The Living Room Times

I know I’ve been lax with pool updates so far this year, due partly to work and family obligations, and partly to my attendance at the Denver games Thursday and Saturday. But anyway, here is where things stand at the moment:

Men’s pool: Through the first two Sunday games, Ben Sloniker leads with 176 out of a possible 210 points — but one of the games he got wrong was very damaging, as Pitt was his national champion. Dane Lindberg, who has Butler as his national champ, is second with 169 points. Alec Taylor, Mark Jordon and Ken Stern are third, fourth and fifth with 168, 166 and 165 points, respectively.

Women’s pool: Through 24 of the 32 first-round games, nobody’s perfect. (Five were 16-0 after Day 1: Becky Loy, Nate Evangelista, Lisa Velte, Rachel Wetherill and Ian Auzenne.) Now, five contestants — Loy, Evangelista, Velte, Scott Paine and Peter Timbrell — are tied with 92 of a possible 96 points, meaning they’ve gotten just one game wrong. Among those lurking just behind the leaders, with 88 points, is Jenna Stigliano, daughter of UConn coach Geno Auriemma.

NIT pool: Through the end of the weekend’s games, Charles Fenwick leads with 107 points out of a possible 162. Larry Caplin, Victoria Wagner and Jeff Morrison are tied for second with 104 points.

Six “below the Red Line” mid-majors — seven if you count Gonzaga — survived the first two days (or three days, in VCU’s case) of the 2011 NCAA Tournament. Here’s my #GiantBracket:

Meanwhile, in the 16th annual Living Room Times pool, Greg Shtraks of Montclair, New Jersey leads the LRT men’s NCAA pool with 124 points out of a possible 140, reflecting a perfect “First Four” and a 28-4 record in the first round.

Mark Jordon of Goshen, New York and Andrew Hunter of Columbia, Missouri are tied for second with 117 points. President Barack Obama, if he had entered the pool, would be in fourth place with 116 — and that’s only because he didn’t make “First Four” picks. Obama’s 29-3 record in the first round is better than anyone in the pool.

Keith DeMonstoy, Sean Sullivan, Jeffrey Kwit, and two-time past champion Jenn Castelhano are tied for fourth with 113 points. Complete standings here.

I, incidentally, am tied for 27th place with 106 points. Loyette has 91 points; Becky has 87; the cats have 77; and DU Bally has 34. Interestingly, the last-place human contestant, just above Travis Mason-Bushman’s FYNNAL FOUR BALLZ and my DU Bally, is ESPN sports columnist Arash Markazi. His bracket went just 17-15 in the first round.

Of course, my “As-You-Go Bracket” remains perfect, as you can see at the top of this post. 🙂 Tomorrow, I’m back to the Pepsi Center for Morehead-RIchmond and BYU-Gonzaga!!!

What a day at the Pepsi Center. Wow.

More later. Must sleep.

P.S. Here are the pool standings. Mark Jordon went 15-1 and leads the 16th annual Living Room Times men’s NCAA pool with 69 points out of a possible 76 (he earned 60 points yesterday, on top of his 9 from the First Four). David Mathues is second with 68 points (14-2 Thursday for 56 points, plus a perfect 12 from the First Four). Benjamin Sloniker is next with 65 points.

The pools are, as always, free to enter. Winners will get a t-shirt*, and eternal glory. Complete rules here. Entry links below. Good luck!

Men’s NCAA Tournament Pool:
Current standings here.
Scoring system: 3-4-7-10-16-24-33.

Women’s NCAA Tournament Pool:
Current standings here.
Scoring system: 4-7-11-17-24-33.

NIT Pool:
Current standings here.
Scoring system: 7-10-15-20-25.

*As I’ve mentioned before, I’m two years behind on championship t-shirts. 🙂 Hoping to get caught up this week, and actually be on the ball with that this year!

P.S. As you can see, based on feedback on my logo thread, as well as my own judgment, I decided to go with one of Tom Greca’s logos. Many thanks, though, to Bonnie Stone’s class at Newington High School for all of their submissions! One of the students’ logos remains the pool’s “Facebook logo,” and whoever wins this year’s t-shirts can select one of the “alternative” logos for their shirt, if they like.

[Originally posted on March 13, 2011 at 8:51 PM; bumped to top. -ed.]

If there’s one region on my bracket that’s giving me major headaches right now, it’s the Southeast. The region has some incredibly weak top seeds (#1 Pitt, which always seems to be a paper tiger come tournament time; #2 Florida, grossly overseeded for no discernible reason; and #3 BYU, struggling without Brandon Davies) and five of the strongest mid-majors in the entire tournament (#8 Butler, #9 Old Dominion, #11 Gonzaga, #12 Utah State and #13 Belmont), the latter two just criminally underseeded (and forced to potentially face each other in a #12 vs. #13, mid-on-mid-violence Round of 32 game). Combined, there’s a 17.1% chance that one of those five mid-major teams will reach the Final Four, according to Ken Pomeroy’s log5 stats, with the #12 Aggies (6.4%), #13 Bruins (4.6%) and #11 Zags (3.9%) actually having the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-best odds in the region, respectively, trailing only the top 4 seeds. All of which adds up to, for me, the following hot mess of a nonsensical, pie-in-the-sky, NOT-GONNA-HAPPEN bracket:

As I tweeted with that photo, “Is there a support group for this? #OfficePoolSuicide #CantHelpMyself.”

Then again, it doesn’t exactly help dissuade me from this lunacy when mainstream sports media guys are basically saying, yeah, that could totally happen:

I’m really not sure what to do with my bracket here. Do I pick one of the mid-majors, most likely Belmont, to reach the Final Four? Do I bank on another round of Tom Izzo Magic? (Pomeroy’s stats answer that one with a resounding “no.”) Do I go with dangerous, possibly-peaking-at-the-right-time Kansas State — but: USU! — or perhaps St. John’s or (gulp) UCLA? Or do I pick some early upsets, then bank on one of the surviving favorites to roll through the shattered bracket that’s left after a wild first weekend? But if the latter, which favorite? I have zero faith in either Pittsburgh or Florida, and I’m highly skeptical of BYU without Davies. But then, I (like most of the rest of the country) didn’t have much faith in Duke last year, and yet they successfully navigated a highly favorable bracket to reach the Final Four, then knocked off WVU and Butler to win the whole thing, despite having pretty clearly not even deserved to be a #1 seed in the first place! There are plenty of similar examples of imperfect high seeds taking advantage of upset-filled brackets, and this could well be another. Will paper-tiger Pitt or overseeded Florida or undermanned/oversexed* BYU be “this year’s Duke”? Ugh. I don’t know. I’ll be wrestling with this one for the next 24 hours, I think.

*by BYU standards

It’s become clear to me that most pool administrators are handling this newfangled “First Four” different than me, and concerns have been expressed about the Tuesday deadline, and the uncertainties created by those Tuesday & Wednesday games. As such, I’ve had a change of heart about the pool deadline and rules. I’ve decided to utilize the ingenious “Option 3” described here. Basically, it will work like this…

Well, wait. First things first. If what follows below makes your head spin, and you have no idea what I’m talking about, JUST IGNORE IT AND ENTER THE POOL NOW. 🙂 Treat 4:30 PM MST Tuesday as the deadline, and pay no attention to all this mumbo-jumbo.

Having said that, here’s the new procedure…

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WHEEE!!!! It’s College Basketball Christmas!!

Here’s my annual Bubble Scoresheet, to be marked up and followed-along-with during the Selection Show, to give a clearer idea of how many bubble spots are left. I show 13 teams competing for 6 spots (although really, VCU, Missouri State and Harvard could just as easily be in the “very likely out” category — I’d be pleasantly shocked if any of them get in).

I won’t be “liveblogging” the Selection Show as such, but will doubtless be live-tweeting up a storm, which you can see at right.

And of course, stay tuned for my pools, which will start later tonight (a few hours after the girls’ bedtimes, most likely).

P.S. In case you missed it yesterday…

Before it gets completely lost and forgotten in the impending insanity of Selection Sunday, the Big Dance and the Living Room Times NCAA & NIT Pools, here’s the archive of my entire liveblog (via Twitter) of the Big Sky championship game Wednesday night. It was a truly epic experience — I was sitting just a few feet in front of the student section all night — that ended with Northern Colorado winning its first ever NCAA autobid, and me rushing the court with the UNC students.

Of all the basketball liveblogs I’ve done this season, this is by far the one I’m most proud of. The whole thing, with inline pictures and embedded videos, is after the jump.

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First things first: you can now “like” the 16th annual Living Room Times NCAA & NIT Pools on Facebook. Do that now, and you’ll automatically get an update Sunday night when the pools are ready to go.

Secondly… after much deliberation and some excellent analysis by blog readers, I’ve decided to abandon the “upset points” idea, and stick with a fixed, per-game scoring system that will add up to 477 points, as it always has — but with greater weight to the later rounds than I’ve given in the past. My current plan is to use a 1-4-7-10-16-24-41 scoring system (that’s 1 point per “First Four” game, 4 per Round of 64 game, etc.), though that’s subject to minor tweaking between now and Sunday night, when the pools go live.

Meanwhile, the submissions are in for my pool’s logo contest. Here are the ones I’m deciding between. The first two are from Tom Greca; the others are from Newington High School students in Bonnie Stone’s design class, who I can’t identify by name until I have their permission (due to educational privacy laws and whatnot). Anyway…

That last one needs some Photoshop tweaking — “Livingroom” should be “Living Room,” and “Pool” should be “Pools” — but you get the general idea. Meanwhile, I’m using the third one right now as the logo on the Facebook Page, but that doesn’t reflect a final decision. I just wanted to have some logo up there right away.

Anyway… does anyone have any favorites?

When I set up the first Living Room Times NCAA Pool in 1996, I was using a primitive piece of DOS software (yes, DOS!) that assigned, by default, point values through the tournament’s six rounds in a 5-7-10-15-20-25 fashion. I’m not sure if this was customizable, but even if it was, I gave it zero thought. I’d never run an NCAA Pool before, after all, so I had no basis on which to doubt the wisdom of the proposed point totals. I just went with the software’s built-in scoring system.

Over the years, however, it became clear that this scoring system was wildly imperfect. Picking the national champion shouldn’t be worth only 5 times more than picking each first-round winner. With 32 first-round games, such a system makes the first round (as a whole) worth more than the Elite Eight, Final Four and national title game combined! Put another way, the first round is worth almost six-and-a-half-times more than the “sixth round” (the title game). Put yet another way, more than 55% of the total points available in the entire pool are given out on the tournament’s first weekend! Basically, the system doesn’t sufficiently reward picking the right teams at the end.

But while I recognized this, I never wanted to change the scoring system, because I liked the ability to historically compare scores over the pools’ 15-year life span. It emphasized how long I’ve been doing the pools, and added drama to late rounds in pools where the champion is already known (e.g., “will Mike Tran break the all-time points record”?).

The NCAA’s addition of the “First Four,” however, has forced my hand. While it was possible to ignore the #PIG (play-in game) because the winner was a #16 seed which was just going to lose its next game anyway, the #quadPIG cannot be ignored because two of the winners will be at-large teams, #11 or #12 seeds with serious hopes of reaching the second weekend and beyond. The play-in games now have to be included in the pool. This not only shortens the pool signup window, it also means that it’s no longer possible to maintain the historical 5-7-10-15-20-25, maximum-477-points-total scoring model that I’ve been using since Bill Clinton’s first term as president.

Even a small tweak, like, say, making the First Four games worth 3 apiece, then leaving everything else the same (or, say, reducing the 15 to 13 and making each First Four game worth 2, thus maintaining the 477-point max with a 2-5-7-10-13-20-25 system), would throw off and ultimately invalidate the historical comparisons, which were the only reason I’ve kept using the stupid 5-7-10-15-20-25 system all these years. So I’ve decided to completely throw it out and start from scratch.

But what to replace it with?

Many pools use a 1-2-4-8-16-32 system, making each round worth the same amount (32 points), but the individual games worth twice as much with each successive round. Although it has a great internal symmetry and logic, I’ve never liked that system, because I think it makes the later rounds too important, and thus the first and second rounds too unimportant. In other words, it’s the opposite extreme from the 5-7-10-15-20-25 system. I want a happy medium.

At the same time, I’m fond of scoring systems that allow for “upset points,” in which you get extra credit for picking the lower seed to win, thus discouraging overly “chalky” brackets. But upset points shouldn’t completely overwhelm the scoring — for instance, you shouldn’t get three or four times as many points for predicting a 12-over-5 upset as you do for picking the #5 — lest wild brackets that pick an inordinate number of upset picks — many of them wrong, but a handful right — get an unfair advantage over more reasonable brackets. (Rule of thumb: if picking all four #12s, and going 1-for-4, gets you anywhere near as many points than picking all four #5s, and going 3-for-4, that’s no good.) Also, the relative impact of upset points should fade somewhat in the tournament’s later rounds, lest the person who had George Mason plus a bunch of incorrect Final Four picks get hopelessly far ahead of the person who missed Mason but got LSU, UCLA and Florida right, and picked Florida over UCLA in the final (for instance). The Mason picker deserves major bonus points, but not a virtual win-the-pool-free card.

Keeping these principles in mind, I am considering the following scoring system for this year’s men’s pool:

FIRST FOUR (quad-PIG): 8 points per correct pick
ROUND OF 64: 15 points per correct pick + 1 times the seed of the winning team
ROUND OF 32: 25 points per correct pick + 2 times the seed of the winning team
SWEET SIXTEEN: 40 points per correct pick + 3 times the seed of the winning team
ELITE EIGHT: 70 points per correct pick + 4 times the seed of the winning team
FINAL FOUR: 105 points per correct pick + 5 times the seed of the winning team
TITLE GAME: 160 points per correct pick + 6 times the seed of the winning team

That means the total number of points available (not including upset picks) in each round (as a whole) are: 32 for the First Four, and then for the six full rounds, 480-400-320-280-210-160. That’s a much more gradually declining slope than the 160-112-80-60-40-25 of my old system (in percentage terms, the proposed system is 26%-22%-17%-15%-11%-9%, versus the old 34%-23%-17%-13%-8%-5%). Obviously, it’s not the symmetrical 16.66%-per-round distribution of a 1-2-4-8-16-32 system, but as I said, I don’t like that system’s overemphasis on later rounds. I think my system is a pretty decent happy medium.

To play out a couple of scenarios, if one #12 seed pulls a first-round upset, our hypothetical 3-for-4 picker of all #5s over #12s would get 60 points for his trouble, while the 1-for-4 picker of all #12s over #5s would get 27 points. Meanwhile, someone who went 3-for-4 because they picked two #12s, the one that won and another that lost, would get 67 points (7 more than the “chalky” 3-for-4 contestant). Finally, someone who went 2-for-4 because they picked the “wrong” #12 seed, and thus got one upset pick wrong and one non-upset pick wrong — this is what always seems to happen to me — would get 40 points, while somebody who went 2-for-4, but had the upset as one of their 2 correct picks, would get 47 points. It’s hard to be scientific about this, but that strikes me as roughly the right balance.

As for my aforementioned 2006 Final Four scenario, the person who picked George Mason to reach the Final Four, but got all the other Final Four teams wrong, would get 114 points, while the person who picked #2 UCLA, #3 Florida and #4 LSU, but not #11 Mason, would get 246 points. That’s barely twice as much as the Mason guy, which is actually a nice bonus for Mason guy, considering he got fully 3x fewer Final Four teams right. I think that’s fine, but I don’t want him to get too much of a bonus, considering he still only got one Final Four team right. Meanwhile, somebody who got both Mason and LSU, but not the others, would get 200 points — well ahead of somebody who got just UCLA and Florida (180), but well behind our 3-for-4 UCLA-Florida-LSU guy (246). However, if somebody got Mason, Florida and UCLA, they’d be sitting pretty at 274, well ahead of the chalkier UCLA-Florida-LSU 3-for-4 contestant (246). Basically, correctly picking the upset gives you a strong “tiebreaker”-like advantage over somebody who got roughly the same number of games right in a given round, but it won’t generally vault you ahead of somebody who got a much higher overall percentage of picks right. Again, I think that’s just about how it should be.

Anyway, I’m just wondering if anyone has any thoughts. Ultimately, this is my call as the Living Room Times Pool Dictator :), but I value any feedback that readers and contestants might have.