If I didn’t know the rankings, I would not have called this an upset. UMBC looked like a much better team, period.
They do tend to have a cavalier attitude.
Originally Posted by Robot Arm View Post
“There will never be a perfect bracket. The odds are astronomical.”
Originally Posted by FoieGrasIsEvil View Post
“But there have been.”
There has not been anything anywhere near picking a full bracket, at least in official records of betting agencies. Even the odds of picking the entire first round are staggering. This goes into a more detailed report:
According to that article, in over 18 years of offering the full bracket challenge, Yahoo Sports says no one even picked the entire first round until 2014, when Brad Binder picked the first 36 games (1st round and 4 others). Last year, however, over 30 people got the first round right, and the top picker got 39, the current record.
This autistic teen ran the first two rounds in 2010 but was not entered in a paid bracket bet.
Dennis
Wah wah.
For some reason I thought that it’d happened a couple times. How hard can it be? I get pretty close every year!
Lets not forget childish. I get that the question was dumb, so was losing to a #16 so convincingly. Wow.
Now that they have some unexpected free time on their hands, they can take another one.
What was the non-childish answer?
To me, that’s about as polite a response as one could expect.
And actually, a 16 had won before. (Fight fiercely, Harvard! :D) A men’s 16 had never won before.
Paying out for unlikely wins is not a “loss”, the bets are designed so the bookie wins no matter who wins the game, that’s what odds are about. That bookie probably made ten times that from the people who bet on Virginia. Unlikely winners are probably better for bookies than if the favorite wins.
That’s if the bookie is doing his job well. But I can believe that there might be some inexperienced bookie somewhere who wasn’t successful in keeping his action balanced, and didn’t worry too much about it because it was a “sure thing”.
There’s something that everybody seems to be forgetting; one of Virginia’s star players, De’Andre Hunter, was out with an injury. The one time a 16 beat a 1 in the women’s tournament, the 1 (Stanford) had its two top players out. Yes, Virginia was still somewhat heavily favored, but apparently the bookies underestimated the effect of Hunter’s absence.
I’ve probably read a dozen articles about this game. They all acknowledge the absence of a starting player and they all feel it was just not that great a factor. UMBA dominated virtually every important aspect of the game. They brought an “A” game that no one knew they had. I think their next game just started, we’ll see how they do now that the cat is out of the bag.
Dennis
Here are the complete Virginia - UMBC game stats:
Field goal percentage: 54% vs 41%
3 point percentage: 50% vs 18%
Free throw percentage: 71% vs 50%
Rebounds: 33 vs 22
Assists: 16 vs 5
Dennis
They try to set odds so that there’s equal action on both sides. They don’t always succeed. Bookies would have lost many millions if McGregor had beaten Mayweather, for example.
The non childish answer would have been “Yes” or “Of course.”
I guess it’s the “thanks for bringing that up again” that rubbed me the wrong way.
To me, the key stat was 3-pointers. I watched the second half of the game (should have gone to bed, but you know, potential history in the making…), and I think the eye test bears out the stat:
If Virginia had hit three pointers at the same percentage as UMBC, even with all the garbage-time points by UMBC, Virginia would have won by one point. Yeah, maybe UMBCs defense had something to do with a lower UVa shooting %, but it’s not like UMBC’s threes were all wide-open uncontested shots taken by peak Steph Curry; there’s no way they hit 50% of threes in a rematch. And a chunk of that 20-point margin was from late-game UVa desperate gambling.
Which says,
- UVa didn’t play that badly; sometimes the rim just likes the other team more, and
- UMBC did play a hell of a game; even without shot-luck they played UVa basically even.
The thing with Virginia (and with Wisconsin earlier, with Bennett’s dad coaching) is they are not built for the Tournament, but the regular season, where teams don’t play as hard. Defense only gets you so far. You have to be able to stay focused when you are trying to score and don’t have scorers, but it’s hard. Your defense falls apart.
If you look in the rafters at Wisconsin (who was coached by Bennett’s long-term assistant after Bennett “retired”) and Virginia you’ll see lots of regular season banners but little from the Tournament. They seem to think that having to score is some sort of weakness.
Bo Ryan at Wisconsin seemed to finally figure it out. His teams started to show up in the Final Four but they only made the title game when they had two NBA First-Round draft picks. Both guys could create their own shots and score enough to keep their teams close.
You saw the old-school Bennetts vs. UMBC.
I’ve got to remember to never pick a team that isn’t balanced or at least has one offensive star. Two preferably so the opposition can’t just collapse on one cough-Arizona-cough. Syracuse is an example of a great defensive team that always has a scorer around.
Speaking of Syracuse, has a play-in team ever advanced this far in the tournament? I mean, this is a team that many howled over even being included in it, and the naysayers had a point…'Cuse had a terrible season.
Perhaps it’s time to stop the carving of Tom Izzo’s mug on Mt. Rushmore. For the past few years, his teams have been great underachievers. This year’s team was supposed to be world beaters, but they just didn’t gel and it seemed like for all their talented players, they were perpetually overmatched. He’s a great guy and all, but it seems like his run of Final Four appearances isn’t coming back.
No. First time.