Writes Dan Wolken in "Purdue is the choke artist program of the decade after another March Madness implosion/When Friday's game was in the balance, Fairleigh Dickinson never wavered. Purdue ran, hid and hoped for a collapse from its opponent that wasn't going to come" (USA Today).
ADDED: I like the first line from Noah Weiland in the NYT: "No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson, the shortest team in men’s college basketball, took down top-seeded Purdue and its magisterial 7-foot-4 big man Zach Edey...."
The tall versus short hijinks were like something in a Disney cartoon. We were, of course, for Purdue — West Lafayette is Meade's hometown — but I thought it was pretty funny how the little guys were slipping in and around the crowd of giants.
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47 comments:
Purdue and its head coach choked. They didn’t get the ball to their center who is 7’4” and maybe the best player in college basketball.
I really blame the coach.
Purdue is often among the toughest teams to beat early in the season. But they are choke masters when it comes to the NCAA. I'm not sure what it is. On the other hand, the Big Ten teams have been awful in basketball in the last couple of years- top to bottom. As a conference, their teams are very overrated based on past performances.
You hope for a collapse from your opponent rather than playing you best game.
It was only a year ago that Iowa won the Big Ten tournament and lost in the first round, to a 12th-seed. Big Ten not that good...
A- Better use of data and statistics means greater parity in the tournament, top to bottom. There are also statistical anomalies within the bracket, like the 7-10 matchup mismatch that create seemingly improbable upsets, poor strength of schedule rankings due to insufficient data of regular season games and changes to starting team personnel due to injury or otherwise...
...and 2- That's why you play the games.
Fairleigh Dickinson, Florida Atlantic also score upsets. A good weekend for "F"s.
Too overconfident.
Oh. please. Even a very good college basketball team loses a lot of games, some times to teams that everyone knows are worse than it. In fact, one reason March Madness is so popular is how often the better team is upset. If the better team always won, it would be boring. The result could be predicted beforehand and the tournament would be superfluous.
I watched the last half of the Purdue/FDU game before my Indiana Hoosiers played Kent State.
Purdue played like they didn't want to win - especially in the final minutes. It's obvious they had the talent to win, it's like they didn't take the game, or FDU, seriously. That's a coaching/mental preparation failure.
I don't know how far Indiana will go, but I'm relieved Mike Woodson at least got through the first round.
A real mismatch, just like Silicon Valley Bank. Purdue had no plan to slow things down or speed things up. They just did what they did all season. But that three-point shooting by Purdue--horrible! They threw up bricks. If you do that, you have to get the rebounds.
FDU was really lucky with their foul situation--key players stayed in the game.
In three years they have lost to 13, 15 and 16 seeds.
Most coaches would be on a much hotter seat.
I really blame the coach.
I agree completely. Coaches need to prepare their players for what the opposition is likely to do. In most big upsets the favored (but losing) team seems totally unprepared.
I learned that lesson in HS football when we lost to an underdog arch rival. We were a far better team, but they ran plays that we were completely unprepared to deal with.
"Fairleigh Dickinson, Florida Atlantic also score upsets. A good weekend for "F"s."
Furman was the third F. Sorry.
I like Matt Painter, but this one is on him. By the end of the year, people figured out how to take Edey out of the game as much as possible and dare the rest of the team to beat them. With my Hoosiers on deck later, I couldn't indulge the urge to gloat to the degree I might have. Only one team gets out of this alive.
Not a stellar effort from the B1G so far. Bad officiating through the season and beating each other up over twenty games will do that to a conference. Miami next. Anything can happen.
How does this happen?
By operation of the rule of "On any given Sunday . . ."
Virginia might be even bigger choke artists over the past four years save for that improbable 2019 victory over....Purdue.
Glad to see Mike Woodson holding up the old coaching standard of suit and tie. He dresses like Wendell Pierce playing Bunk Moreland in The Wire.
The rest of 'em? They look like folks coming out of the aerobics class at a senior center.
Purdue beat my Penn State in the Big 10 championship nail-biter. Then Texas A&M ran into the buzzsaw of hot-hand Andrew Funk, and Purdue gets taken down by the Lollipop Guild.
March Madness!
That's easy... Now explain 81 million votes for Biden!
Purdue's freshman guards hit the wall about three weeks ago. Since then, Purdue has struggled to get baskets from anyone except Edey.
And Rick Mount ain't walking through that Locker room door.
The Big Ten, led by my alma mater in Champaign, routinely shits the bed in the NCAA.
Bad officiating through the season …
A lot of people point to Big Ten officiating as a contributing factor for postseason problems. The idea is that Big Ten refs call ticky-tacky fouls, the players get used to it, and consequently they are ill-prepared for more normal officiating. But that doesn’t account for five of eight Big Ten teams advancing in the opening round of the tournament, plus two of three teams in the NIT (the third, Rutgers, lost in overtime).
Let’s remember that these are college kids, and there will be times when they get too complacent. “Winning by waving your newspaper clippings at the opponents” it used to be called, though what they call it these days when print newspapers are nearly extinct is something I don’t know. Terrence Shannon, Jr., a legitimate pro prospect from Illinois (another disappointing Big Ten team) owned up to this when he tweeted that the team needed to pay better attention to the game plan and didn’t always listen when the coaches told them what to expect from their opponents.
Purdue's guards shot 5/26 from the 3 point line. Thats why they lost. You can't win in the NCAA tournament without good Guard play. It sorta shocking. You'd think that Purdue would have some great sharpshooters at the Guard position to take advantage of the defense having to collape in on their 7-4 center.
But I guess not.
Arizona lost too. But that was expected. I wonder if Duke will sneak in for another Final 4 appearance.
Big 10 and Pac 10 always seem to underperform. Same in College football. when's the last time they won the championship? Most of the time they don't even get in the finals.
No big and small tag?
Writes Dan Wolken in "Purdue is the choke artist program of the decade after another March Madness implosion …”
Thd decade is far from over. But Dan Wolken forgets that in 2018 the University of Virginia was ranked #1 in the entire country and was blown out in a 21 point loss to the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. This is a tiny school, and I have been there a couple of times back in the day so I will assure you that you could drop the UMBC campus in a corner of any Big Ten campus, and most students would never accidentally stumble across it.
As a UVA fan, I'm just glad they're no longer the only #1 to lose to a 16 seed. They did lose to a #13 this year, so they count as a serial early choker like Purdue.
Maybe a failure of conditioning? The players are worn out by March?
Maybe too much time spent on their studies and midterms? No, that couldn't be...
Is this not the first time a #16 has beat a #1. Plenty of wins for a #15 but I think this is new.
I'm going to assume that 90-95% of the players on the floor were B/black. Correct me if I'm wrong--that would be a story.
I topped out at 6'1" early, but had no roundball aptitude or interest.
Sometime in the mid-60s, I recall that Johnny Newman and Ole Miss were at some tourney--he was a local hero to some--and a couple of my uncles were watching and commenting. Both had been athletes in their prime, but were dismayed at the integration of the games they loved.
"I used to care, but now they've gone and messed it up," said Uncle J.
"I know! Who wants to watch a bunch of go-rillas play basketball?" replied Uncle F.
(I don't want to watch anyone play basketball, thought I, and now I have an easy out.)
Arizona, 2 seed, managed a choke loss to Princeton, 15 seed, and was out rebounded despite having three at 6'11" on the roster.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the field of the NCAA tourney has greatly flattened in terms of quality. A decade ago, it really was inconceivable that a 16th seed would beat a 1 seed, but my observation, and I am a long time (like from age 8) college basketball fan, that the #1 seeds of today are significantly worse than the #1 seeds of today. If today's Purdue team were transported back to only 2012 or so, they wouldn't have finished in the top three of their own conference, and would have been seeded in 2012 no higher than a 5 or 6 seed. The big change has likely been the breakdown of the best players staying for even 2 years, and now some of those best players don't even play college basketball at all- they just play overseas for a year, getting paid big money before entering the NBA draft. This allows a mid-level team like Purdue to rise up to a #1 or #2 seed. Whereas the lower level teams like FDU generally get players who play all four years, and who aren't athletically ungifted, just maybe undersized for the positions they play. I watched the highlights of the game from last night- FDU, while undersized, were significantly quicker and better leapers than pretty much the entire Purdue team. I don't even think this was much of an upset- Purdue was just over-rated very badly.
The group with whom I participate to bet the NCAA, in its wisdom, selected Virginia, Arizona and Purdue. we paid a lot of money for Purdue. This because one of our guys is a Purdue grad. He has lost his rights to influence future selections!
Sports topics usually get a good, easy to read commentary here at the house of Alt-meade. People are watching the same thing and are still able to be chatty without getting long-winded.
This is a good thing.
The headline actually understates the disparity in the team rankings. I checked kenpom.com during the final minutes of the game -- Fairleigh Dickinson was ranked 298th overall, with the 359th ranked defense (out of 363 teams) in the country. Kenpom was updated a few minutes after the game, and Fairleigh Dickinson moved up to 275 (and their defense is now ranked 353rd).
Fairleigh Dickinson actually was rated below 300 before their play-in game against Texas Southern, which came in eighth place in the second-worst conference in the country but won its conference tournament. Fairleigh Dickinson plays in the lowest-rated conference in the country - and actually lost in their conference tournament to a team that wasn't eligible for the NCAA tournament because it recently moved up from Division II.
Someone who has actually never played sports speaks.
The crowd of "giants". Fee fi fo fum. We know how that ended.
Of Gulliver's travels. Beware the little people bearing scalpels.
Just one giant. The rest were a bunch of mites. And quick ones, too.
There is a reason it's call sport. Superior skills, bodies and brains don't always win on any given day. Wether it be a easy golf course rat fucking a scatch golfer, marksmen like hunters missing game, etc. Every team in national championship of any sport are talented, all will lose but one.
There is a reason it's call sport. Superior skills, bodies and brains don't always win on any given day. Wether it be a easy golf course rat fucking a scatch golfer, marksmen like hunters missing game, etc. Every team in national championship of any sport are talented, all will lose but one.
Does this deserve the "Big and Small" tag?
Most overrated basketball conference in the country and it's not even close. Every year, the Big 10 gets, what, 8, 9, 10 ... teams into the tournament? And every year they shit the bed.
Last title? Michigan State in 2000. Last title before that? Michigan in 1989.
They should stick to wrestling.
Kansas gone. Another Team that always under-performs. Next highly rated team to get bounced? UCLA.
One reason for the "flattening" is that the best players leave after one year. Maybe two. MJ played 3 years at North Carolina. Bird did 3 at Indiana. McHale did 4 years. Shaq did 3 years at LSU. Even Magic did 2 years.
In 2019, out of the 10 ten NBA draft picks, 6 were freshman, 3 were sophmores.
Bobby Knight said the most stressful thing about his job, was living with the fact his paycheck was running up and down the court, in the pockets of 19, and 20 year olds.
Rory said...
Fairleigh Dickinson, Florida Atlantic also score upsets. A good weekend for "F"s.
Don't forget #15 (South Bracket) Princeton slugging #2 Arizona and then following that up by stomping #7 Mizzou by 15 to reach the Sweet 16.
As for FAU, I think a Ref, standing between two Memphis players signaling "time out," ruled "held ball" instead when only #3 of the Tigers had possession, giving the Owls the last shot.
Only two teams — out of eight Big Ten teams invited to the NCAA tournament — are still playing. Unless Indiana can beat a very good Miami team or Michigan State beat an even better Marquette, it’s quite possible that the Ivy League will have more teams (Princeton) in the Sweet Sixteen than the Big Ten (zero).
Two #1 seeds are gone in the round of 32. Who had that in their bracket?
"rcocean said...
Kansas gone. Another Team that always under-performs."
LOL Kansas won the National Championship last year.
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