-OTHER-people, you’re-discriminating-against-me complex any time I make a comment like this (which is rare). Are you sure you aren’t a closet liberal?
And as for my comment on this thread that apparently upset you, it is no more hostile or pedantic than the comments you were routinely making about my posts not too long ago.
You can “renew your call” for whatever the hell you want. Frankly, I don’t give a s***. If you can’t acknowledge that you are a willing and enthusiastic participant in the unfortunate mudslinging that goes on between yourself and various others in this space, then you clearly have no perspective whatsoever. I wash my hands of it. I’m not going to ban all of you, and short of that, there isn’t much I can do beyond wishing you’d all grow the f*** up.
I don’t know what “comments I was routinely making” you’re referring to, but in any event, your comment on this thread didn’t “upset” me. I merely mentioned, in passing, that you were being rude, which you were. I have no emotional investment in it at all, but since I was responding to several comments at once, and yours was the only one on this thread that broke the spirit of others genially chatting about basketball and pools and toddlers and such, I thought I should address it quickly, lest David come in and respond with a lengthy rant. I thought maybe I could nip the controversy in the bud by doing so, though obviously that was a miscalculation; I forgot about your OMG-victimized-by-the-evil-webmaster complex. Again, I’m sorry it makes you feel like a persecuted victim of The Man to have an instance of rudeness accurately and calmly pointed out to you. Maybe Jesse Jackson will hold a rally for you or something.
I need to get to work now. This is precisely why I don’t have time in my life to police bullshit like this.
You are missing the point. I am not arguing that my comment wasn’t rude. I am arguing that:
A) It wasn’t nearly as rude as what David posts regularly, and has indeed posted within the last 24 hours.
B) While you regularly call me out and bemoan my fairly gentile jabs at David, you never call him out.
You put yourself out as some fair-minded middle of the road independent, but you don’t behave that way.
Make that gentle, though they are gentile as well.
Your premise is faulty. I don’t “regularly” call you out, and I don’t “never” call David out. I’ve had numerous ferocious arguments with David on this blog over the years!! I may not be perfectly “fair-minded ” or “middle of the road” (who is?), and maybe I give David a slight bit of benefit of the doubt because he’s my friend (is that what you came here to make me admit? congratulations! you got me to admit I’m human!), but at the same time, you are not a persecuted victim of the cruel, cruel world who is constantly being put upon by The Blog Man, who is constantly and unfairly attacking you. If that’s who I was, if that’s what I was doing, if this blog was some sort of protection racket for David & co., you’d have been banned long ago. But that hasn’t happened and won’t happen because I have no interest in heavy-handedly policing your stupid pissing contests with David, which reduce and demean both of you. Every once in a while, I comment when those contests spill over into unrelated threads, like here. But I mostly stay out of it, both with respect to your comments AND David’s (and others’). So, basically, get over yourself. You’re whining about nothing.
For what it’s worth (nothing), I just skimmed the Gray Fox thread. You made it personal, gahrie. Everybody was talking about the substance of an issue, and then you took it upon yourself to come in and insult David. David had made an exasperated and sarcastic comment to Dane, perhaps overreacting, but still not an insult, still on topic, and in any event having nothing to do with you. Then you came in and basically called him stupid (saying you were “saving” his sarcastically calling himself stupid “for future use”), without adding anything of substance to the thread. It’s not like you said, “David, that’s a stupid thing to say, here’s a more correct opinion.” You just came in and basically said, “Haha! David admitted he’s stupid! Haha!” Maybe this was a “gent(i)le jab,” and maybe it wasn’t; that’s a subjective call. But it was definitely off-topic and unprovoked, and you are definitely the one who turned a substantive discussion into a personal attack thread, with Alasdair immediately piling on. Then David said “go die in a fire,” which was, undoubtedly, the most severe and inappropriate #OldTone comment on the thread. Inappropriate, but not unprovoked — it was, on the contrary, directly provoked by you and Alasdair, who had come in and trashed a substantive thread by calling David stupid, for no reason other than the fact that you felt like being trollish, apparently. David proceeded to feed you, and then upped the ante with a trollish comment of his own, worse than yours. But, in the lexicon of the playground, you started it. So stop trying to play the part of some sort of innocent schoolboy who is constantly being insulted by Evil Insulting David, who is in turn endlessly protected by Evil Webmaster Overlord Brendan. It’s just not true, and obviously so. Claiming otherwise makes you look like a buffoon. Just. Stop.
[/dumber for having read and analyzed the thread & written all of the above…ugh]
Where did I call David stupid? Citation please.
This is precisely my point. I don’t make personal attacks against David, I make attacks on his positions and tactics, which you interpret or label as personal attacks. For the record, I was commenting on David’s hypocrisy, not his intelligence.
I was going to respond, I had about two-thirds of an explanation typed out, and then I was like, GOD, BRENDAN, JUST SHUT UP!!! So I deleted it.
Go read the thread yourself. You said what you said. You’re wrong. This is a fucking idiotic discussion that makes everyone dumber. Bye.
gahrie, if you hate it here so much and feel so persecuted why don’t you leave?
Brendan is one of the most fairminded and even handed people I know, so much so that I have become frustrated with him for not putting his foot down when other people (like you) have attacked me personally, but as he says he doesn’t get into our pissing matches (which I openly admit to being a part of, not proud of it but I’ll admit to it). He’s called me out for saying stupid things on more than one occassion, sometimes fairly, sometimes not in my opinion (which is of course biased), but honestly if you feel like its so horrible here, JUST LEAVE.
gahrie, if you hate it here so much and feel so persecuted why don’t you leave?
Because most of the participants of the various debates on this blog engage in serious and entertaining debate. Even you contribute valid points from time to time. Unlike Krugman, I realize that the best way to learn is to seek out opinions and positions different from yours and examine them.
I request a citation of any personal attacks I’ve made on you. Where have I even come close to wishing you would die by fire?
Your position frankly is one that appears to be common on the left, (as recently expressed by Krugman) that there is no room for debate or discussion and opposition to the Left’s point of view equates to either stupidity or evilness.
I have said before and I say again, I will not leave unless and until Brendan asks me to.
gahrie, I have no problem with positions that are not my own, my problem with you has never been that you are a conservative/republican. My problem with you (and Alasdair to a larger extent) has been the way you behave. You claim that you don’t make personal attacks but thats a lie. I’m not claiming innocence here either but you have played the woe is me victim card many times now and its never held because you have been the instigator far too often. Frankly I don’t have the time nor effort to dig through the tons and tons of back comments on this blog to pick out specific instances but I tell you what, I’ll make a deal with you right here right now:
We both stop. We both start over. We pretend that I’ve never read your comments before and you’ve never read mine. We focus on arguing the issues and avoid the personal attacks. If you are willing to do that then I will gladly do the same. I will still call out your arguments when I think they are wrong, but I will do my damndest not to attack you personally. No more arguing about who started it, or who did it first, just a fresh start. I’m game if you are.
Deal
Hear, hear!
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