Brave New Bubble: which 5-11 ACC team is more “deserving”?

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The latest bubble update from Mike Scullin’s NIT-ology is instructive, both for thinking about this year’s NCAA Tournament, and for thinking about how an expanded, 96-team field would change the nature of the discussions that we have at this time of year.

With respect to the current state of the NCAA bubble, Scullin writes:

I’m sure this is a common theme you’ll see on all of the NCAA bracketology sites this week as they digest the results of the weekend — there are simply not enough deserving at large teams right now, so the door is absolutely wide open for any of the [currently projected] top 3 seeds in the NIT to jump into the four-letter tournament.

That includes teams like UConn, Rhode Island, Ole Miss and Memphis: not exactly world-beaters, but still serious NCAA contenders because the bubble is so weak. And in a 96-team field, forget “contenders,” they’d be locks. The UConns and URIs would be playing for seeding next week, while the NCAA bubble debate would instead focus on those teams presently on the NIT bubble, teams like — I kid you not — North Carolina (16-15 overall, 5-11 in the ACC, tied for 9th place), which would, according to NIT-ology, still be in the field despite its eleventy-bajillion-point loss to Duke the other day.

Here are the current “last 10 in” to a hypothetical 96-team tourney, if we extrapolate from NIT-ology’s list:

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Jeff Freeze wins Oscar Pool, sets record

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Congratulations to Jeff Freeze, a resident of Burns Harbor, Indiana, and a blog reader since 2005, who won the 6th annual Living Room Times Oscar Pool tonight — and set an all-time record in the process, with 74 out of a possible 80 points.

Freeze got only six categories wrong, all worth one point apiece: Best Film Editing, Costume Design, Sound Mixing, and all three of the Short Film categories (live action, animated and documentary). Freeze’s total beats the previous high of 72 points, set by Chris McLemore in 2006 and equalled by Lisa Velte in 2008. (Full pool history here.)

It’s the second time Freeze has won a Living Room Times contest. He won the women’s NCAA Pool in 2008.

In Sunday night’s LRT Oscars liveblog, Freeze explained his predictive methods thusly: “I usually Google ‘expert’ predictions and then go with a favorite or the ‘conventional wisdom’.” Later, 10 awards into the show, he wrote: “I am almost ashamed to be leading this pool. I am shocked I tell you, shocked. I have not even seen most of these flicks. No way it holds.”

When his pick for Best Foreign Language Film, El secreto de sus ojos from Argentina, won the Oscar, Freeze admitted his pick was influenced by the Mark Sanford scandal: “I am ashamed to say, Sanford’s woman is the reason I picked that film. YES I am that shallow! … I figure if women are that hot in Argentina, then I would pick that film.”

Later, when he clinched the pool by virtue of The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture, Freeze gave a brief “acceptance speech” on the liveblog, stating, “I would like to thank…the interwebs, specifically Google for the help.”

Vicki Lopez, who famously almost won the 2005 and 2006 pools, finished in second place with 68 points, six behind Freeze. The screenplay categories doomed Lopez: she picked favorites Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air, but instead The Hurt Locker and Precious won, as Freeze predicted. If just one of those awards had gone according to Lopez’s picks, it would have resulted in an 8-point swing between Freeze and herself, and she would have won the pool.

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