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The NCAA tournament ended with a brick-laden thud in the championship game. But even if Butler had somehow found a way to win (perhaps by making more than 9 field goals), Joel Landas would still have won Gelf's inaugural Bracketless Bracket competition. Besides having both the finalists on his list, Landas had five of the final eight teams, and scored points with 11 of his teams, more than any of the 646 other entries in the tournament.
Landas credited his victory to picking teams with defense, interior size, and the presence of NBA talent. For his overwhelming victory, Landas wins a Gelf T-shirt and a copy of Dave Zirin's book Bad Sports.
Second place went to David Adair, who tells Gelf he picked his teams by going with the ones that were the hottest going into the tournament. That led him to UCONN, Kentucky, and 12-seed Richmond, the latter of which won twice and vaulted Adair above several similar brackets. He gets a copy of Zirin's book for his efforts.
The last T-shirt goes to third place finisher David Burke, the only other competitor to get more than 4,000 points.
How did a selection of our other competitors do? CBSSports's Eric Angevine picked UCONN but ended up in the middle of the pack after choosing Ohio State and Notre Dame as his one- and two-seeds. Basketball Prospectus's Neil Paine finished even farther down the list after choosing Purdue as his three-seed and Texas as his four-seed. Your humble author managed to pick Butler, but otherwise underwhelmed, and didn’t pick up a single point below the eight-seed line.
After two weeks and 64 games, the 2011 NCAA basketball tournament is down to just four teams. Gelf's Bracketless Bracket field has constricted even further—only two contestants are still competing for the grand prize. The favorite is Joel Landas, who has been dominating the field since the early rounds. (Earlier, Landas told Gelf how he decided which teams to pick.)
All of the NCAA tournament's 6 and 7 seeds have washed out after the first two rounds, as have all the teams seeded 13th and below. That leaves nine of the 16 seed lines still alive in Gelf's Bracketless Bracket tournament, and Joel Landas is the only contestant to have a team still playing in each one. As the current leader, Landas is also the only contestant to have racked up more than 3000 points, and he has a 260-point lead over his closest competition.
The first two real rounds of the thoroughly entertaining 2011 tournament are over, and two things are abundantly clear. First is that our student-athletes should spend more time learning when is and isn't an appropriate time to foul. Second is that Brian Westbrook will not be winning this years Bracketless Bracket tournament. Over the course of just two games, every single team in Westbrook's bracket has lost, meaning he can earn no more points in this competition. Since he already has the lowest point total, he will definitely be the overall loser of the Bracketless Bracket tournament. (Indeed, everyone else has at least one team left in his or her pool.)
Gelf's Bracketless Bracket tournament—the Bill James-designed contest in which readers pick their favorite team from each seed line—has attracted more than 500 entries so far from around the world. The most popular choice overall? Contestants chose seven seed Washington in more than half of the brackets. Basketball Reference's Neil Paine tells Gelf that based on the 10,000-tournament simulation he ran, Washington was the easiest pick. "The Huskies have 1.41 expected wins," Paine writes in an email. "No other 7-seed has more than 0.71 expected wins. The have a 73.7% chance of beating UGA in round 1, and are a great value with a 47.7% chance of beating big-name UNC in round 2."
For a long time, ESPN has willingly whored itself out to brands looking for nifty product placement slots. (A cold Coors Light, anyone?) But one of its forays into the advertorial waters is bewildering, at best. The folks behind ESPN.com have taken what has long been one of their best features—the SportsNation poll that shows how respondents in each US state reply to questions—and turned it into an ad for, of all things, windshield-wiper blades.
In case you missed it, Lil Wayne and Jackie Robinson made like hangovers and resolutions, joining forces to help ring in the New Year. The unlikely duo were featured in an irreverent and enigmatic ad campaign that showcased professional athletes accompanied by Lil Wayne asking, "What's G?"
The New York media are already having a field day with how much of a field day they're going to have with the Yiddish meaning of the last name of a certain recently acquired Mets reliever. "It's Pronounced "Puts," Until J.J. Screws Up, At Least," declared an NBC New York headline. The New York Times ran an entire article about the challenges posed by the fact that "the word 'putz' is vulgar Yiddish slang for penis."
Back in 2005, Molly Shattuck was the subject of one of the most poorly received Rick Reilly columns to ever land in Sports Illustrated. At 38, the super-hot wife of a super-rich CEO was not only a super mom, she was also a super cheerleader for the Baltimore Ravens! Super awesome! Thank God someone was there to make her feel even better about herself by giving her head on the back page of a national magazine! Luckily, her well-deserved time in the limelight isn't quite over.
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