This is a record of encounters with the humans who play college basketball. For most, they've been reduced to numbers, percentages: bracketed. Around here, I want to decompress them, let them be young men who play a game.
Yesterday, I described my discomfort with the statistical fandom, the goal of which is to create the best algorithm for predicting the world based on data. It's seeing a sport like a machine.
Which, actually, can be pretty fun!
But there are plenty of blogs to give you the statistical breakdown of every game and matchup. This is a different journey through the tournament's first round. I'm committed to just watching the games without the statistical overlays.
I'm here to watch humans test the species' athletic limits, not brute force my way to a marginally better bracket.
In most years, I'd enter the tournament with a stockpile of numerical and visual data about teams and players. But this season, my first with a child, I've watched way less games and analyzed far fewer stats. My basketball brain has been trained by 20 years of seriously watching games, but I'm entering March Madness with beginner's mind.
I only have a few ground rules.
The first: I'm rooting against the best bracket produced by the Huffington Post's Predict-a-Tron, which (now that you've already filed your bracket) you can see here. If this year is like the last four years, the machine is going to get a lot of things right, perhaps even 85 percent of the games.
The second: I'm rooting for UCLA and against all the other top seeds in the South bracket. So, sorry, Florida, Kansas, Syracuse, and VCU. You are, of course, welcome to join us in collegial fandom, but I wish for the destruction of your dreams.
The last: I'll be hanging around the comments. Let's chat.
9:40 am: And we're off. I'm beginning the day with Dayton-Ohio State. An interesting social dynamic this intra-state: Jordan Sibert transferred from OSU to Dayton.
10:00 am: In the early going, I've been thinking about nerves. In the first few minutes, one Dayton player short-armed a bounce pass and another missed a layup. But moments later, Sibert hit a three from the wing on a fast break. And the teams settled into a fast rhythm.
10:20 am: One of my favorite basketball moves is when a smaller player is on the break, dribbling just a bit ahead of a defender. As they approach the basket, the offensive player jumps up and generally into the defender. It takes away their shotblocking angle, stabilizes them as they go in for the shot, and often draws a foul. And they grimace. Almost every time.
10:25 am: In the Dayton-OSU game, it was 33-30 Dayton with 40 seconds to go. Dayton's guard caught a pass on the wing, made a remarkable pump fake at the three point line, stepped inside and missed a jumper. Ohio State's possession was one of those where they started the offense too late and wound up with a guard in a one-on-one situation and the clock winding down. Unable to gain an advantage, the guard forced up a bad shot and missed it. The half ended at 33-30.
The last two possessions of any first half are fascinating. Of course, all possessions are the same in the eyes of the machine. But how different does 35-30 feel from 33-32. One is a substantial lead, the other a virtual tie.
10:37 am: With 11-seed Dayton up 8 with 13 minutes to go, the ambient noise level of the arena begins to increase. The crowd has begun to entertain the notion that an upset is truly possible.
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin-American game is playing out as expected: Wisconsin up 10.
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