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willtalk
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Marquette Fan
Joined: 06 Mar 2005
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 Posted: 03/03/20 8:01 am ::: |
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| calbearman76 wrote: |
The one thing I liked about today's reval was that the Committee seemed more interested in balance than geography. I didn't agree with some of their rankings, but given the rankings they had I think it was solid placement of teams.
I particularly think that DePaul and Gonzaga are overrated, but the Fort Wayne region looks quite intriguing. |
Creme had DePaul down to a 5 after the losses at Villanova and Marquettes and I was a little surprised to see them in the reveal last night. I do think if they win the BET, they can probably get a 4 seed. And they probably have a pretty good chance of winning the BET.
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pilight
Joined: 23 Sep 2004
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| Posted: 03/03/20 10:07 am ::: |
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| linkster wrote: |
| Maryland is definitely a 1 seed but who have they beat? 11 Quad 1 wins sounds impressive until you look at those wins. They have played exactly 2 top 15 teams and lost both games. Given the steep dropoff of talent in wcbb a metric that rates the No 1 team as equal to the No 50 team is insane. |
They have wins over RPI #7 Northwestern and #12 Iowa and two over #15 Indiana. Comparing Louisville, whose second best win is Central Michigan, is sort of ridiculous.
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summertime blues
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| Posted: 03/03/20 10:49 am ::: |
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I've been wondering all these years, who made Charlie Creme God? And how much does the "committee" pay him to tell him what they think?
Yes, I'm sure that's subversive and heretical, and I don't care.
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myrtle
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| Posted: 03/03/20 11:54 am ::: |
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Lobo said Maryland met the 'eye' test to be in the same category as the top three. But when I've watched them, they didn't meet my eye test.
The intriguing thing this year is that nobody is unbeatable. Bring your 'a' game and you have a shot to beat any one of these teams and likewise if you bring your 'f' game or maybe even your 'c' game, you can get beat if you have a reasonably competent opponent.
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myrtle
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TechDawgMc
Joined: 12 Aug 2010
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| Posted: 03/03/20 12:12 pm ::: |
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| summertime blues wrote: |
I've been wondering all these years, who made Charlie Creme God? And how much does the "committee" pay him to tell him what they think?
Yes, I'm sure that's subversive and heretical, and I don't care. |
I've wondered why anyone pays any attention to him. Until the committee started doing reveals, he was always way off base. And he still doesn't seem to know what's going on until the committee does it's first reveal. You'd think after a few years of watching the way the committee works that he could have some idea how they think.
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myrtle
Joined: 02 May 2008
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| Posted: 03/03/20 12:20 pm ::: |
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| TechDawgMc wrote: |
| summertime blues wrote: |
I've been wondering all these years, who made Charlie Creme God? And how much does the "committee" pay him to tell him what they think?
Yes, I'm sure that's subversive and heretical, and I don't care. |
I've wondered why anyone pays any attention to him. Until the committee started doing reveals, he was always way off base. And he still doesn't seem to know what's going on until the committee does it's first reveal. You'd think after a few years of watching the way the committee works that he could have some idea how they think. |
this year is particularly hard to predict anything for anybody.
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calbearman76
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| Posted: 03/03/20 12:49 pm ::: |
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Actually Creme has generally done a pretty good job. Anyone that tries to put a bracket themselves realizes that Creme knows what he is talking about. Yes, he does adjust based on the Committee's reveals, but he is trying to predict what the Committee will do. He looks at choices the Committee has made in the past, and he tries to apply them to this year's results. And he tries to follow the NCAA guidelines of selection and bracketing.
The one quibble I do have with him is that he seems to get locked in on teams early in the season and doesn't adjust when other teams they've played fall off. This year Creighton had some early season wins that don't look as good in retrospecr,and I'm not sure that the Committee will see them as strong as Creme.
Indeed I think sometimes Creme does a better job of following past precedent than the Committee.
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summertime blues
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| Posted: 03/03/20 12:51 pm ::: |
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| myrtle wrote: |
Lobo said Maryland met the 'eye' test to be in the same category as the top three. But when I've watched them, they didn't meet my eye test.
The intriguing thing this year is that nobody is unbeatable. Bring your 'a' game and you have a shot to beat any one of these teams and likewise if you bring your 'f' game or maybe even your 'c' game, you can get beat if you have a reasonably competent opponent. |
I've watched Maryland a lot this year, ever since they managed to beat JMU with a surge in the 4Q. And I don't care what Lobo said, they have a turnover problem. Some bad hands there.
You're right, Myrtle, this year nobody is unbeatable. While some are whining that this means it's a "down year". I think it means more parity.
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RavenDog
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pilight
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Conway Gamecock
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| Posted: 03/03/20 3:26 pm ::: |
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| summertime blues wrote: |
I've been wondering all these years, who made Charlie Creme God? And how much does the "committee" pay him to tell him what they think?
Yes, I'm sure that's subversive and heretical, and I don't care. |
Bracketology began with two die-hard college basketball fans in a tiny office watching games, eating junk food, drinking caffeinated beverages, working around the clock and wishing the weekend would never end.
Today, Joe Lunardi and Charlie Creme are ESPN’s bracketologists: Lunardi projecting the N.C.A.A. tournament field for men’s basketball and Creme for women’s. They have been with the network for more than a decade and are familiar faces to many fans who follow the sport closely. To them, though, their part-time job is more a labor of love than a demanding occupation.
In the mid-1990s, before the proliferation of sports websites, Lunardi, 54, was the editor of the Blue Ribbon college basketball yearbook when he decided to publish an N.C.A.A. tournament guide and include detailed information on each team. He predicted which teams would make the field by analyzing data and figuring out what the selection committee members valued. That way, Lunardi, Creme and other contributors could start writing before Selection Sunday and finish the guide in time to send to subscribers and employees of ESPN and CBS Sports, who used the book as a resource.
Creme, 44, and Lunardi were living near Philadelphia at the time, so they and a few colleagues would get together during the weekend heading into Selection Sunday. They worked out of Lunardi’s office at St. Joseph’s University, where he has been a full-time employee since graduating in 1982. Creme was a staff writer for The Sports Network, a wire service that provided college and professional sports news mainly to radio stations.
Creme and Lunardi bonded immediately over their shared obsession with college basketball. They also enjoyed giving each other a hard time about their alma maters, Catholic colleges and rivals in the Atlantic 10 conference. Creme had recently graduated from St. Bonaventure, where he worked on a student newspaper staff that included the New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro; the Yahoo Sports and Fox Sports 1 N.B.A. reporter Adrian Wojnarowski; and Jeff D’Alessio, a former editor in chief of The Sporting News.
“I still have this vision of Charlie sitting on a carpeted floor in my office at St. Joe’s with his back up against a chair in front of this big old color TV that I had inherited from my wife’s grandmother,” Lunardi said. “He would just sit there and watch games and write about the teams as they ended. He was just a machine at cranking out copy.”
Even after Creme accepted a sports anchor job at the ABC television affiliate in Bangor, Me., in 1996, he sometimes made the trip to Lunardi’s office and helped out his old friend. He remembered the two of them working until 4 a.m., falling asleep for a few hours and returning to their duties. Their diet consisted of cheesesteaks, chicken cheesesteaks, Coca-Cola and coffee.
“It was the best,” Creme said. “I knew I was going to be massively sleep-deprived and nutritionally deprived, but it was all basketball working next to this guy who maybe felt even more strongly about the sport, the game and the excitement around this time of year than I did. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.”
Around a decade ago, ESPN asked Lunardi to project the N.C.A.A. women’s field. By then, Lunardi had established himself as an authority at predicting the men’s teams, but he declined the additional duties because he was busy working his St. Joseph’s and men’s bracketology jobs and raising a young family. However, he knew the right man for the position: Creme.
Although Creme was by then a pharmaceutical sales representative, he embraced the opportunity to take on the part-time bracketology job and pursue a lifelong passion. Growing up in Canastota, N.Y., 25 miles from Syracuse, he would tape two pieces of poster board together and make his own brackets that he attached to his closet door and filled in as the tournament progressed.
“Honestly, I didn’t have any expectations,” Creme said. “I looked at it as ‘I get to play with brackets again, I get to have ESPN next to my name and I get to be someone intimately involved in women’s basketball.’ I didn’t even think about anything else.”
Through the years, Creme’s ESPN role has expanded. At first, he was strictly a bracketologist and did not reveal his initial projections until February. Now, the first bracket is published in November and is updated each Monday starting in early January. By late February, he begins updating the women’s field every day until it is announced Monday, a day later than the men’s field. Last year, Creme correctly predicted all the at-large berths.
Creme also helps plan ESPN.com’s women’s basketball coverage and writes analysis articles, including accounts on site at the women’s Final Four. He also writes scouting reports for ESPN.com’s Insider service on the Big 12, Pac-12 and Mountain West conference teams that appear in the men’s tournament. He occasionally appears on radio and television, too, although not as frequently as Lunardi.
“Charlie Creme resonates with women’s basketball fans just as Lunardi does on the men’s side,” said Melanie Jackson, who has been ESPN.com’s women’s basketball editor since 1999. “And that’s not to take anything away from Joe. Joe absolutely should be credited for the model, and I know Charlie says he learned everything he knows from Joe. But I think Charlie’s done a great job of making this his own for women’s college basketball.”
Since Creme moved in 2003 to Las Vegas, where he continues to work in pharmaceutical sales, he has not seen Lunardi in person. Still, they exchange emails, remain fond of each other and reminisce about their days two decades ago when they huddled in Lunardi’s office.
“It was closed quarters and it was bracketology in its formative days,” Lunardi said. “One of these years before I quit all this, I’m going to do that again, get all those guys together, and we’re going to spend that weekend together watching games and eating bad food. We’re just not going to do the work part.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/sports/ncaabasketball/the-birth-of-bracketology-filling-in-all-the-blanks.html
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calbearman76
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| Posted: 03/03/20 3:51 pm ::: |
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| myrtle wrote: |
| calbearman76 wrote: |
I particularly think that DePaul and Gonzaga are overrated, but the Fort Wayne region looks quite intriguing. |
agree. And I think I saw Gonzaga is #10 in RPI which totally blew my mind and must be a good example of how crappy the RPI actually is. Their best game was almost beating Stanford. :oops: but they've really not beaten anybody unless you call Purdue somebody. OTOH it is pretty cool to have a mid host. |
The RPI currently has 16 teams in the top 50 with 2 or less quadrant 1 wins. I could make a case that everyone of them is overrated, but a few are more reasonably rated. But it is not so much those teams being overrated, but how the wins against those teams also become overrated. Gonzaga is the perfect example of that. Currently Gonzaga has 5 quadrant wins, but 4 are against teams rated 46 -49. Those teams are Purdue (4-11 against top 50), Tennessee-Martin (0-4), Dayton (0-4), and Middle Tennessee (2-5).
Other teams like Bucknell, Troy, Drexel, Central Florida and Central Michigan (maybe a top 50 team but certainly not 16) have more than 30 losses between them that get upgraded. The most interesting team is Princeton with only 1 win over a top 50 team, FGCU, but only 1 one loss, by 2 points in OT to Iowa. I don't think they are the 11th best team in the country, but if I were a 3 or 4 seed I wouldn't want to get that second round matchup.
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pilight
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| Posted: 03/03/20 4:22 pm ::: |
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| Princeton is hard to rate. Massey has them higher than RPI. None of the computer rankings place them outside the top 20. They have a weak schedule, but they've won big through almost all of it. Only one of their wins was by fewer than 12 points, way back in mid-November over Seton Hall.
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summertime blues
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| Posted: 03/03/20 5:07 pm ::: |
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| Maybe Charlie should stick to selling drugs.
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Davis4632
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| Posted: 03/03/20 5:15 pm ::: |
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| calbearman76 wrote: |
Actually Creme has generally done a pretty good job. Anyone that tries to put a bracket themselves realizes that Creme knows what he is talking about. Yes, he does adjust based on the Committee's reveals, but he is trying to predict what the Committee will do. He looks at choices the Committee has made in the past, and he tries to apply them to this year's results. And he tries to follow the NCAA guidelines of selection and bracketing.
The one quibble I do have with him is that he seems to get locked in on teams early in the season and doesn't adjust when other teams they've played fall off. This year Creighton had some early season wins that don't look as good in retrospecr,and I'm not sure that the Committee will see them as strong as Creme.
Indeed I think sometimes Creme does a better job of following past precedent than the Committee. |
Creme does do a better job picking the teams than actual region that they will be placed in because of the Committee doesn't always follow past precedent.
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WNBA 09
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RavenDog
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myrtle
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| Posted: 03/03/20 7:48 pm ::: |
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| calbearman76 wrote: |
| The most interesting team is Princeton with only 1 win over a top 50 team, FGCU, but only 1 one loss, by 2 points in OT to Iowa. I don't think they are the 11th best team in the country, but if I were a 3 or 4 seed I wouldn't want to get that second round matchup. |
personally I would LOVE to get that second round matchup. They have one really good player and the rest are middlin' at best. I've watched some of their games and I think they would have a hard time against middle of the PAC or SEC or ACC, etc... In fact, if they're a 3 seed, I wouldn't be surprised if the #6 seed beat them on their home court.
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but they've really not beaten anybody unless you call Purdue somebody. OTOH it is pretty cool to have a mid host.