Mike Wiser wins NIT pool, ending 11-year drought

After 11 years and 32 tries, Mike Wiser is finally a Living Room Times basketball pool champion.

Wiser, a 2003 USC and 2006 Stanford alum and current Michigan State Ph.D. student who has competed in every single LRT pool since he and I were USC sophomores in 2001, clinched victory in the 8th annual NIT Pool when his grad-school alma mater, Stanford, crushed Minnesota for the NIT championship, 75-51.

Had Minnesota won, UConn senior and Newington High School alum Dan Dinunzio, who started the day with the lead, would have won the pool.

Wiser’s 31 pools without a win prior to yesterday (including this year’s men’s and women’s NCAA pools, from which he has been mathematically eliminated) placed him fourth on the all-time list for most LRT pools participated in without a win, behind Kevin Hauschulz (36), Josh Rubin (34) and Becky Loy (32).

(I hold the record for most pools participated in, having been in all 40 of them — 17 men’s NCAA, 15 women’s NCAA and 8 NIT — but I won the first-ever women’s pool, in 1997, which had only ten contestants. Including Rubin and Hauschulz. 🙂 That said, I do also hold the record for most losses in my own pools, with 39.)

Stanford led Minnesota by just 6 at halftime, 31-25, setting up a somewhat eerie parallel to the Wiser’s closest near-miss in an LRT pool. In 2001, his first year as a contestant, Wiser was somewhat famously 20 minutes away from winning the women’s NCAA pool, which would have made him the first-ever non-Newington winner in the then-6-year history of the pools. Wiser needed a Purdue win in the national title game to capture the pool championship, and the Boilermakers, having led by as many as 11 in the first half, were ahead of Notre Dame at halftime by an almost identical score to Stanford’s halftime margin yesterday — 32-26. But the Fighting Irish, led by Ruth Riley, stormed back, and Newington High School alum (and then-Providence College sophomore) Todd Stigliano won the pool, extending Newington’s dominance in the LRT pools.

The first non-Newington winner would emerge two years later, in 2003, and now there hasn’t been a Newington winner since 2005 (coincidentally, Todd Stigliano, winning his second women’s pool title). But yesterday, Wiser was yet again facing a title-game showdown with Newington High alum, and yet again the team he needed to win the championship game was ahead by 6 points at halftime. But this time, there would be no comeback to derail Wiser’s pool championship. The Cardinal outscored the Golden Gophers 44-26 in the second half, and Wiser jumped from 3rd place to 1st, winning the pool with 186 of a possible 317 points.

Dinunizio and Don LaPlante of Cheektowaga, NY, the only contestant besides Wiser to pick Stanford as the NIT champ, tied for second with 171 points. (Wiser, incidentally, is originally from nearby Kenmore, NY.) Tommy Lemoine of Manchester, NH was fourth with 164 points, and J. Scott Fitzwater of Ohio was fifth with 161 points.

Rounding out the top 10 were Colin Pedicini (160 points), Larry Caplin (147), Ian Auzenne and Jeff Poor (tied with 142) and a four-way tie among Greg Kagan, Ken Stern, Kelly Strutz and Lisa Velte (140). Full standings here.