Which Conferences are Doing the Best in March Madness So Far?/My Dream Final Four

The original 65 teams from Selection Sunday have now been shaved down to just the Sweet 16. Which conferences have the most representatives and which ones are doing the most with what they have?

From the, um, mighty Big 6 "BCS" conferences:
Big Ten - 3 of their 5 NCAA teams are in the Sweet 16 (#5 seed Mich St., #2 seed Ohio St. & #4 seed Purdue), and people laughed when I said the Big Ten would look like the best overall conference in the tourney, though I was expecting Purdue to be out by now and Wisconsin to still be alive.
SEC - 2 of 4 (#6 Tennessee & #1 Kentucky)
Big 12 - 2 of 7 (#2 Kansas St & #3 Baylor)
Big East - 2 of 8 (#1 Syracuse & #2 West Virginia)...Anyone remember one week ago when the Big East was supposedly the most powerful conference of all? Those were the days!
Pac 10 - 1 of 2 (#11 Washington) - they were supposedly by far the worst conference, but look better than the "strong" ones since they advanced 50% of their entries and they had a much worse starting point for their two teams than the other big guys.
ACC - 1 of 6 (#1 Duke) - I bet my ACC-loving buddy Jeff Kelberg would not have imagined that the ACC would have the same number of Sweet 16 teams as the Valley, Horizon, Pac-10, A10, Ivy & WCC...

So the ACC has the worst percentage advancing to the 2nd weekend, but considering the Big East was touted as the best conference by far, they definitely look the worst!

Now for the "little" guys:
Missouri Valley - 1 of 1 (#9 Northern Iowa)
Horizon League - 1 of 1 (#5 Butler)
Ivy League - 1 of 1 (#12 Cornell - the "Cinderella" that looks more like a good team with a bad seed!)
West Coast Conference - 1 of 2 (#10 St. Mary's - never thought over the last 10+ years that if only 1 WCC team was in the Sweet 16, it wouldn't be Gonzaga!)
Atlantic 10 - 1 of 3 (#6 Xavier)

11 different conferences are represented in the Sweet 16, which I'm guessing has to be a record, but I can't say for sure. If it is though, I imagine we'll hear about a few times on ESPN & CBS in the next 5 days or so. Only other conferences with more than 1 bid that didn't have anyone advance are the Mountain West (0 for 4), Conference USA (0 for 2) and the WAC (0 for 2).

Three #1 seeds are still alive, as well as three #2s, but only one #3 seed and one #4 seed remain. If you are a fan of the underdog (as I am) you have to love this year!

Shockingly, my brackets are actually still in good shape, since I had Kansas, Villanova, Georgetown, New Mexico, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Maryland & Vandy losing between Round One and the Sweet 16 (except Kansas which I had losing in the Elite 8). So if I'm following my brackets, I'd want a Final Four of Ohio St., Kansas St., Kentucky and Baylor, with the Buckeyes beating the Kentucky version of the Wildcats for the championship.

However, since this is the tournament where anything can happen, this is my dream for the next two weekends:
Sweet 16 -
Northern Iowa def. Michigan St. (I like Tom Izzo, but I have to pick the cute little school that is just a few hours away)
Ohio St. def Tenn (gotta pick the Big Ten if neither one is a "mid-major" school)
Butler def. Syracuse (The Bulldogs #5 seed is the best seed of any the remaining small conference schools)
Xavier def. Kansas St. (Might as well support the Jesuit schools since my sister teaches at LMU & I love the Zags)
Cornell def. Kentucky (Perhaps the worst seeding of a tournament team in 10+ years)
Washington def. West Virginia (Both big conferences, but I'll take an #11 over a #2)
Purdue def. Duke (Considering many people, including myself, had the Boilermakers losing in the first round to Siena without Robbie Hummel, they are pretty much an underdog story; plus I hate Duke)
St. Mary's def. Baylor (even though many other Zags fans can't cheer for their big conference rival, I will, while wearing my St. Mary's sweatshirt which I only purchase a couple years ago because I was looking everywhere for the soft, comfy adidas 3-stripes on the arm hoody sweatshirts, and they had one, with colors that match all my Twins, Gonzaga & Loyola Marymount clothing!)

Elite 8 -
Northern Iowa def. Ohio St.
Butler def. Xavier (who wouldn't want to see Butler in the Final Four at home in Indianapolis? It could be a real life Hoosiers story!)
Cornell def. Washington
St. Mary's def. Purdue

Final 4 -
Northern Iowa def. Butler (I just said I wanted Butler in the Final Four; didn't say they needed to win it. Gotta cheer for the 2 Tartan High School Kids, Asst. Coach Ben Johnson formerly of the Gophers & DeLaSalle high school & North Dakota native Ben Jacobson, who could be a good choice for the Gophers if the unfortunate Tubby rumors come true).
St. Mary's def. Cornell (Cornell's Ryan Wittman is a Minnesota kid, but I pull for St. Mary's normally outside of West Coast Conference games, plus that's another excuse to wear the aforementioned sweatshirt)

Championship Game -
St. Mary's def. Northern Iowa (as Omar Samhan suddenly becomes a lottery draft pick in the NBA after not even being on most team's list of players to watch...and then Coach Randy Bennett likely leaves for the Oregon spot once Mark Few and Tubby Smith turn it down, causing the Aussies on the team to go back Down Under and St. Mary's fades into oblivion the year after their National Championship, kinda like that school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina)

Not exactly realistic, but it would just be my dream picks from who is left, and who could have imagined everything that's happened so far? Either way, I think there will be another fun weekend of basketball starting Thursday night! Now I hopefully I have a few days to relieve my Tivo Stress...

"Strandom" Thoughts - College Basketball edition: WCC, Zags, Trey Thompkins, Wesleyan School & more

I (once again) have neglected this blog for awhile, so I am just going to jot down some college basketball thoughts that are on my mind, just to get back into the swing of it!

• In the first month of this men's college basketball season, there was a lot of talk about the West Coast Conference (WCC) possibly sending more teams to the NCAA tourney than the Pac-10, due to all the solid wins from the conference, including Gonzaga winning the Maui Invitational, San Diego over Stanford & Oklahoma, Portland over Oregon, UCLA & Minnesota, St. Mary's over Oregon (& crushing San Diego St.), and even last year's 3 total wins team, Loyola Marymount, winning at USC (& now at Notre Dame just a few days ago). Even though Portland cooled off after Anaheim with some weak losses, the WCC has still looked strong. My favorite conference might want to erase today from the calendars though...Gonzaga played the 2nd worst game I've seen them play (@Virginia a few yrs ago was the worst in my opinion even though the point totals made today's the worst in over 20 years) in Madison Square Garden vs. Duke, losing 41-76 while shooting 28% overall, 10% on 3's & even a pathetic 48% on free throws. The Portland Pilots were taking on Washington in the evening, with a chance to redeem the conference, a yr after knocking off Washington in Oregon. The Huskies annihilated them though, 89-54 (both Zags & Pilots only had 17 1st half points). University of San Francisco lost the green & gold "USF' battle vs University of South Florida by 20 pts. San Diego lost a lead vs. Southern Illinois to fall by 2 points...but at least Loyola Marymount gave the conference one win for the day (and already their 5th on the season) over Cal State Baskersfield. Yikes.
• Speaking of the Zags & Duke...I am trying to find something redeeming out of the absolutely pathetic game they played in almost all aspects (they actually weren't terrible on defense for much of the game). Here's all I can come up with: They have made a habit of falling behind early this season, and coming back to win (or having a chance to win, such as their 2 pt loss vs. Wake Forest). Perhaps this absolute butt-kicking will hammer home the message that falling behind by double digits & coming back is not the way to have a successful season. It's good to be able to do that, but it's not a best practice to try to make a habit. To keep myself sane, I'm just comparing this game to the Vikings vs. Cardinals 2 weeks ago. Gonzaga just wasn't "there," but hopefully they will show in their next few games that it was an aberration, and not a sign of things to come.
• One final WCC related thought: When Notre Dame looked at their schedule earlier this year and saw they were playing two Los Angeles teams in one week, if you had told them they would be 1-1 in those games, I'm guessing the entire team (& 98% of fans) would've assumed a win over Loyola Marymount & a loss vs. UCLA. Again, this is the LMU team that was one of the worst in the country last year, with those three wins, during the season in which they got a new head coach, who took a medical leave a few wks into the season, quit 2 months later w/o ever returning from that medical leave and then took a Portland Trailblazers asst job the very next week. Yet when the final buzzer sounded in South Bend, Indiana last Saturday night (12/12), the final score was Lions 87, Fighting Irish 85, thanks to a Notre Dame 5-second violation and a game-winning 3 by Jarred DuBois. I was very happy (and surprised) to see LMU get that win, and was even more disappointed that it was not televised anywhere on my 100 DirecTV sports channels, than I had been when I discovered that before the game...yet somehow, I could find a game like Northern Iowa at North Dakota in Grand Forks today (not the North Dakota St. team from Fargo that was in the NCAA tourney last season, the UND team that regularly loses by 40 points in their slow process of acclimating to D1 basketball). Go figure.
• I figure the job of the analyst in a college basketball game is to research stuff about the teams/players, and be able to speak quasi-intelligently about that throughout the game. I realize this often doesn't happen, but the ESPNU team for Saturday's Illinois at Georgia game were selling a local school a little short. Georgia's leading scorer is sophomore F Trey Thompkins (given name Howard Thompkins III, hence "Trey"). Analyst/Former Alabama head coach Mark Gottfried, twice mentioned that Thompkins had gone to high school at Oak Hill Academy (the basketball "factory" school in Virginia that has a long list of former players including Carmelo Anthony, Michael Beasley, Kevin Durant, Brandon Jennings & Rajon Rondo, to name a few), and that Thompkins wanted to be closer to home, so he chose Georgia. While it is true that he went to Oak Hill & he chose Georgia, he skipped a step. Trey had been a student at the Wesleyan School in Norcross, GA, before transferring to Oak Hill for his junior year. After one year in VA, he came back to Wesleyan for his senior year, where he, along with Clemson sophomore G Tanner Smith, led their team to a Class A Georgia State championship. This game was even being played in Duluth, GA rather than on campus in Athens. Duluth is just a few minutes from Norcross (and Duluth is also where Gophers Soph Ralph Sampson III is from, but I digress...). Since my aunt Margaret works at Wesleyan, I know how much fun it is for the school (employees & students) when this is mentioned! Heck, it's fun for me when this is mentioned.
• While on the subject of Norcross, and the Wesleyan School, one other note is on Al-Farouq Aminu, the Soph star for Wake Forest/future NBA lottery picks. Aminu graduated from Norcross High School, immediately across the street from Wesleyan, where he won two 5A state titles. But before he transferred to Norcross his sophomore year of high school, he too was at Wesleyan. So if you look at the freshman on the basketball team in '04-'05 , one is a starter at an SEC school, and two others at ACC schools. Not bad for the little Christian school with barely over 1000 total students, K-12. They also have had many other athletes playing division one sports including former Air Force star RB/WR/KR Chad Hall, Georgia women's basketball player Anna Marie Armstrong & Colorado St. basketball player Chantel Kennedy, just to name a few. When Aunt Margaret told me a few years back that they had some really good basketball players, I was thinking of my high school, which was about the same size, who during my years had some D3 basketball players, and one D1 walk-on player. I soon realized that when she said they were really good, she meant D1 college star athlete type good!

That's all for now. I have many more thoughts stored away on subjects other than college basketball, but it is time to rest the brain once again!