NCAA Tournament

orientalnc

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Here (1st look) are some games with potential surprises:

Winner of Rutgers/ND over Alabama - Bama has not played as well lately *** they did earlier.
VPI will be a load for Texas. The Hokies seem to have found themselves late this year.
Chattanooga could surprise Illinois who tanked in the B1G Tournament.
Pencil in South Dakota State for the second round. They are good.
 

orientalnc

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Probably not a coincidence that 5 or the ten schools are premier academic institutions: GT, NW, Cal, Stanford and Vandy. Education not a big seller these days.
That's an interesting POV. If you look at the P5 schools that are also highly ranked, unless I missed one, only Michigan is in the NCAA Tournament and also went bowling.
 

Northeast Stinger

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And what do MOST (Not all) of those schools have in common? Excellent academics. Make of that whatever you will.
Yep.

And not to put too fine a point on it but it is not that there aren’t enough smart basketball players out there to make these schools competitive, it is that lots of good athletes would rather reduce their classroom stress level to be able to give 100% focus on developing their sports career. Whether their thinking is flawed in that regard or not, that seems to be the current conventional thinking.

Even in football I am often struck by the fact that every year there are several star players at uga who clearly had the smarts to come to Tech but they chose an easier path.

Just mho.
 

MWBATL

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Yep.

And not to put too fine a point on it but it is not that there aren’t enough smart basketball players out there to make these schools competitive, it is that lots of good athletes would rather reduce their classroom stress level to be able to give 100% focus on developing their sports career. Whether their thinking is flawed in that regard or not, that seems to be the current conventional thinking.

Even in football I am often struck by the fact that every year there are several star players at uga who clearly had the smarts to come to Tech but they chose an easier path.

Just mho.
Agree 100%
 

RamblinRed

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B10 is 2-1. Ind won that first four game Tuesday,

The Rutgers/ND game last night was fantastic. Great game to watch.
Atkinson was ridiculously good, which made up for Blake Wesley being ridiculously bad (8 pts on 4-17 shooting - including 0'fers from both 3-pt range and the FT line).
 

RamblinRed

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Iowa is my first loss today. Even though I was rooting for Richmond I had Iowa advancing.

Richmond's coach was who GT wanted to hire when Hewitt was fired, but GT couldn't afford to pay him as much as Richmond could at the time due to the Hewitt buyout.
 

lv20gt

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Iowa is my first loss today. Even though I was rooting for Richmond I had Iowa advancing.

Richmond's coach was who GT wanted to hire when Hewitt was fired, but GT couldn't afford to pay him as much as Richmond could at the time due to the Hewitt buyout.

And this is Richmond's first NCAAT appearance since the sweet 16 run a decade ago (although they would have gone two years ago if the season wasn't cut short)
 
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