Oh, Minnesota! Where Be Thy Hoopsters?

The Hoops Per Capita numbers show that Minnesota boasts just one DI hoops team. One team for over five million folks? What gives?

As mentioned a couple of days ago, other states with one team are in very low population states. It seems odd for a Big 6 school to have no in-state foil. The Lonely Gophers have no Creighton to their Nebraska, no Louisville to their Kentucky, no Nevada to their UNLV, no New Mexico State to their New Mexico. Further, they do not even have a "mid-major" to avoid and/or from which to demand two-home-games-for-a-neutral-site tilt in scheduling contracts: no Marshall to their West Virginia, no all-ten-other-Louisiana-schools to their LSU.

I do not have an answer here, but a question: is one hoops team enough for 5.3 million people? That ratio is twice as high as the next lowest state (Arizona) and 5.7 times higher than the national average.

Minnesotans: educate us.

HoopUcation: Hoops Per Capita (Capitol Edition)

What is the capitol of college basketball? Is it Tobacco Road? Or, with Indiana's resurgence, is it back in the Kentuckiana triangle? As a lifelong Kentuckian, I have long argued that the most passionate region for hoops in our fair nation lay in the rolling hills of the Bluegrass State. But, "depth of passion," like "love," proves difficult to measure. Philosophical and abstract arguments abound when trying to communicate such concepts.

So, how about "Hoops Per Capita?" That is, proportionally, which states have the most DI hoops? Interestingly, neither North Carolina or Kentucky made the top ten in this measure, immediately calling into question HPC's validity in answer questions about "passion." But, from an access standpoint, one could do worse than to look to our nation's capitol to find our hoops capitol. Could this be?

The case looks better than I first thought. That said, we must begin with a caveat: the census numbers get a little tricky here, because everyone knows that metropolitan Washington, DC, has far more than 600,000 people. Nevertheless, the case should be heard. There are four DI basketball teams in a very concentrated area. Washington, DC, houses a storied Big 6 representative (Georgetown), a sometimes excellent non-Big 6 rep (George Washington), and two teams that rely on hopes of winning their conference tourney every season (American and Howard). Each team plays in a different conference. None of the four play "big time/IA/FBS" football. Further, DC is designated as a district, not a state, so it is "neutral" ground by design (unlike Tobacco Road or the Bluegrass). And, per capita, it has the most hoops by a wide margin.

Are DC folks the most passionate about hoops? Probably not. Do they have access, diversity, neutrality (hey, Kentuckians and Carolinians can drive to DC in a day!), and non-football purity in their hoops environment? Hoya, yeah, they do.

Tomorrow's question: Oh, Minnesota! Where be Thy Hoopsters?!?!?!

HoopUcation: College Hoopdom Map Complete!

After six weeks of mapping and plotting, the 2011-12 College Hoopdom Map is complete! My four-year-old son and I had a great time talking about geography, team colors, and the like. While he learned a ton about American geography, he also learned about persistence. Working through 345 teams takes some time. He also learned about population and space, as jamming all of those team-colored circles into the New York City/New Jersey area was not easy. Dad had to do most of those and let the boy draw the circles and write in the in the roomier spaces in the great midwest and the Rocky Mountains. In the end, the most burning question for my four-year-old was this: why doesn't Alaska have a team? It was puzzling to him. Travel, weather, and distance concerns aside, to my son, it just was not fair.

What did I learn? Well, for starters, I find it odd that Minnesota has only one DI basketball team. I guess I knew this, but this is hard to explain on a DI-Hoops-Per-Capita level. For example, Nebraska has just 1.9 million people. But, Minnesota? It boasts 5.3 million people strong! It is similar in population to states like Maryland (eight DI teams), Missouri (five), Wisconsin (four), and Colorado (four). Further, other one-team states are low-population states and not one of them play in a Big 6 league: Hawaii, Maine, North Dakota State, South Dakota State, Vermont, and Wyoming. Minnesota, by a wide margin, has the lowest DI-hoops-per-capita in the United States.

All that to say, here is the completed map followed by a couple of regional photos. A big thanks goes out to the Blue Ribbon Basketball Yearbook and Crayola.

Ye Realm of Hoopdom.

Concentration. It helps with free throws, but lives on the East Coast.


More hoops go here.

Bowling Green Versus Bowling Green

How last night's WKU win over Bowling Green looked from my seat in Diddle Arena via the 800 Games Project at the Mid-Majority.

Unexpected Chili, Expected Hoops Result

My take on last nights' WKU-Murray State tilt via the Mid-Majority's 800 Games Project.

Belted!

The Sun Belt is off to a better-than-average start in the non-conference. Denver has posted a rare road win, FIU took out George Mason on a neutral court this week, and last night Middle Tennessee romped over UCLA by twenty (!) in Los Angeles. The Raiders are now 3-0 and have two home games this weekend, one of which will be Belmont if their home tourney bracket holds up.

WKU is playing in the ESPN Charleston Classic this weekend. The Tops face Tulsa on ESPN3 tomorrow at 11.30am CT. They will face either LSU or Northwestern on Friday.

Introducing #TeamReset

The Bracket Board is happy to be a part of the Mid-Majority's 800 Games Project. Here is my first contribution on #TeamReset and write-up on last night's 52-49 Hilltopper win over Tennessee State.

WKU vs Tennessee State

I am stacked up today, but a full write-up of tonight's Tennessee State at WKU tilt is forthcoming late tonight or tomorrow morning. It will be the first of several contributions to the Mid-Majority's 800 games project.

If you are not reading over there or following TMM and @800GP on Twitter, please do so. Great fun!

The River Wide

Enjoy the rapids of this opening full weekend of college hoops! There are 230 games involving DI schools this weekend including 17 Sun Belt games. The WKU Hilltoppers open the season tonight by hosting Saint Joseph's.

TBB will be running the Chickamauga Marathon tomorrow at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Situated just south of Chattanooga, I had hoped to catch a game there. Alas, the Mocs are at Indiana on Saturday.

More on Monday to recap the Sun Belt weekend and look toward that night's Tennessee State at WKU match up.

HoopUcation: Mapping College Hoopdom Update

It is time for an update on the Mapping College Hoopdom project. A couple of short sessions over the course of the last week was capped by a marathon school-plotting episode last night. My four-year-old and I sat down for a good 1.5 hours and talked through the map while plotting a boatload of teams. His curiosity pulled him westward last night, so we plotted all of the Big Sky teams and all of the teams located in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico while adding a smattering of other Western teams as well. A random set of other teams from all over Hoopdom were also plotted (which included a strange preoccupation with the state of Iowa).

While I do aim for unbiased assessment when building brackets, it is no secret that I am a "mid-major" fan through and through. So, when the Iowa Preoccupation emerged, my son asked, "Who is your favorite team in Iowa?," I immediately answered with Drake. So, the Bulldogs got the first plot-point in Hawkeye State. His response: "Drake is my favorite team in Iowa, too." Brainwashing. Bias. These are hallmarks of excellent parenting.

This is such an enjoyable DIY project. Our tools include:
--this online map
--the hard copy Blue Ribbon Basketball Yearbook
--hard copy of Rand McNally's Road Atlas
--two sheets of paper from those giant pads you have probably used in workshops at your place of employment
--lots of Crayola markers

College basketball fuels curiosity on so many levels. Engage it. Embrace it. Map it. Drive it. Attend it. The best learning and deeper understanding occur when our passion produces something. Looking at the college hoops map? Good. Creating a college hoops map? Better. Watching the game on TV? Good. Experiencing the game in the arena and adding to the noise and atmosphere in that place? Better.

A four-year-old ponders and plots the Montana Grizzlies.
















Mapping College Hoopdom project's current status.

Head of the River

Three games bubble onto the surface tonight and begin the trickle to a full, raging river that awaits us on the weekend. While there are no Sun Belt games tonight, a home state OVC club tips it off this evening: Eastern Kentucky plays at Mississippi State in the Coaches vs. Cancer.

The night's other two games include William & Mary at St. John's (another Coaches vs. Cancer match up) and Valparaiso at Arizona.

Sun Belt action starts on Friday. More on that coming later in the week.

HoopUcation: Introduction

As I mentioned in the season’s initial post, a bracket-centric focus seems less relevant these days given the army of capable bracketeers out there. I find myself rethinking what I can add to this conversation, while not giving up “bracketing” every Sunday night from January until March. It has been a hobby of mine for over two decades now. I love engaging in the process, and will continue to do so. A longer essay about identity and doing work that we love will come later, but today I offer a taste of the kind of work that will happen here.

I am a teacher (more on that in the coming “love your work” essay). Helping students see academic disciplines at work in everyday life is a crucial element of my teaching philosophy. For my money, sports (and food) offer some of the richest interdisciplinary experiences we encounter (also, they are “five sense” experiences). So, in short, I feel the content of this blog going in the direction of answering a fundamental question: how can we use college basketball to teach ourselves and others about the world around us? As I said, a longer essay on all this is brewing.

Today, I offer an example of the kind of work I hope to share here on a regular basis this season. File this one under both “teacher” and “daddy.” As a boy growing up in the Eighties, I learned United States geography through college basketball conference affiliation. Some glorious weekend in October, Dick Vitale’s College Basketball Yearbook would hit the local drugstore’s magazine rack, and I would giddily grab it and run to my mother yelling “It’s here today! Can I get it?!” She always said “Yes,” and the stat-ogling would begin. When I grew tired of marveling at how many points Reggie Miller or Reggie Williams averaged or at the size of the Carrier Dome or at the enrollment at Texas, I moved on to drawing uniforms and mascots. Eventually, at some point, this rural Kentucky boy would dig up a map of the United States and hunt for places like Corvallis, Oregon, or Lafayette, Louisiana. I made it a point to know all of the Division I teams, their colors, and their mascots.

So, now as father-teacher, I aim to revisit some of these practices with a four-year-old boy (my daughter is a bit young for this right now, but I hope this can come for her, too). A current obsession of his happens to be maps. This sparked the thought of a massive college hoops project to usher in the season: plot all 345 teams. Yesterday, I created a giant paper map in pencil, and allowed my son to trace over the pencil sketch with a black marker to create those stark state borders essential to understanding concepts like “in-state rivalry” and “border wars.” Perhaps those concepts are a bit advanced for a four-year-old, but a sense of place and geography are not.

There will be more on this project as we go along, but a good work session last night yielded these results:

Overview.

Kentucky and Tennessee up close.

Note that we plotted WKU first, followed by other member Sun Belt institutions. After that, the remaining Kentucky schools went on. Beyond that, I left it up to my son to ask questions and pick states until the session ended. This morning, he rolled out of bed, and his first words to me were, “What about Rhode Island?” So, we put URI’s baby blue and Providence’s black on the map before breakfast.

Curiosity. It is the greatest gift given from teacher to student. And, actually, curiosity is not given, but stirred or inspired or uncovered. That is one of the greatest aspects of a sport with 345 teams: from year to year, there is always room for curiosity.

The Rules for 2011-12

I feel what happens here is becoming less and less relevant. There are so many earnest bracket projections out there, I am not sure that my brackets contribute much in the way of accuracy. But, I was making projections long before I started posting them on a blog, and I would do them for fun anyway. That is how TBB started eight years ago: I began emailing them to some friends and we had fun discussing them. Once the email list grew a bit longer, I stuck them up on Tripod as a central location. If I unplugged today, I would still draw them out in pencil on 8x14 paper just as I did in my youth long before the internet. So, in some ways, I am simply sharing one of my rituals that has been part of my life as a hoops fan for many, many years.

All that said, a few words about what will happen here in 2011-12.

1. No bracket projections until at least New Year's Day. I base projections on results in a given season and nothing else. Until nearly all of the non-conference games are in the books, projections are too much like the popularity polls. Results, regardless of budget or conference or pre-season prognostications or preseason accolades, are all that matter in meaningful projections. This goes for the Lockbox as well. The first one will happen after New Year's Day.

2. This does not mean nothing important happens before January. Quite the opposite. Non-conference games are like the opening chapters to novels, and these first words are vital to the ultimate stories (glorious, mundane, tragic or otherwise) of all members in Hoopdom. I write about those stories from time to time. Also, with two kids under the age five, readers will likely have to endure some daddy-rambling on occasion, but I promise to make those ramblings relevant to the college hoops experience. No posts consisting of a dozen pics of my kids hamming it up with Big Red. However, I do feel drawn to share more about what it means to be a fan of a non-BCS team (WKU Hilltoppers). As I get older, the realities of identity, belonging, community, history, and ritual in "being a fan" of a school become clearer and more important to me. I hope I can share some of that as we go along.

3. Extra attention will be paid to WKU and Sun Belt members, especially before January. Also, non-SEC southern conferences get special treatment (especially the SoCon). History shows that they do not get preferences in the bracket projections, just in the amount of verbiage on TBB.

4. No Kardashians. Crap, just broke that one.

That is enough to serve as a start.

Final Bracket

Here is my final bracket projection. I took Virginia Tech, St. Mary's, Colorado, Penn State (still playing), and Clemson as my last five, but there are a number of teams that could easily slide in depending on what the committee favors this year.

Also, our SCKySSiP Mock Committee yielded this S-Curve. Again, this is NOT a projection, but a replication of the selection process (or as close as we can get to replicating it).

Just a little over 3 hours until we see the real deal.

SCKySSiP Mock Committee

The SCKySSiP (SKISS-ip) is in full swing, so most of my bracketing time is spent managing that process. An update on that process will come late tonight.

Bracket Breakdown 3/10

The One Stop is up to date as is the Lockbox, which reflects the updated bracket.

Multi-Bid Conferences
Big East (11): Pitt, Georgetown, Notre Dame, UConn, Syracuse, Louisville, St. John's, Villanova, West Virginia, Cincinnati, Marquette
ACC (6): Duke, North Carolina, Florida State, Virginia Tech, Boston College, Clemson
Big 12 (6): Texas, Kansas, Texas A&M, Missouri, Kansas State, Colorado
SEC (5): Kentucky, Florida, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Georgia
Big Ten (5): Ohio State, Purdue, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan State, Michigan
Mountain West (3): San Diego State, BYU, UNLV
Pac 10 (3): Arizona, UCLA, Washington
Atlantic 10 (3): Xavier, Temple, Richmond
Colonial (2): George Mason, Old Dominion
West Coast (2): St. Mary's, Gonzaga


The Bubble by the Numbers
--31 Automatic Bids. That number will not change this season. Black italics means a team is the projected auto-bid for that conference.
--37 At-Large Bids (AL). That is also a static number.
--20 teams are LOCKS at this point. More will achieve this status as the tourneys play out.
--22 AL teams are listed in black (or are LOCKS). The black teams could miss, but it would take a meltdown at this point. Several are a win away from LOCK status.
--I have 3 other AL teams listed in blue, which means they are on their way, but could use a win in their conference tourney to avoid the Bubble. That means 26 AL slots are taken, leaving the Bubble at 12 at the moment. Bubble-IN teams are in green, Bubble-OUT teams are in red.

Bracket 3/10

Updated bracket is up.

More as time allows on Thursday.

Updates 3/8

Could not get to a bracket today. Too much going, including the SCKySSiP 6.0 kickoff. Our mock committee is "meeting" by electronification, so that's taking some time, too. Hopefully, a full bracket update comes tomorrow. But, the Lockbox and One Stop have been updated.

Terriers and Peacocks?

Neither mascot will incite fear in the masses, but these critters can dance. Congrats to Wofford (SoCon) and Saint Peter's (MAAC). They have their golden tickets.

The Lockbox and One Stop are up to date. Full bracket coming later today or tonight.

First Tickets Punched

Congrats to Morehead State (OVC), UNC-Asheville (Big South), and Belmont (A-Sun). So far, all the teams in the bracket are within a few hours drive of TBB's home base in Bowling Green. In Belmont's case, it's only one hour, and rest assured that some Big Conference U. coach is going to break into a cold sweat when they see Belmont pop up as their 12-13 seed.

One Stop is up to date.