While it’s incredibly obvious to everyone in America that Kansas has a “Rock Chalk Cakewalk” to the Final Four, we thought it wise to pause for just a few moments to look at the seasons of the toe jam currently left in the Southwest bracket, if only to pretend like they possess the dignity for us to cast our eyes upon their lowly, fallen states.

We plotted the efficiency margins of each the four remaining teams in the Southwest bracket to get a sense of where each team was headed. Let’s look at the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum matchup from the late game first.

FSU

FSU was dominating even crappier teams than they earlier in the season, but once they got to the ACC, they became Dr Jekyl or Mr Hyde, while keeping their five game rolling average (the black line) pretty consistent. Remarkably, without Chris Singleton, they’re arguably playing their most consistent ball of the year. They are on an unusual uptick. Math would suggest that they’ll regress to the mean a bit, which would suggest more potential for a loss on Friday, but let’s look at their pathetic opponent before making any judgments.

VCU

These losers, like FSU, have shown a dualistic personality throughout the year, but their execrable season looks more like a sine wave. None of their players probably know what a sine wave is, because they are too crappy of people to merit the Jayhawks’ attention, but you can see that at different phases of the season (or perhaps the moon), they’ve smoothly transitioned from bad, to slightly less worse, to really bad and now to almost ordinary. While we would normally say that FSU is due a fall, VCU is demonstrating play right now that is unprecedentedly good. Can they keep it up? In all seriousness, probably not.

Richmond

Boring. Predictable. Richmond, peppered with seniors who will spend a majority of their lives wearing special order dockers from Levi’s Big and Tall, their eyes blurred from staring at someone else’s spreadsheet, is the most consistent bunch of chumps left in the Southwest. Never too hot, or too cold, they are just their remarkably ordinary selves. This is basically the narrative of their season: “Why yes these are iron-free, stain resistant cotton pants. My wife bought them for me. I have twelve pairs of them. If I lose one of them on Friday, I still have eleven other pairs that I can wear until life in a crappy office chair necessitates that I get twelve new pairs with slightly larger waistlines.” No one is reading this sentence, because everyone has been put to sleep by Richmond’s season.

Kansas

We lost three players to the NBA draft. To infer only from fan comments on public message boards our starting five is made up of a couple of white kids who aren’t athletic enough for big time basketball. The other guys are knuckleheads who should be kicked off the team. A semantic analysis of fan tone would tell one that this season has been a disappointment. And yet this team has won 34 of 36 games. Put an asterisk on one of those losses too, because UT would not have beat KU if not for the loss of Thomas Robinson’s mother. And yet, this is the worst 34-2 team in history. Believe what you read people, despite the fact that we are playing against three animate turds, we will lose, because we’re just not that good. We don’t have enough focus to beat teams, except for the 34 we’ve already beaten.

Our Prediction: Kansas emerges from the region only because the other teams don’t deserve to be in the NCAA tournament, feeling, appropriately, like the worst 36 win team in college basketball history, prepared to lose in the Final Four to a Wisconsin team that plays so slow they couldn’t make 100 baskets in an hour on an empty court on six rims.

Ken Pomeroy’s updated his log5 analysis for the Sweet 16. Despite ESPN’s cake walk suggestions, it’s still very possible that KU not make the final four. All other things being equal, if you’d have told us back in October that we’d be talking about the feasibility of not making the final four, I think we’d all have cut fat checks for it. But still, we can lose, and the teams we’ll play have beaten good teams to get where they are.

By all statistical measures, KU’s chances for earning another Final Four jumped markedly over the weekend, due in part to meeting or exceeding statistical expectations and to upsets. Nate Silver’s projections at the New York Times, which he updates multiple times daily while games are being played, were less sensitive than expected to the upsets, mostly because his model rewards margin of victory and recent play, and VCU and FSU in particular had big wins over solid teams.

Nate suggests that KU will be playing FSU if we can get by Richmond, and that overall, we have a 69.5% probability of making the Final Four.

Ken’s analysis suggests that KU has a

Team Rankings’ updated bracket odds end up in roughly the same place, although they think our Richmond game is tougher and our potential championship matchup is more winnable.

According to our computer overlords, KU has a little better than a one in five shot of cutting down the nets in Houston. I’ll take it.

And, even more than when the tournament began, the computers believe this is a three horse race. Four if you count “every one else” as another horse.

Be sure to download the March Madness On Demand App through Itunes. If you buy a lot of apps through iTunes, you can get 4% back when you purchase through BargainMatch.

If you need last minute help on your bracket, TeamRankings can help. PhogBlogger and budding guru David Hess works over there, and has several suggested brackets based on the size of your pool. They beat 99.6% of America last year, which means they probably beat you .

Here’s the link: Team Rankings

Two of the smartest smart guys in college basketball must have been reading the same thing, because the Phog Blog’s own David Hess and the New York Times’ Nate Silver both did pieces on seed and power rankings.

Silver shows how, given that teams in the 6 to 13 range aren’t that different, it may actually better to be seeded 15 than 8 in the tournament. This is how teams typically break down, given his normalized composite of power rankings over the last several years.

Hess shows that this year, there are backwards seedings. The four seeds, are on average, better than the two seeds; so are the threes! Kentucky, Wisconsin and Texas are all 4 seeds, and all dangerous ones. He suggests there will be upsets as a result.

I was always frustrated that I didn’t have a good way of using KenPom numbers to project hypothetical games…you know for filling out brackets or other recreational purposes, so I created a little spreadsheet to do the calculations for me. I’ve embedded that spreadsheet below. Remember, recreational use only but if you want to use it to bet on sports, I can’t stop you. Note these numbers are slightly off from Ken’s projection numbers - it may be because of rounding. I’ll dig into it at some point but this is good enough to start I think.

To use it do the following:

1. Click “Click to Edit” so that you can modify the cells.
2. Input the following data for your first team: Rating (on this page, Offense Rating, Defense Rating and Tempo (all on team pages).
3. Repeat for second team.
4. You should see the projections update.
5. Share the link to this post with your friends.
6. Save the calculator as an excel doc if you’d like.

Thanks to Ken Pomeroy for all the work he does. Hopefully this makes his numbers and the use of tempo free stats more mainstream.

The New York Times’ Nate silver has an excellent post on the role of luck in NCAA Tournament success which I highly suggest you read.

Silver contrasts Florida and Washington and shows how teams with similar talent have such a different experience based on the luck or incompetence of the draw. He then comes up with a nerdy formula for comparing the luck of the draw for each team in the field. Not surprisingly Florida is luckiest. UNLV is unluckiest. Kansas is third luckiest, though you would hardly believe it with all these people trying to kill yossarian out there.

Were it not for three inches on a twent five foot shot, Davidson would have advanced to the final four and not the mighty 08 team and had Ali Faroukmanesh eaten one less carrot or chicken nugget earlier in the day, his shot might have drifted slightly.

I really enjoyed this article for a couple of reasons:

1. It reinforced my sense that KU actually got a pretty good draw this year. Sure our 8/9 is a little harder than one would expect, but at least they’re well known programs. Unless they just shoot very well or we don’t show up defensively, either team would have a hard time beating KU.

2. It’s a reminder about the randomness and chaos of the tournament in general, and even the best teams have a remote chance of winning. If I lined up ten of you and told you I was going to give one of you a new Daewoo Leganza you’ve all been dreaming about, you probably wouldn’t be that surprised when you didn’t get that hot ride. You probably wouldn’t dwell for months on why you didn’t win it, breaking down your very identity to determine what traits the winner had.

The most extreme projection gives KU a 20% chance to win it all and roughly a 50% chance of even making the final four. Do we go into each game with a projection to win? Except against OSU and possibly Duke, yes. So in that sense we’re favored. In the real world, and the tournament is most certainly a part of said world, weird stuff happens, and sometimes, often even, that weird stuff isn’t good.

This year, like last year, we should be thankful that weird stuff has to happen for us not to do well. Last year, weird stuff, enough of it anyway, happened. This year, maybe we’ll be a little luckier.

Paranoia is knowing all the facts - Woody Allen

I told you not to worry last night, and I will repeat: Do not worry about Boston University. There will be plenty of worrying, and the heavy drinking and pacing associated therewith, to go around later in the tournament.

But there is no need to worry about Boston University, and here are a few serious reasons why.

Their mascot is the terrier, as in the Boston Terrier, a dog species described here as being confusingly similar to most Missouri fans, possessing “broad heads, protruding eyes, tuxedo-patterned coats and square faces with short muzzles.

Boston University’s primary color is Scarlet, which, like Crimson, is a color that normal people call “Red.” Their actual mascot, a humanoid dog named Rhett, was named after Rhett Butler, who loved Scarlett O’Hara in a movie most of you have probably never watched because it lacks a sufficient number of explosions to keep your attention. Rhett was born in 1922, so he has to be on his last legs by now, though admittedly my knowledge of bipedal, humanoid dog gerontology is fairly thin.

So before we even get into the numbers you can see that there is really nothing to worry about. After all, a team like Kansas could never lose to a highly-respected academic institution with ties to the patriots of the American Revolution. It just couldn’t happen.

The New York Times gives Kansas a 99% chance of winning in round one. This link is a cool one as it will update daily, so bookmark that piece. It actually shows that KU has the best chance of anyone of getting to the National Championship game, mostly because Duke and OSU are considered by your average robot to be the best teams.

Ken Pomeroy’s computers are a little less optimistic, giving KU a 97% chance of victory.

In other words, these teams could play between thirty and one hundred times, and it’s possible that BU might never win even once. A lot of bad things would have to happen for them to beat KU, and given that this team now has the taste of blood, I can’t seen enough of them happening save a freak sickness or accident, to de-wing the Hawks enough to lose this game.

According to Pomeroy, we would have to play this tournament 25,000,000 times for Boston University to win once.

Disagree with this opinion? Think we should tone it down a bit? I say we find each team in hallways and let Mook and Keef use adult language at our opponents to provoke them.

Our most important player in this tournament: Focus. If we can keep focus on the floor for more than 30 minutes a game, we can win it all. If Focus gets into foul trouble, look out.