Brackets! Brackets! Brackets!

The bracket is out! And that means that office printers and copiers everywhere are going to be working overtime to accommodate for all of the highly illegal NCAA Basketball Tournament gambling operations that sprig up. Surely by now you’ve taken a look at the bracket and seen where your favorite teams are located, where they will have to play, who they will have to beat on the road to the Final Four. Like every year, some teams feel like they were snubbed, and some probably didn’t deserve to dance over others. The time for argument and debate is exactly right now. After today, you’re going to have to get over it, get out you pencil, open up your browser, sign into your Insider account and try to make the best possible predictions.

There’s so much out there about the Tournament right now it’s hard to tell exactly where you should go. The Final Four Blog recommends starting out very general. In fact they have introductory courses on Bracketology at ESPN.com, and even a whole home page for all that is the Tourney. Dig in, folks. There is no end to the amount of analysis you could possibly come up with for this week of sports.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 17, 2008 - Post a comment

Friday Games For Which You Ought to Already Have Tickets

Yesterday there were some excellent games to attend. The conference championship tournaments are producing some great matchups- as always, as expected- and today will be no different. In fact, some are saying that today and tonight’s games are the biggest this whole season so far. You can see a little overview of some of the best matchups at BasketballProspectus.com. Here are the Final For Blog’s top games fro which to get tickets.

—TOP TICKET GAMES – FRIDAY OF CHAMPIONSHIP WEEK—

1. USC vs. # 3 UCLA
2. Nebraska vs. #5 Kansas
3. Ohio State vs. #19 Michigan State
4. Pittsburgh vs. #25 Marquette
5. Boston College vs. Clemson
6. Boise State vs. Utah State
7. West Virginia vs. #9 Georgetown
8. #18 Vanderbilt vs. Arkansas
9. Michigan vs. #8 Wisconsin
10. #21 Washington State vs #11 Stanford

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 14, 2008 - Post a comment

Championship Week Continues

With so many good conferences running their championship tournaments this week, it’s hard to keep track of who is playing who around the nation. Teams are clamoring for spots in the NCAA Tournament, so that means that bubble teams are doing their best to impress the selection committee, and mid majors are doing anything possible to win the conference auto bid. Take a look at the scoreboard at CBS Sports to see how many great games there are today. Hope you have your tickets!

—–TOP TICKET GAMES—–
Thursday, March 13, 2008

1. #14 Notre Dame vs. # 25 Marquette
2. Cal vs. #3 UCLA
3. Dayton vs. #10 Xavier
4. #9 Georgetown vs. Villanova
5. #11 Stanford vs. Arizona
6. Boston College vs. Maryland
7. Oregon vs. #21 Washington State
8. #13 Louisville vs. Pittsburgh
9. Florida vs. Alabama
10. Illinois vs. Penn State

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 13, 2008 - Post a comment

Read Luke Winn’s Tourney Blog at SI.com

Luke Winn, one of the best sports writers at Sports Illustrated.com, is at the Big East Tournament in New York blogging away, and you ought to take a look at what he’s putting together. The man runs a good blog, I’ll tell you. Anyways, Winn has some great stuff and you ought to check it out. You can check out a funny picture or two, see some predictions, even get the inside scoop on his scrabble game with one of the best players on the UConn team. Now that’s a blog. We’re very jealous at the Final Four Blog.

So who will win the Big East Tournament? Great question. The games start today, but all of the top four seeds have byes in the first round, so the favorites won’t start until tomorrow. Georgetown, Louisville, UConn and Notre Dame are the top four seeds and thus the most likely to make it to the championship. We would make a prediction that Notre Dame is going to win the thing, but since StubHub also sponsors a Notre Dame blog, we don’t want to jinx things.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 12, 2008 - Post a comment

Torero Means Bullfighter in Spanish, to Anticipate your Attitude-filled Next Question

The USD Toreros beat the No. 20 Gonzaga Bulldogs in the Championship Game of the West Coast Conference Tournament, securing a ticket to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2003. In fact, last night’s 69-62 win on their home floor was the first time that the Toreros earned a W vs. the Bulldogs since the ’03 WCC Championship Game, also played at the Jenny Craig Pavilion on the gorgeous, Spanish Renaissance-style University of San Diego campus, perched like a castle atop a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and all of the poor hoops serfs wallowing below who have not secured a bid to the Tourney. The Gonzaga Bulldogs, their coach Skeletor “The Evil Lord of Destruction,” and all of their disheartened fans whose whole weeks are ruined because they finally lost, must now wait for the selection committee to throw them a measly little at-large bid. Maybe.

Bubble teams like Florida and Ohio State, who are hoping to get into the Tournament based purely on name alone, are the most affected by the Toreros’ auto bid- although you could also make the case that San Diego-area Tourney brackets will feel the ill effects of this news the hardest. USD is slated to play Kansas in a No. 15 vs. No. 2 matchup in the first round, according to Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 11, 2008 - Post a comment

The Bubble is Forming

In the NCAA basketball world, the “bubble” is a figurative place where a hoops team is located if they are not certainly in and not certainly out of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. There are a lot of ways to try to define the bubble, but if you want to ask a guy who knows a few things about the NCAA bracket, you ought to ask Joe Lunardi, the resident bracketologist at ESPN.com. Check out his bracket, which he updates every week. Basically, if the Tourney were to start today, that’s how he thinks the bracket would turn out.

On the left of his article there is a list of teams that would be categorized as bubble teams. Out of those, we will create our own Final Four Blog list, the Top Ten Bubble Teams Today! Oh, and make sure to get tickets to see the University of San Diego Toreros try to break Gonzaga’s death grip on the West Coast Conference by winning the WCC Tournament and getting to the NCAAs.

TOP TEN BRACKETOLOGY BUBBLE TEAMS TODAY
March 10, 2008

1. Oregon
2. Arizona State
3. Maryland
4. Florida
5. Syracuse
6. Ohio State
7. Villanova
8. Dayton
9. Winthrop
10. UAB

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 10, 2008 - Post a comment

The Best Defensive Teams in the Pac-10

The Pac-10 will probably end up sending about six or so teams to the NCAA Tournament, but before that can happen, they will all have to close out the season in the Pac-10 Tournament later this month at the Staples Center. When they get there, the teams will do scouting reports on one another to determine their respective strengths and weaknesses. Since they will all be trying to get the Pac-10 championship, and as we all know, defense wins championships, it makes sense that the team with the best defense will win the conference title. Right? Right. So here they are, the best defensive teams in the Pac-10. We used the info at basketball-prospectus.com, combined with our own secret rankings recipe.

TOP TEN (THERE ARE ONLY TEN, SILLY) PAC-10 DEFENSIVE TEAMS

1. UCLA
2. Stanford
3. Arizona
4. USC
5. Washington St.
6. Arizona St.
7. Oregon
8. Cal
9. Oregon St.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 7, 2008 - Post a comment

What’s Your Team’s Field Goal Effectiveness?

Basketball-Prospectus.com is the stats junky of the internet street corner. You can get all sorts of great stats that will tell you many different things about the college basketball world. Getting good college hoops stats is hard, because there are so many teams out there. Even the big sports media sites, like ESPN and FOX, don’t cover basketball stats very well. Anyways, today’s stats are going to come from Basketball-Prospectus.com. We’re looking at teams with good effective field goal percentages. Basically eFG % is like a regular field goal percentage (how many shots you make over how many total you take) but three pointers are weighted heavier. Our own ranking will list the best eFG% teams out there, but we also weight a team’s success.

TOP TEN SHOOTING TEAMS
(March 6, 2008)

1. Kansas
2. Georgetown
3. Oregon
4. Florida
5. Boise St.
6. Washington St.
7. Xavier
8. Duke
9. Vanderbilt
10. Gonzaga

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 6, 2008 - Post a comment

SI Does the Fans Right This Week; Plus Top Tickets Games

Last week the Final Four Blog reprimanded the guys at Sports Illustrated for getting sensational about fan behavior. They had several artcles decrying the state of college basketball fandom. We rightly defended the NCAA hoops fans for being awesome, and this week, it appears that our side has won out. SI is now making nice with the fans, even going so far as to put together a photo gallery of “supefans.”

Now, onto a semi-regular feature we call TOP TICKET GAMES. Here are the games you should already have tickets to, because they’re going down tonight!

—TOP TICKET GAMES—

1. Vanderbilt vs. Mississippi State
2. Tennessee vs. Florida
3. Duke vs. Virginia
4. Wisconsin vs. Penn State
5. Minnesota vs. Indiana
6. Notre Dame vs. St. John’s
7. Memphis vs. SMU

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 5, 2008 - Post a comment

Boy, if Bobby Knight Were Still Coaching Here…

The Texas Tech Red Raiders have had a week of ups and downs. Last Wednesday they got blown out by Texas A&M on the road. Then they played an inspired game against Texas- then ranked No. 5 in the nation- and beat one of their in-state rivals. Then yesterday the Raiders got blown out again, this time by the new No. 5 team, Kansas. One has to wonder what the conversation in the locker room or at practice would be like if famously furious coach Bobby Knight were still in Lubbock. Right now the Red Raiders are being coached by Knight’s son, Pat Knight. They’ve been a hard team to try to pin down, but one thing is for sure: they are dangerous on any given Knight.

Texas Tech had to deal with the sudden departure of Bob Knight in the middle of the season, so no wonder their team lacks some consistency. But we shouldn’t be so hard on the players. They are actually doing a pretty good job considering the situation. The Red Raiders are currently 16-13, meaning that an NCAA Tournament appearance is not out of the question, although it would take a lot of work to actually get there- probably a Big 12 Conference Tournament championship. Let’s hope that this team can come together before the dance tickets get passed out.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Permalink - Posted in General on March 4, 2008 - Post a comment


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