March Madness Round of 64 upset picks include VCU, Butler
The No. 7 Virginia Commonwealth Rams have made a name for themselves in the NCAA Tournament in recent years with a 12-3 ATS record in their last 15 March Madness games. The Rams will be looking for an upset this Thursday going up against the No.
Kevin Durant, Shooting Star
Hell be gone soon, so people in Austin know they had better see him while they can. Of course, many dont even know what he looks like, since he has been in Austin little more than one semester. All they know when they push through the doors at the Frank Erwin Center is to be on the lookout for quite possibly the best basketball player ever to put on a University of Texas jersey, a tall, baby-faced freshman who plays like a mash-up of Tracy McGrady and Kevin Garnett. They spot him right away: the willowy 6-foot-10 player wearing No. 35 and bringing the ball up the court like a point guard, passing to his teammates, nailing jumpers from 15, 20, 25 feet away. They see him slash inside, dunk, get fouled and go to the free-throw line. They watch him smile and laugh and cut up with teammates, as happy as a child at play. And then they remember that Kevin Durant is only 18. Before the season, many basketball analysts predicted that Durant would be the best freshman in the country. Now, on the eve of the tournament, some of those same experts are saying that this skinny kid from Suitland, Md., might be the best player in college, period. Barring disaster, he will lead a dewy Texas team (three other freshmen start) into the tournament this month; three months after that, hell even more certainly enter the draft, where hell be the first or second player chosen -- and for some, not a moment too soon. Send him to the league, Missouris head coach, Mike Anderson, said after Durant hung 34 on his team in January.
AP EXPLAINS: March Madness, When America Goes Basketball Mad
Thursday is something of a national holiday for American sports fans, when office productivity plummets. The NCAA Mens Division I Basketball Championship, also known as March Madness or the Big Dance, begins in earnest. Thursday and Friday feature a hoops extravaganza: 16 games each day, from noon to midnight. The single-elimination tournament means every game is a must-win for all 68 schools, producing tense, dramatic finishes. Upsets are eagerly anticipated as elites like Kentucky fend off underdogs trying to spark an improbable run and become the next tournament darling. Fanatics, novices and even President Barack Obama are trying to predict the winners of every game by completing an estimated 70 million tournament brackets, according to the American Gaming Association — thats more brackets completed than votes Obama received in the last presidential election. Heres a brief explanation of how a basketball tournament transcended sports to become a national craze:
Nate Silver’s MARCH MADNESS
Nate Silver, the author of The Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog, presents the probability of each of the 68 teams winning the N.C.A.A. national championship.
Candace Parker, Fly Girl
Candace Parker is elevating the women’s game, one dunk — maybe two — at a time.
MARCH MADNESS 2015: 5 Locks to make the Sweet Sixteen
We take a look at a handful of locks to make the Sweet Sixteen as the NCAA Tournament rolls around.
Georgia State is already the best story of March Madness
When Georgia State won the Sun Belt Conference tournament last Sunday to earn a March Madness berth, coach Ron Hunter was understandably pumped up. He ran onto the court to celebrate with his players ��� but thats when things took a turn for the .
Brandon Crones Last Hurrah
One of the most memorable images of last years tournament was that of Gonzagas Adam Morrison weeping as his college career came to an abrupt and unhappy end, the then 20-year-old poleaxed by the finality of it all. But Morrison was one of the lucky ones. He had already decided to turn pro and at least had the N.B.A. to cushion the blow. Most seniors will lose their final games and never again take the floor competitively at an elite level. These are among the events most compelling figures, straining to extend their playing days just a few. moments. longer. Take, as example, Brandon Crone, starting forward for the Butler Bulldogs of the Horizon League. His is a familiar tale, different from that of his counterparts at other schools only in its details. Crones junior career was classic small-town myth; he was the guy they raved about outside the Tastee Freez. Two-time all-state at Indianas Frankfort High. Three-year captain. Set school records for career scoring and rebounding. M.V.P. of the state A.A.U. tournament, which his team won.
Ben Howland Is on the Verge
U.C.L.A.’s basketball coach may be the best college coach you’ve never heard of. But that may soon change.
Roundup: MARCH MADNESS, Brackets, Empire Finale, Nick.
See you at the bar at noon? To watch college basketball!
Will It be Win, Win for Jaokim Noah?
Its a traditional bit of sports-world kabuki, acted out every time an underclassman leads his team to a championship. The celebratory pep rally. The students chanting, One more year! The marquee player aw-shucksing his way through a carefully worded speech about Getting a Degree and Loving College Life. Then the throng explodes and the star grins, knowing full well hes leaving for the pros as soon as his new agent files the paperwork. As it happens, such a scene played out in Gainesville last spring, after the Florida Gators won the title. But this time there was a twist: Joakim Noah really meant what he was saying. Noah, a 6-foot-11 center/forward, announced he was returning for his junior year, along with his teammates Al Horford and Corey Brewer. Together they would chase that rarest of things: back-to-back N.C.A.A. titles.
The Surprising New Tech in March Madness Refs Whistles
This March Madness, a refs whistle blast will instantly stop the game clock, thanks to a a new technology that detects the shrill cry above the din of the crowd. The technology relies on a breakthrough in whistle design, the New York Times reports.
Ben Howland on the Verge of Being Famous
The night before the biggest basketball game of his Weber State career, Ben Howland called his close friend Jay Hillock, a former junior-college assistant coach. Howland had a reputation for nervous excitability -- he typically vomited 10 minutes before every game -- so Hillock wasnt surprised when the phone rang at 2 a.m., just hours before Weber was to play a powerhouse University of Arkansas team in the second round of the 1979 N.C.A.A. tournament. Im going to give Sidney Moncrief the biggest charley horse of his life at the get-go! Howland screamed, referring to the Arkansas star, and promptly hung up.
Obama Joins Millions in U.S. College Basketball Madness
March Madness gripped the White House and lots of other workplaces on Wednesday as President Barack Obama joined an estimated 60 million Americans scrambling to make their predictions for the annual tournament to crown a collegiate basketball champion.
March Madness spurs sick days, low productivity
If you figure about 50 million Americans participate in March Madness, according to a Microsoft survey from several years back, that means businesses across the U.S. will lose over $! billion for every hour employees spend watching the basketball games .
Murder Begets Grief and an Effort to Curb Murders
LEAD: The last article Lionel Harris wrote for the newspaper at Calvin Coolidge High School was about the killings in his city.
Kevin Durant, Shooting Star
A new N.B.A. rule forced Texas’s freshman phenom, Kevin Durant, to go to college. Praise rules.
The Workout: A Ref Keeps Up With MARCH MADNESS
. You think the players get a workout during March Madness? Try being a referee.
How to stream 2015 NCAA March Madness to your favorite.
Whether you have an Apple TV, Chromecast, or some other streaming hardware, we lay out the best scenarios for catching all the March Madness.
Live MARCH MADNESS Scoring Updates Upsets | The Daily.
For a sports fan, March Madness is the greatest few weeks of the year, but it can be tough to keep track of all the games. Fear not! TheDC has your back. For starters, weve compiled a master list of every single first round��.
Charlie Sheens racist tweet over Obamas March Madness bracket
Charlie Sheen is incensed that President Barack Obama filled out an NCAA bracket, and let his displeasure be known with a racist tweet. Barry Satera Kenya u wont attend a soldiers funeral uhkros da street that u kild yet u hav time 4 brackets? s a d.
Science Shows MARCH MADNESS Fans Cannot Resist an Underdog
If you got that warm-n-fuzzy feeling the weekend Lehigh beat Duke or the year N.C. State socked Phi Slama Jama or the time Butler almost did it, you are not alone.
The Colleges With The Hungriest MARCH MADNESS Fans.
As March Madness switches into high gear, it is time once again to start ranking colleges by their basketball teams. But a basketball team is nothing without fans -- and fans are nothing without pounds of greasy takeout food.
How a Pro Gambler Beats the March Madness Brackets
Betting on the NCAA basketball tournament is big business���an estimated $9 billion might be spent gambling on March Madness this year. With that kind of money at stake, its a safe bet that professional gamblers will be out in force trying to take.
MARCH MADNESS 2015: is it possible to hack the NCAA.
The tournament known as March Madness is notoriously difficult to predict. We analyzed 30 years of games to examine the likelihood of upsets ��� and came up with a bracket of our own as part of the experiment.
95-year-old nun shares her March Madness picks | WGN-TV
A few years ago we featured her on WGN as part of Chicagos Very Own because shes got an amazing mind for college basketball. She stopped by WGN Morning News Tuesday to talk about her March Madness picks.
Daytons crazy play-in game was the perfect start to March Madness
For those who needed the perfect appetizer to be really ready for March Madness (in case filling out six different brackets, planning watch parties and getting unnaturally hyped on schools that you just heard of this week didnt do it for you), the.
For the Gamblers, 1+2=5
In March 2001, a couple of Yale professors, Edward Kaplan and Stanley Garstka, published a paper called March Madness and the Office Pool, a serious, academic look at whether the code of the N.C.A.A. tournament brackets could be cracked. This treatise ran 14 pages and contained the work of two dozen statistical minds focused on a singular, noble goal: how to win the office pool. The wonks ran algorithms derived from past tournaments. They ran computer simulations. They even studied the National Invitation Tournament, a masochistic endeavor if there ever was one. Howd they do? They achieved overall prediction accuracies of about 58 percent, the report reads. But [did] not surpass the simple strategy of picking the seeds when the goal is to pick as many game winners as possible. Scientific translation: their guess is as good as yours. Worse, even.
She, the Jury
The only woman to ever serve on the men’s selection committee tells it like it is.
Brandon Crone’s Last Hurrah
Many players enter the N.C.A.A. tournament with dreams of the N.B.A. For others, it’s the end.
Get a Vasectomy and Have a Ball Watching MARCH MADNESS
Vasectomy clinics report spikes in appointments around March Madness, presumably from men who feel that theres no better period than tourney time to recover from the briefly painful procedure. The recovery involves little more than a few days of guilt.
12 March Madness facts to make your bracket suck less
However, once the original 64 teams are whittled down to the Sweet 16, its anyones game. To better help your bracket predictions, here are some March Madness facts and historical probabilities that might help give you an edge on your competition this.
Awesome NCAA March Madness apps | WGN-TV
This official March Madness app allows users to watch live streams of all 67 games. Note: A paid TV subscription is required for games broadcast on TBS, TNT and truTV. Explore the interactive bracket, receive real-time score��.
Dale Nosel Is THE Fan
If Dale Nosel is not the biggest fan of the University of Connecticut womens basketball team, he is at least its most visible. Basically, Nosel says, I shave my head before every game, and I paint the left side of my head white and the right side blue, and I also paint my arms blue and white. Thus arrayed like the stepson of the Blue Man Group, he positions himself in the sightline of opposing players and spends the better part of two hours popping up and down, chanting, shrieking and generally making a nuisance of himself. Such devotion has won him fame -- hes known variously as Superfan and Blue-and-White Guy -- but not without cost. Ive gotten slight rashes a couple times from the poster paint, says Nosel, who needs at least an hour to make himself up. His grades, too, have suffered. He thinks he could bump his 2.7 G.P.A. up to a 3.2 if he didnt spend so many nights watching sports. (My parents wouldnt want to see this, he says, but I picked UConn because of the sports.) There are also the nightmares. I wouldnt want to show up at a game without paint on, says Nosel, whose slumber is troubled by such visions several times a week. Nosels talent became fully realized during his freshman year, when, on a whim, he painted himself for a game. His roommate challenged him to keep it up, and over the next four years Nosel attended -- in character, as he put it -- football games, mens and womens basketball home games, even a handful of volleyball games. In all, Nosel has missed only two womens home games, once because he was at the Motor City Bowl in Detroit and the other time because his dad forgot to wake him up for a game over winter vacation. I thought it was a 7 oclock start, but it was a 3 oclock start, he recalls. By the end of the current season, he estimates, he will have been to nearly 100 sporting events this school year alone.
Dominos Pizza Offers 50 Percent Discount To Celebrate.
This is simply MADNESS!.. Dominos Pizza Offers 50 Percent Discount To Celebrate March Madness. The Huffington Post | By Kate Bratskeir �� Email. Posted: 03/16/2015 4:41 pm EDT Updated: 03/17/2015 1:59 pm EDT��.
Will It Be Win, Win for Joakim Noah?
Florida’s Joakim Noah passed up the pros for a shot at the impossible: a repeat title.
NCAA Tournament 2015 TV schedule: The first 4 days of.
SB Nation 2015 March Madness Bracket. For some, the first four days of the NCAA Tournament are essentially national holidays -- non-stop basketball starting Thursday afternoon and continuing late into the night on Sunday.
Google vs. Microsoft Bing: Search engines use algorithms to pick March.
Photo via Shutterstock. Whos better at picking the outcome of mens collegiate basketball games: Google or Microsoft? Well find out in a month. Both search engines have filled out March Madness brackets based on their own algorithms. As GeekWire .
How To Tell If A March Madness Underdog Is Going To Win
How To Tell If A March Madness Underdog Is Going To Win. By Stephen Pettigrew. When the NCAA mens basketball tournament picks up full speed Thursday, many fans will tune in with the hopes of seeing one thing: upsets. Some no doubt will come on .
The only MARCH MADNESS bracket Harvard could win
The NCAA mens basketball tournament is under way, and we know one thing is likely���Harvard isnt going to win. Sure, they squeaked in as Ivy League champions, but thats about it as far as they will go. According to Ed Feng, a sports data expert who.
A Guide to Watching NCAA March Madness Online
Forget February, its finally March which means one incredible thing: productivity-killing March Madness is here. By now youve completed your one precious bracket ��� and a few others because, why not? ��� and anxiously await the Big Dances March 19th .
MARCH MADNESS TV schedule: What and how to watch Thursday, March 19th
March Madness TV schedule: What and how to watch Thursday, March 19th. By: Nate Scott 1 hour ago. 245 shares. SHARE. TWEET. SMS. SEND. EMAIL. March Madness is upon us! Here is todays schedule of games, TV networks, and announcing teams.
March Madness 2015 Bracket Revealed (Easily Printable)
Its that time of year: March Madness! The NCAA on Sunday revealed the 68 teams that will play in the annual mens college basketball championship tournament. The Kentucky Wildcats were named the overall first seed, with��.
March Madness: The touching story behind UABs mismatched sneakers
If you tuned in for part of the opening-day March Madness game between Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) and Iowa State, you probably had the same question as so many others: Why do UABs players have mismatched sneakers on? Its not just a fashion .
John Oliver Tears Into The NCAA And March Madness In.
On Last Week Tonight John Oliver didnt just poke fun at March Madness. He triumphed in a 20-minute full-court press of a rant against the hypocrisy of the NCAA Tournament and the suits who run it. Oliver took shot after��.
For the Gamblers, 1+2=5
Want to win your office pool? Forget everything you know about math.
NCAA Tournament Live Stream: How to Watch March.
Catch every buzzer-beating basket and incredible upset with our comprehensive guide on how to stream 2015s edition of NCAA March Madness online.
Lisa Anns 2015 NCAA March Madness Bracket | SportsGrid
March Madness is here, and though we want to help you fill out your bracket by giving you as much information as possible, remember that your guess is probably as good as anyones ��� including the ���experts��� over at ESPN.
Future - March Madness (Prod. By Tarentino) | Stream.
Futures just as psyched for March Madness as you are. Futures descent down the rabbit hole of drugs and thinly-veiled depression continues. Ever since hi.
Another Way to Watch NCAA MARCH MADNESS for Free
The NCAA March Madness early round play-in games are over, and the tournament proper tips off around the country on Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately, the majority of the games are being broadcast on channels that are traditionally available only in.
Bytes Make Might
YOULL THEN BE able to pick up your telephone and call your son or daughter, who you are watching in real time in a fire fight. They will pick up their cellular telephone. You will chat with them about your view of how they are conducting their squad operations.. A lot of this sounds far-fetched, but its not. This is literally the edge of the future. This is Newt Gingrich, applying his fascination with technology and futurology to the ancient art of war. Gingrich believes that a third-wave society, one based largely on information instead of on agriculture or industry (the first and second waves), will have its own distinctive kind of warfare. Or so he said last month in a speech to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
Charlie Sheen Tweets About Obamas MARCH MADNESS.
Charlie Sheen is furious that the president had time to fill out a March Madness bracket, but not for a soldiers funeral. The former ���Two and a Half Men��� actor tweeted out an angry poem or something early Thursday morning��.