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Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Random Junk

Back from a weekend of getting out of the house and watching some hoops in-person, I return with the following tidbits...

ESPN announced the February 19th Bracket Buster schedule on Monday. Surely one of the cadre of personalities at The Mid-Majority will have an in-depth breakdown of the key matchups with the proper aplomb that can't be provided here. The headline game is Vermont/Nevada in a rematch of a first round preseason NIT game last season which the Wolf Pack won convincingly, 69-49.

Once again, the ESPN matchmakers ignored geography. It's one thing to send Vermont to Reno or the U. of Buffalo to Fresno in the name of good TV, but another to send 10-9 Cal State Northridge to Bridgeport, Connecticut to play 10-9 Fairfield.

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Florida International and Arkansas Little Rock participated in a Sun Belt classic for the ages on Sunday in Pharmed Arena in Miami. FIU prevailed 118-114 in quintuple overtime. UALR guard Zach Graber played all 65 minutes.

Unfortunately, it appears that no one knows when the last five overtime game was played, with all accounts of the game referencing the D1-record seven overtime affair between Bradley and Cincinnati in pre-shot clock 1981. But using some info on overtime games over the past two and a half seasons, one can make an educated guess on how rare five overtimes are.

In 2003 and 2004, 4.32% of all games required bonus basketball. Once in overtime, a game has about an 18% chance of being extended another period. So the chance of any game going 5 OTs is .0432 x .18 x .18 x .18 x .18. Which is 0.0453% or about once in every 22,000 games. With about 5,000 games played each season, this works out to once in every four to five seasons.

(As a footnote, in looking for the last five overtime game I found that there was a high school game in 1996 in Michigan that went five OTs with the final score of 7-6. That's 52 minutes of action and 13 points. Talk about taking the fun out of the game. At least the 5-2 game from Vermont in early January ended in regulation.)

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ESPN has rolled out wall to wall coverage of the miserable 0-24 season Savannah State is having. Over the last 50 years, winless seasons (one) are much rarer than undefeated seasons (eight). Shannon Sharpe's alma mater appears to have a great (maybe the wrong choice of words) chance of losing their last four games and finishing 0-28. But it was only two years ago that North Carolina A&T was expected to take on the same fate before pulling off a March shocker at Norfolk State. There won't be any March Madness for SSU - their season ends on Valentine's Day, before any other D1 team.

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The upset of the weekend was Washington State winning 70-63 at Arizona, ending a 38 game span where Arizona won every game between the two teams. Four players on the Wazzu roster weren't born the last time the Cougars beat the Wildcats on January 30, 1986. The longest in-conference winning streak now belongs to Kansas over Kansas State. The Jayhawks have won 28 in a row since falling to K State in a January 17, 1994 loss.

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Speaking of one team's domination over another, Princeton won every home game against Brown between 1929 and 2002 - a total of 52 games, the longest streak of its kind in NCAA history. With Brown's 57-52 win at Princeton on Friday, the Bears have taken two of the last three at Princeton.

Posted on 02/01 at 12:00 AM
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