Month: March 2006

OK, besides the fact that it’s the small conference teams who make the early rounds of the tournament fun, I just have to comment on the statistical stupidity of Billy Packers now-famous selection Sunday comments, dissing the MVC and trying to pump up the major conferences.

The basis for this argument was essentially that the ACC (who only got 4 teams in) have sent a lot more teams to the Final Four and the Sweet Sixteen than has the MVC (who also got 4 teams in this year). Packer was also clearly interested in Cincinnati being excluded, making the argument that the Big East and other power conferences have also accounted for many more Final Four and Sweet Sixteen teams.

The response from the selection committee chair was that (1) selection was based on teams’ performance this year, not on results of previous NCAA tournaments, and (2) the selection committee assesses individual teams, not conferences. These are pretty valid arguments on their own.

However, I wish the actual substance of Packer’s argument were directly addressed, because Packer’s argument is simply wrong, for two reasons.

First, the major conferences have sent one heck of a lot more teams to the NCAAs than have the minor conferences over whatever span it is that Packer would like to discuss. (This is the first time a so-called “mid-major” has gotten 4 bids in the same year, I believe.) So, even if games were decided by coin flips, the power conferences would have gotten far more teams into advanced rounds of the tournament, simply by the virtue of the sheer numbers. A conference sending six teams is more likely to have a team win four games than is a conference which only sends a single team, even assuming random outcomes. Anybody who thinks about this for 30 seconds should understand this, but apparently CBS rules prevent such consideration. A (slightly) better index would be games one per bid, not total games advanced.

The second thing Packer’s argument misses is that the power conference teams not getting in as a result of bids to the MVC are not teams like Duke and UConn. The MVC isn’t taking top seeds away, it’s taking away at-large bids mostly from the bottom half of the seeding. It’s mediocre power-conference teams like Florida State and Michigan who didn’t get bids, not the big boys like Villanova and UNC. How many of those power conference Final Fours and Sweet Sixteens Packer cited are from teams with #10 seeds?

Until Packer’s numbers are adjusted for number of bids given and seeding, they’re just meaningless statistics Packer is using inappropriately to justify his (and probably his employer’s) bias for big-name schools. And he never addressed the arguments made by the selection committee, he just repeated the same silly numbers. Angrily.,

I will agree with one thing, though; I have no idea how Air Force got a bid.

I grew up in Minneapolis. My mom is a big baseball fan and so I grew up a fan of the Minnesota Twins and the Detroit Tigers (my mother’s hometown team). Sometime in the early summer of 1984, at which time I would have been 13 years old, my family was watching the Twins game on TV (I remember it was a road game with the Twins wearing their horrible baby blue road unis) and a guy with a funny name took center field for the Twins. I misheard the TV announcer and thought his name was “Herbie Plunkett,” probably because I had never heard either of his names. When giving me a hard time about misunderstanding something, my folks still bring up that name.

Anyway, that funny-named guy became the face of the franchise, a local hero, and my favorite position player. Baseball was my favorite sport growing up, before the days of the juiced ball, juiced players, and shoebox-sized strike zone. A time when hitting 30 homers was a lot and baseball games were 3-2 and not 8-6.Through the 80s, baseball was my sport. And if you followed baseball at all in Minnesota through the 80s, you followed Kirby.

Kirby seemed to always be in competition with Wade Boggs for the batting title. Boggs usually won, but I always maintained Kirby was the far superior hitter. He hit for more power, more RBIs, and was infinitely more clutch than Boggs, who always seemed to me to hit 2-out, bases-empty singles when the game was already decided. (I may have been somewhat biased on that, but I bet if you asked the closers of the era who they were more afraid of in the 9th inning with a one-run lead and a runner on first, Puckett would be virtually unanimous over Boggs.) And Kriby was a multiple gold-glove winner in center field, whereas Boggs took many years to work up to “no longer a liability in the field.” But I digress.

The Kirby even I most distinctly remember the 1991 world series. I had just moved to Atlanta to start graduate school, and since I was going to be in Atlanta for the next few years, I decided to try to attempt to root for the Braves, the team of my new city. I just couldn’t do it. The first time I saw Kirby come to bat in that series, I simply could not root against him. It was just impossible to do. It was impossible not to like Kirby, to admire Kirby’s talent, and to root for Kirby. I know there were some controversies involving Puckett in his post-baseball life and I just found those incidents tragic.

I’m not one to get particularly sentimental about the passing of sports figures, but Kirby was different. It was sad to see his career end prematurely, and I’m sad he left us early.

RIP Kirby.