Irish Trojan in Tennessee

"Cover me, Chelsea!"

By Brendan Loy

Heh:

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Where should Davidson be ranked?

By Brendan Loy

Here's a question for y'all: when the final USA Today coaches' poll rankings are released, after the NCAA Tournament ends, where should Davidson be ranked?

I think it's pretty obvious that the top 4 teams from the final regular-season poll will remain the same, in whatever order, in the post-tournament poll. After all, they all made it to the Final Four. But after that, then what? Who else, if anyone, should be ranked ahead of the Wildcats?

Davidson, which was ranked #23 in that final poll, knocked off #26 Gonzaga, #8 Georgetown, and #5 Wisconsin en route to the Elite Eight, and damn near beat #4 Kansas. And that's on top of almost beating North Carolina, Duke and UCLA in the regular season, and going 20-0 in their conference.

More on Hillary's lie misstatement

By Brendan Loy

Snipergate: the gift that keeps on giving!

SARAJEVO, Bosnia - The Bosnian girl who famously read a poem to Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 1996 visit to the war-torn country is shocked - and her countrymen infuriated - that the former first lady claimed to have dodged sniper fire that day.

Emina Bicakcic, now 20 and studying to become a doctor, told The Post she stood on the tarmac at the air base in Tuzla, greeted Clinton and even had time to share the lines of verse she'd written - all without fear of attack from an unseen enemy.

In other news: Heh.

Chalk rides again

By Brendan Loy

If you think the men's tournament is Chalk City, check out the women's bracket: the Elite Eight consists of four #1 seeds and four #2s. (Admittedly, chalkiness is more common on the women's side, where parity is less pronounced than among the men. But still.) #1-seed Tennessee sealed the deal last night with a 74-64 win over #5 Notre Dame, which is now 0-16 all-time against UT.

The Irish gave the Lady Vols a much better game than they did in an 87-63 loss back in January at the Joyce Center. In this one, ND led at halftime, 33-31. But between about the 18-minute mark and the 13-minute mark of the second half, Tennessee went on a 17-1 run, and Candace Parker wound up with a career-high-tying 34 points. That was just too much for the Irish to overcome.

In my 11th annual women's pool, six contestants correctly predicted the "all chalk" Elite Eight: Ken Stern, Kevin Pilz, Tom Caputi, Carol LaPlante, Joseph Hiegel and Lisa Velte.

Stern currently leads the pool with 316 out of a possible 352 points. He took first place from Chuck Wessell when #3 Texas A&M beat #2 Duke last night. Wessell, who had picked the Blue Devils, is now second with 313. Pilz is third with 311. Those three contestants are the only ones ahead of the "all favorites bracket," which would have 309 points. Complete standings here and after the jump. Information on who's still alive to win the pool -- 21 contestants in all -- here.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention this before, but in the men's pool (presented by the UCLA Bruins, blah blah blah), 28 contestants got the "all-chalk" Final Four right. Their names are listed after the jump.

Poll: Obama increases lead over Clinton

By Brendan Loy

Gallup says Obama leads Hillary by 10% nationally. Maybe the voters are getting caught up in the same wrap-it-up trend as the superdelegates.

Meanwhile, alas, Obama is going to get in trouble for this remark regarding his opposition to abstinence-only education:

Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information.

I boldfaced the part that's being, and will continue to be, gleefully taken out of context by "outraged" conservates. In reality, as the context makes obvious, Obama's not talking about abortion at all, nor is he saying that teenage parents ought not love their babies. He's merely acknowledging an obvious reality that everyone understands (teen pregnancy is a bad thing), and proposing something that he believes would help reduce teen pregnancy ("comprehensive" sex education that includes information about birth control and protection). His comment is entirely defensible, and indeed, 100% correct in my view. But it was also clumsily worded, and will make great fodder for some anti-abortion 527 group. (The linked blogger, Mike Allen, asks whether "this comment opened the door to trouble, or are conservatives twisting an innocent observation?" Um, both?)

GOOO IRISH, BEEEAT LADY VOLS!!!

By Brendan Loy

Notre Dame and Tennessee are about to get underway in a Sweet Sixteen showdown. The #5-seed Fighting Irish are the last chance to prevent an "all chalk" Elite Eight in the women's NCAA Tournament; so far, all the #1 and #2 seeds have won.

Incidentally, the women's pool standings and scenarios are updated through seven Elite Eight games. Ken Stern currently has the lead. The standings are after the jump as well.

8 still alive in Times pool

By Brendan Loy

For the first time ever, the men's Final Four will feature four #1 seeds. And for the first time ever, a Living Room Times NCAA pool will enter the final weekend with a different potential winner for each remaining scenario -- meaning eight people are still mathematically alive to win the contest.

Currently, Alex Whitfield (a.k.a. "CORNHUSKERS 94 95 97") leads the 13th annual Times men's pool presented by the UCLA Bruins with 327 out of a possible 412 points. But Whitfield will only win the pool in one scenario: if Kansas beats Memphis in the title game. In the each of the other seven scenarios, someone different will overtake him.

The other contestants still alive are Joseph Hiegel (currently in 2nd place), Chuck Wessell (3rd), Robert Dokes (4th), Amy Greca (T-9th), Chris Mulvey (T-9th), Shari Long (T-9th) and Keith Evans (T-20th).

Complete standings, possible outcomes, what-if scenarios and other information after the jump.

Finally, a close game?

By Brendan Loy

Will we finally get a close, entertaining regional final game, courtesy of Kansas and Davidson? It looks good so far. After starting the game with good defense and ice-cold shooting -- it was 4-2 Kansas six minutes in, and at one point Davidson was 1-for-10 from the floor while Kansas was 2-for-10 -- the Jayhawks and Wildcats are both making big plays (on both sides of the ball), and it's 28-28 with 2:00 left in the first half.

UPDATE: Kansas 59, Davidson 57 with 36.3 seconds left. GO WILDCATS!!!

UPDATE 2: 16.8 to go, Davidson ball, still Kansas by two. Curry for 3 at the buzzer?? C'mon, I want to hear Gus Johnson so NUTS!!!

UPDATE 3: ARRRRGH. Not a good final possession at all by Curry and Davidson there. Good defense by Kansas, I guess. But, argh.

For the first time ever, all four #1 seeds are going to the Final Four!

Davidson, the last anti-chalk hope?

By Brendan Loy

With Memphis looking nigh unstoppable early -- they're up 39-24 over Texas with 2:00 left in the first half -- it's looking increasingly likely that Stephen Curry and the #10-seed Davidson Wildcats will be the last hope for the non-#1-seeds.

It was #1-seed Kansas that blew the chance for an first-ever "all-chalk" Final Four last year, losing to #2-seed UCLA in the second game of the Elite Eight. (#1-seed North Carolina subsequently lost, too, to #2 Georgetown.) But that was against a Bruins team that effectively had home-court advantage and arguably should have been a #1 seed itself. Losing to tiny Davidson, when a win would put four #1 seeds in the Final Four, would be a much bigger upset -- and a much bigger stain on the already oft-smeared record of Bill Self and the "Rock Choke Jayhawks."

And yet, would anybody really be stunned if Davidson pulled it off? At this point, who dares doubt Stephen Curry?

UPDATE: Memphis wins, 85-67. Davidson is our last hope!

Al Gore for President?

By Brendan Loy

The Goreacle Option picks up steam.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

The idea of rejecting Clinton and Obama, and turning to Gore instead, entered the mainstream conversation with some intriguing comments by a Florida congressman on Monday, and this Joe Klein piece on Wednesday.

Cue some Rovian snark: "You know you got a problem if the answer is Al Gore."

One ballsy tie

By Brendan Loy

Is the key to Davidson's success Kyle Whelliston's tie?

Little did I know I was in the presence of talismanic greatness last year at BracketBusters!

On a more serious note, here's Whelliston's ESPN article on Stephen Curry, who, it bears repeating, is not only a transcendent superstar, but just a really nice and humble guy. Apropos of which, Whelliston's Mid-Majority blog post about the Wildcats' win over Wisconsin concludes:

We haven't had a breakout basketball star like Curry in a generation, and he's helping undo the damage that the past 20 years have done to the idea of basketball stardom. There are kids out there who are now 10, 11 years old, spending this afternoon in driveways copying the fallaway 3-pointer that gave Davidson that early lead at 13 minutes of the first half. Here's hoping that they'll keep emulating him, carrying themselves with perfect humility.

P.S. After Curry, who is a sophomore, led Davidson to their first-round victory over Gonzaga -- that's two upset wins and 63 points ago -- Rush the Court wrote a post titled "Is Stephen Curry becoming a March legend?" which noted:

[Curry] isn’t a big-time NBA prospect (according to scouts) because he isn’t that tall, strong, or athletic. In fact his biggest attributes are his shooting and intelligence, which are two things the NBA scouts don’t seem to care about these days. We are assuming that his family is doing ok financially given the fact that his father (Dell) had a long and distinguished career in the NBA. When you combine all of that, it seems like he might be one college star who remains in college all 4 years. In this day and age, that might be enough to make him a legendary player in March by the time he finishes his college career in 2010.

I'd say Curry is well ahead of schedule on the "legendary player" bit. But it can always get better. Three years of this? Pinch me.

Notre Dame advances to Frozen Four!

By Brendan Loy

One year after rising to the #1 ranking in the country only to be stunned by Michigan State in the NCAA regional final, the #12-ranked Fighting Irish of Notre Dame got their revenge tonight, beating the Spartans 3-1 (after previously upsetting the top seed, New Hampshire) to advance to their first Frozen Four in school history! WOOHOO!! (Hat tip: NDLauren.)

The Irish will play the hated Skunkbears of Michigan, whose football team lost to Appalachian State last year, in a national semifinal in Denver on April 10. Michigan is ranked #1 in the land.

[UPDATE: Folks in the South Bend area are encouraged to assemble at the Joyce Center around 4:30 AM to greet the team upon its return. (Hat tip: John.)]

Now... can the Fighting Irish women's basketball team pull off an even more monumental upset tomorrow by upsetting #1-seed Tennessee in the Sweet 16? The Irish are 0-15 all-time against the Lady Vols. How does two milestones in 24 hours sound? GO IRISH!!!

P.S. Speaking of women's basketball, the ladies are now halfway to the Elite Eight after another quartet of non-upsets. In my pool, Chuck Wessell continues to have the lead. Complete standings here and after the jump. Information on who's still mathematically alive to win the pool here.

All chalk?

By Brendan Loy

So... we head into the second day of the Elite Eight facing the still-active possibility of all four #1 seeds making the Final Four for the first time ever. Last year, that prospect still existed at the start of the Elite Eight's first day, but #2-seed UCLA's win over #1-seed Kansas on Saturday night guaranteed that it wouldn't happen. Now, after tonight's wins by #1 seeds UCLA and North Carolina, only #2 Texas (vs. #1 Memphis) and #10 Davidson (vs. #1 Kansas) stand in the way of the all-chalk Final Four.

Pool update shortly.

UPDATE: Ryan Morgan still leads the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins, but he'll be eliminated if #1-seeded Memphis beats #2 Texas tomorrow.

For now, 12 contestants -- Morgan, Mark Gardner, Joseph Hiegel, Chris Mulvey, Keith Evans, Lisa Velte, Chuck Wessell, Alex Whitfield, Shari Long, Steve Hartranft, Amy Greca and Robert Dokes -- are still alive to win the pool.

But Morgan, Gardner and Hartranft would be eliminated by a Memphis win, while Evans would be eliminated if Memphis wins and Davidson beats Kansas. On the other hand, Hiegel, Mulvey, Whitfield, Long and Greca would be eliminated by a Texas win; Velte would be eliminated if either Texas or Kansas wins; Dokes would be eliminated if either Texas or Davidson wins; and Wessell would be eliminated if Davidson wins, regardless of the Memphis-Texas outcome.

If both of the #1 seeds, Memphis and Kansas, win tomorrow, the pool will be as wide-open as is mathematically possible heading into the Final Four, with eight scenarios remaining and a different winner in each of them!

After the jump, complete standings and additional scenario information.

News flash

By Brendan Loy

Apparently John McCain is American.

P.S. Meanwhile, it seems Hillaryland considers Indiana a must-win. Also, predictably enough, their line of attack against the growing Hillary-should-withdraw chorus (about which, more here) is to play the gender card: Leahy, Dodd, Richardson, etc. are the "big boys" trying to bully a woman. Ugh. What a shameless b.s. artist she is, truly.

Oops, I did it again

By Brendan Loy

For the second straight year, I let IrishTrojan.com expire this morning. BrendanLoy.com was unaffected. I have now renewed IrishTrojan.com. It may take a while to start working again, but in the long run at least, all is well.

Why/how did this happen? Basically, I'm an idiot. Actually, it's a bit of a long story, but I don't really have time to tell it right now, as I'm in the car with Becky, Loyette, Auntie Barb and Auntie Marissa, heading to The Lost Sea in Sweetwater. More later, maybe.

On an unrelated note, GO XAVIER!! BEAT UCLA!!

All hail Appalachia

By Brendan Loy

Man, oh man, has it been a great year to be an unheralded, small-conference school in western North Carolina, or what?

First Appalachian State beats Michigan in the Big House. Then Gardner-Webb beats Kentucky at Rupp Arena. And now Davidson -- Appy State's conference-mate -- is going to the Elite Eight.

Just call it the Bermuda Carolina Triangle:

"Abandon hope, all ye major-conference foes who enter here!"

Heady days in western Carolina. HOT! HOT! HOT!

Fed seeks broad market oversight power

By Brendan Loy

File this under "things that Brendan doesn't know very much about, but that sound like a pretty big deal":

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system.

The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the country’s hodge-podge of regulatory agencies, which many specialists say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they triggered what is now the worst financial calamity in decades. ...

The Fed would also be given some authority over Wall Street firms but only when an investment bank’s practices posed a threat to the financial system over all.

The Wall Street Journal says passage of the plan "would likely take years and would also require major compromises from an increasingly partisan Congress," and that it "is likely to trigger messy feuds over turf at a time when confidence in government supervision is low."

If Memphis & Kansas win...

By Brendan Loy

With Memphis and Kansas leading at halftime by scores of 50-20 and 41-22, respectively -- and with myself being exhausted and about ready to sleep -- I'm going to risk a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment, assume that both the Tigers and Jayhawks will in fact win, and post the updated pool standings based on that assumption. If either team somehow loses, you may consider this post null and void, and the linked standings inaccurate. :) So, without further ado, my slightly-premature pool update:

Ryan Morgan leads the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins at the conclusion of the Sweet Sixteen, and would win in 34 of the 128 remaining scenarios. Dan Port and Mark Gardner are tied for second place, and would win in 26 and 11 scenarios, respectively. Eighteen other contestants are still mathematically alive to win the pool, each owning between one and seven possible winning scenarios.

Meanwhile, former leader Khalil Aboukhaled fell from first to fourth place, and was mathematically eliminated from any chance of winning the pool, when Memphis won. (He had picked already-eliminated Pitt, and needed Michigan State to upset Memphis in the Panthers' stead in order to keep his hopes alive.)

Complete scenario information can be found here, sorted by statistical chances of winning. Complete standings are here and after the jump. Also after the jump, information on who'll be eliminated tomorrow, depending on how the North Carolina-Louisville and UCLA-Xavier games turn out.

GO DAVIDSON!!!

By Brendan Loy

Wisconsin and Davidson are tied at the half. WOO!!! Go Wildcats!!!

UPDATE: Davidson leads by 15 points with 10:08 left!! WOOOO!!!

UPDATE 2: Stephen. Curry. Is. Awesome.

UPDATE 3: Davidson wins, 73-56! Wildcats to the Elite Eight!! YAAAY!!!

Davidson has officially achieved Gonzaga status. Up next: George Mason status?!

UPDATE 4: Only two contestants in the entire pool picked Davidson to reach the Elite Eight, and both are way down near the bottom of the leaderboard: Jessica Osborne of Denver, currently in 236th place, and our cats, Toby, Sasha & Butter Zak, currently in 238th place. Both brackets have Davidson losing in the Elite Eight (to Kansas, in Osborne's case; to already-eliminated Clemson, in the cats' case).

UPDATE 5: After the jump, complete standings of the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by UCLA. Khalil Aboukhaled is still in the lead, thought he would win in only 1.6 percent of the remaining 512 scenarios (up from 0.4% of 2,048 scenarios as of last night). Ryan Morgan is second, and Mark Gardner, Bill Reece and Dan Port tied for third.

Quite possibly...

By Brendan Loy

...the silliest-looking police car ever.

Ohio: it's a quagmire!

By Brendan Loy

I knew the mortgage crisis had hit Ohio hard, but I didn't realize things were as bad in the Buckeye State as this headline suggests:

Obama, Clinton Respond to Bush’s Speech on the War in Ohio

Personally, I think we should withdraw our troops from Ohio immediately. We must stand down so the Ohioans can stand up.

Dean wants supers to decide by July 1

By Brendan Loy

Howard Dean wants the undeclared superdelegates to pick a candidate "at some point between now and the first of July, so we don't have to take this into the convention."

Dean's logic is not necessarily pristine here, alas. Even if every single one of the 794 supers were to "say who they're for" prior to July 1, that doesn't necessarily mean "we don't have to take this into the convention." Indeed, in a formal sense, we "have to take this into the convention" no matter what -- there is, after all, going to be a roll call at the convention, and no other binding roll call will occur before then. The best the Democrats can do is have a nominee presumptive before the convention, not an actual nominee. And that only works if Hillary Clinton plays along.

That raises the following question: if the informal July 1 tally shows Hillary trailing by, say, 100 delegates -- barely 2 percent of the total -- does anyone believe she'll drop out at that point? Particularly if the Michigan and Florida controversies are still unresolved? She keeps reminding us that all the delegates, including the "pledged" ones, are free to make their own independent decisions when the roll is called. That means they're also free to change their minds between July 1 and August 28. If Hillary's willing to put the party through hell through the end of June in hopes that Obama will inexplicably collapse, why wouldn't she be willing to extend her quixotic quest for another two months?

This is where the brilliance of Phil Bredesen's superdelegate superconvention -- which Dean opposes, because he doesn't like the potential "cigar-filled back room" aspect of it -- comes in. Admittedly, such a gathering would not formally change any of the above. But if Hillary publicly buys into the concept (even if kicking and screaming), then it will have the potential of producing some actual closure to the race, as opposed to the anticlimactic June trickle of superdelegate endorsements that Dean seems to envision. It'd be much harder for Hillary to justify continuing her campaign after "losing" the "superdelegate primary" than it would be if she is merely "trailing" in the fluid, informal "superdelegate count."

In related news, one day after Chris Dodd said that "over the next couple of weeks," after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries at the latest, "the national leadership of this party has to stand up and reach a conclusion... instead of having this sort of drip on for the next five months," Pat Leahy took it a step further, opining that Clinton "ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama." Cue sputtering outrage from the Clinton camp in 5... 4... 3...

It should be noted that Dodd and Leahy had already endorsed Obama, so these aren't exactly neutral parties putting the heat on Clinton. Nevertheless, it's significant that we're start to hear some high-level noises that sound a bit like "drop out, Hillary."

Oh, and also, Pennsylvania Senator (and superdelegate) Bob Casey (D-PA) will endorse Obama today. This is a big deal for two reasons. One, it's a crack in Hillary's firewall of Pennsylvania establishment support that could carry a decent amount of weight in the Keystone State, since, in Halperin's words, Casey has a "big following among — and symbolic resonance with — the state’s working-class voters." (Did I mention he's white? And, as far as I know, doesn't attend a wacky racist church?)

Secondly, as Eric Kleefield notes, "Casey had previously said he thought the best thing to do was remain publicly neutral — so his endorsement of Obama could potentially reflect a desire to end the primary race as soon as possible." Along the same lines, Mike Allen writes: "Democrats are wondering if this could signal the beginning of a 'bandwagon effect' that began last week with the endorsement by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson."

In other words: Richardson... Dodd... Leahy... Casey. The drumbeat begins. Boom, doom. Drums in the deep.

Vols losing; Hilltoppers threatening

By Brendan Loy

It looks like Louisville is about to beat Tennessee. Meanwhile, Western Kentucky has mounted a big rally to pull within six points of UCLA with 7:07 left. GO HILLTOPPERS!!!

UPDATE: Louisville wins; Khalil Aboukhaled leads the pool. Jeff Belisle is second; Ryan Morgan drops to third. Full update after the UCLA-WKU game.

UPDATE 2: A valiant effort by Western Kentucky -- and damn, if that three-pointer rattles in, back when it was a four-point game with 5:17 left, who knows? -- but the Bruins win, 88-78. So it'll be UCLA vs. Xavier in the West Regional Final... just like my original bracket predicted (I had Xavier beating the Bruins and going all the way to the title game), before I changed it at the last minute to have UConn beating UCLA and going to the Final Four over the Musketeers. Harumph.

UPDATE 3: As mentioned earlier, Khalil Aboukhaled of South Bend, Indiana (a.k.a. "fezafou") leads the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins. He has 247 out of a possible 312 points. However, his chances of winning the pool are statistically quite small -- just 0.4% -- in large part because his predicted national champion, Georgetown, has already been eliminated, as has another of his Final Four teams, Pitt.

The mathematical favorite to win the pool is Jeff Belisle of Brooklyn, New York, currently in second place with 242 points. He has a 14.5% chance to win. Belisle is followed in the current standings by Ryan Morgan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who had a 14-point lead at the beginning of the day, but went just 2-for-4 on Thursday, having picked neither Xavier nor Louisville. He has 241 points, and a 10.4% chance to win.

Dan Port, Lisa Velte, Bill Rece and Mark Gardner are tied for fourth with 239 points apiece. Alex Whitfield is eighth with 237, Joseph Hiegel ninth with 235, and rounding out the top ten are Kevin Hauschulz, Chuck Wessell, and brother & sister Matt Thomsen and Danielle Thomsen, all tied with 234 points each. Hauschulz and Danielle Thomsen are already mathematically eliminated from winning the pool, however. Here's a full list of possible outcomes.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

March Madness: it's baaaack!!

By Brendan Loy

Our (three-day-)long national nightmare -- in which all we had to satisfy our hunger for college basketball was the NIT, the CBI and the largely upset-free opening weekend of the women's Big Dance -- is over. The Sweet 16 begins tonight. Whee!!!

All I can say is: GO WESTERN KENTUCKY!!! BEAT FUCLA!!!

(Also: Go Tennessee! Go Xavier*! Go Wazzu!)

*Or West Virginia. Whatever.

UPDATE: Xavier won in overtime; North Carolina won easily, again.

In the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by UCLA, Ryan Morgan still leads, but his margin is down to 4 points because of West Virginia's loss. Everyone else in the Top 7 -- Khalil Aboukhaled, Matt and Danielle Thomsen (brother and sister, tied for third), Chris Mulvey, Jeff Belisle and Joe Swiderski -- picked both of tonight's early-game winners. Morgan only picked the Tar Heels.

If Louisville beats Tennessee, Aboukhaled will take the lead. If the Vols win, Morgan will remain on top.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

Does Hillary want McCain to win?, ctd.

By Brendan Loy

Yesterday afternoon, I blogged about Maureen Dowd's column in yesterday's New York Times, in which she argued that Hillary Clinton's willingness to out-and-out attack Barack Obama -- even though the resulting damage will probably inure only to John McCain's benefit, not Hillary's, in the end -- might indicate a self-interested preference for a McCain victory in November. The theory, of course, is that an Obama defeat in the general election would open the door for Hillary, The Sequel in 2012. "Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat," I quoted Dowd as saying.

Silly me, thinking Maureen Dowd had an original thought.

As it turns out, this very topic has been the subject of a raging debate in the center-left blogosphere for almost a week, with various prominent bloggers weighing in both sides of the issue -- creating a dialogue that's much more illuminating and insightful, unsurprisingly, than a Maureen Dowd column. Details after the jump.

Davidson offering students free tickets, travel, lodging for Sweet 16, Elite 8

By Brendan Loy

Sweet, indeed:

Davidson College students who want to go to Detroit to see their basketball team in the Sweet 16 can do so for free.

In an e-mail to students Wednesday, school President Tom Ross said the school's trustees will pay for tickets, travel and lodging for Davidson's Midwest Regional semifinal game Friday night against Wisconsin at Detroit's Ford Field. Students also get tickets to Sunday's regional final -- win or lose.

The gift will not come from Davidson's endowment, said Stacey Schmeidel, director of college communications. "At least one person on the board stepped up and said, `I want to do this for the students,' " Schmeidel said.

As of Wednesday night, hundreds of students had signed up for the offer, so many that college officials were scrambling for extra tickets and buses. The offer includes a 660-mile bus ride to Detroit leaving Friday morning and returning between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. Monday -- just in time for classes.

Heh. Awesome. (Hat tip: anonamom.)

The only downside: they aren't cancelling classes on Friday. The school's president urged students to "please consider going to the game ONLY if this is, academically, the right decision for you." Riiiiight.

UPDATE: Here's the full text of the president's e-mail, courtesy of Davidson blogger Will Bryan. But now it seems the school sent out "a second email a few hours later saying that not everyone who responded to the first will be able to go since they don't have enough tickets." Heh. That's according to AOL Fanhouse, quoting Bryan. A commenter on Bryan's site confirms:

They said they could give free tickets, transportation, and lodging to everyone, but now they are saying that they can't meet the student demand (and they should have certainly expected FULL demand). Things are really up in the air right now as people are hoping that Davidson will keep its word on this. A lot of people who were really excited are now pretty disappointed. Don't make promises you can't keep.

The commenter also quotes from the latest e-mail from the college: "We have been overwhelmed by the response. There will not be enough time before Friday morning to respond to each email. We are keeping track of the requests in the order they come in. If we have a ticket for you, we will email you directly on Thursday. ... We apologize, but we will not be able to take every student who wants to go to Detroit."

P.S. In other basketball-related news, I'd just like to clarify, in case anyone was wondering after last night's David Schnauzer Letterman Top Ten list, that the reason we've chosen to conceal Loyette's true first name on the blog is not because we named her "Gonzaga." ;)

Speaking of the Shuttle...

By Brendan Loy

Heh.

Time for a new garish blazer?

By Brendan Loy

The Bruce Pearl to Indiana rumors are officially on.

It's Kirby vs. Dupuis in NIT Pool

By Brendan Loy

Gary Kirby is one Florida loss away from winning his second consecutive Irish Trojan NIT Pool.

Kirby, a.k.a. "gahrie," got the entire Final Four right -- something only he and Katrina Lewonczyk can claim -- and he now has 228 out of a possible 252 points. That puts him 15 ahead of Josh Krause, 16 ahead of Mark Gardner, 22 ahead of Brian Dupuis and 23 ahead of Ginny Zak.

Only Dupuis, a LSU alum, still has a chance to win, however. Both he and Kirby, who attended USC in the 1980s, predicted a Florida-Ohio State title game, a rematch of last year's NCAA championship game. But whereas Kirby (along with everyone else near the top of the current leaderboard) picked the Buckeyes to win, Dupuis picked his Tigers' conference rivals, the Gators.

So if Florida follows up its two consecutive NCAA championships with an NIT championship, Dupuis -- winner of the Irish Trojan college football bowl pick 'em contest in 2005-06 -- will win the pool. If anyone else wins the title, Kirby will repeat as NIT Pool champ.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

Heh.

By Brendan Loy

TNR's Christopher Orr says Hillary Clinton has joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Meanwhile, blogger Cameron Fredman has found some counts that show Clinton ahead. My favorite:

Average Highest Elevation

CLINTON: 6135 Feet
OBAMA:  6097 Feet

Frankly, I’m surprised that more attention hasn’t been drawn to this.  Obama claims to want to elevate the level of discourse, but he has failed in states with the highest elevations.  Clinton has won on Mount Whitney (California), Humphreys Peak (Arizona), Boundary Peak (Nevada), and Wheeler Peak (New Mexico). Perhaps more significantly, there are so few peaks left that despite the close margins, Obama has no hope of regaining the altitude vote.  Clinton also leads among states with the highest average mean elevation: (Clinton:  1908.8 feet    Obama:  1457.7 feet).

I fully expect Howard Wolfson to be citing that one within days. (Hat tip: TNR.)

P.S. And another "Heh," courtesy of James Carville, opening a speech at a finance conference: "Governor Richardson was going to introduce me, but he got pinned down by sniper fire at the airport.”

P.P.S. And yet another "Heh," courtesy of Wonkette:

NIT Pool down to a Final 3

By Brendan Loy

Ole Miss beat Virginia Tech tonight to become the third straight NIT #2 seed to knock off a #1 seed on its home floor -- and in the process, the Rebels eliminated Josh Krause, Dan Port, Pat Caplin, Jeff Burch and Joey Perucki from any chance of winning the 4th annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool.

The pool is now down to a final three: defending champion Gary Kirby ("gahrie"), who attended USC from 1983-1987; Brian Dupuis ("DUP"), a 2004 LSU alum; and Chris Bravo ("cdbavg400"), a 2007 USC alum and current Arizona grad student.

Bravo needs Dayton to beat Ohio State in a game that's still in progress. If the Flyers win tonight, Bravo will win the pool if UMass wins the NIT and the total number of points scored in the title game is 128 or less. On the other hand, if the Buckeyes win tonight, Bravo is eliminated. Meanwhile, regardless of tonight's outcome, Dupuis will win the pool if Florida wins the NIT. And Kirby will repeat as pool champion in every other scenario (including the one where UMass wins a title game in which 129 or more points are scored).

I'll post a full update tomorrow, but that's where things stand in terms of the scenarios.

Shuttle to land tonight

By Brendan Loy

The Space Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center at 8:39 PM EDT. Complete coverage here.

UPDATE: The Shuttle landed safely.

Krause, defending champion Kirby tied atop NIT Pool; Gardner eliminated

By Brendan Loy

Barely 24 hours removed from pursuing a perfect bracket, Mark Gardner is suddenly out of the running in the Irish Trojan NIT Pool -- and defending champion Gary Kirby is back in the catbird seat.

Kirby, a.k.a. "gahrie," is tied with Josh Krause for first place, and is statistically the most likely to win the pool, prevailing in 14 of the 32 remaining scenarios. He is also the only contestant guaranteed to still be mathematically alive after tonight's final two quarterfinals. For now, however, eight contestants are  alive to win: Kirby, Krause, Dan Port, Brian Dupuis (DUP), Pat Caplin, Jeff Burch, Chris Bravo and Joey Perucki.

Gardner, who was perfect until the tournament's 22nd game and entered last night's action with a 23-1 prediction record, was mathematically eliminated by a pair of quarterfinal upsets: wins by #2 seeds UMass and Florida over homestanding top seeds Syracuse and Arizona State, respectively. The Syracuse loss especially hurt, as the Orange were Gardner's predicted runner-up. He can now finish no better than third place.

Kirby, for his part, appears to have an uncommon gift for predicting the NIT. In addition to winning the 2007 pool, he finished second in 2006. (He did not compete in 2005.) This year, he has gotten only two games wrong to date.

Dean O'Hara to step down in 2009

By Brendan Loy

Above The Law has confirmed the legitimacy of the leaked U.S. News law-school rankings, which I blogged last night. As I mentioned in that post, they show Notre Dame Law School erasing last year's decline and returning to #22.

Meanwhile, there is breaking news at NDLS. Less than an hour ago, Dean Patty O'Hara wrote an e-mail to the student body, announcing that she is stepping down at the end of next year. The e-mail was forwarded to me, and it's printed in full after the jump.

Gravel vs. Paul? Bring it on!

By Brendan Loy

Mike Gravel, the former Democratic presidential candidate who once made a creepy YouTube ad in which he stared at the camera for like two minutes, will run for the Libertarian nomination for president.

So far, Ron Paul -- who was the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1988 -- says he's not running in 2008. But man, wouldn't that be awesome? Mike Gravel vs. Ron Paul? The Democrats' fringe also-ran vs. the Republicans' fringe also-ran, duking it out for the Libertarian nomination? It'd be the political equivalent of the NIT championship game!

The audacity of hopelessness

By Brendan Loy

David Brooks had a good column about Hillary Clinton in yesterday's New York Times. He estimates her chances of capturing the nomination at 5 percent, and then professes himself astounded at "what she’s going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance." She appears intent on attempting to destroy Obama, even though there's a 95 percent chance her efforts will only help McCain. "When you step back and think about it, she is amazing," Brooks writes. "She possesses the audacity of hopelessness."

Interesting stuff, but even moreso when it's read in concert with today's Maureen Dowd column, which suggests that Hillary might consider this lifeline to McCain a feature, not a bug. After all, if Obama loses the general election, Hillary can take another stab at the presidency in 2012. And a 76-year-old President McCain could hardly play the age card against a 65-year-old opponent.

Chuck Wessell leads women's pool

By Brendan Loy

Chuck Wessell, a Ph.D. student at N.C. State, leads the 11th annual Living Room Times women's basketball pool heading into the Sweet Sixteen.

Wessell picked both of last night's mild upsets -- by #5 seeds Notre Dame and Old Dominion, both in overtime over #4 seeds -- to break the deadlock at the top of the standings. He has 243 out of a possible 272 points. Maryland alum Josh Rubin and Evansville alum Jeremy Gist are tied for second place with 240 points. The pool is scored on a 5-7-10-15-20-25 basis. Complete standings here and after the jump.

44 of the 91 contestants -- nearly half -- are still mathematically alive to win the pool, as you can see on the Possible Outcomes page. (To sort that page by mathematical likelihood of winning, instead of by current rank, click twice on the column header "# First.")

I'll post an NIT Pool update later today, sometime before tonight's last two quarterfinals tip off at 7:00 PM EDT.

SHA girl needs your votes!

By Brendan Loy

Since I was being mean to Buffalo yesterday, I figured I should do something nice for a Buffalo native this morning. And, conveniently enough, one of Becky's high-school classmates needs my, and your, help!

Sara Crowther (née Alpsan) is competing in the "Be a Milk Rock Star with Rascal Flatts" contest. She uploaded a video of herself singing "God Bless the Broken Road," and it's currently ranked 14th out of 219 entries, based on viewers' votes. That's up from like 85th or something when I first checked! You can help keep that momentum ("Crow-mentum"?) going by clicking the above link and voting for Sara!

Sara doesn't need to finish first -- she just needs to crack the Top 10 by April 15. Then Rascal Flatts and MilkRocks.com will pick the winner from the Top 10 entries. Whoever they choose will, according to the contest rules,  "win a trip for them, and three friends, to see the band live and perform their song entry onstage with Rascal Flatts; a Gibson Les Paul Studio Guitar autographed by Rascal Flatts; their own backstage dressing room, a meet and greet with the band; VIP accommodations to and from the concert on the Gibson Guitar Tour Bus and a webcast featuring their performance aired for 30 days on MilkRocks.com."

So anyway... vote for Sara! Here's her video:

ND beats OU in OT; Tennessee next

By Brendan Loy

#5-seed Notre Dame and #4-seed Oklahoma -- playing in West Lafayette, Indiana -- are tied 72-72 in overtime in the second round of the women's tournament. Winner gets Tennessee in the Sweet Sixteen. GO IRISH!!

UPDATE: IRISH WIN!! Notre Dame is Sweet 16-bound!! Wooo!! GOOOO IRISH, BEEEEAT LADY VOLS!!

I'll update the pools in the morning.

Endeavour & ISS over Knoxville

By Brendan Loy

I drove a few miles to Carl Cowan Park this evening, where I figured I'd have a clear-ish horizon and a dark-ish sky to watch the Shuttle & ISS flyover. And, sure enough, I saw both spaceships -- preceded a few minutes earlier by the ATV Jules Verne -- race across the sky. The view of the Shuttle & ISS wasn't as spectacular as when I saw them from Nashville (they were much brighter and more directly overhead in that particular instance), but it was still neat. And I got a video!

Pay no attention to my blithering at the end of the video about how the Shuttle "stayed light longer than I thought it would." I was just a bit confused in real-time. On the video, it's perfectly obvious that the Shuttle faded into shadow when and where you'd expect it to, based on the ISS's behavior moments before.

The more interesting question -- which I don't mention in the video -- is why the Shuttle flared up so bright, brighter even than the ISS, in the final moments before it disappeared into the Earth's shadow. I'm sure there's a good answer to that question, but I don't know what it is.

P.S. The apparent jerky motion of the ATV, Shuttle and ISS is a result of my camcorder's "Super Night Shot" feature. In actuality, orbiting satellites move rather smoothly. :)

P.P.S. The title of this post is technically wrong. The Shuttle and ISS were not directly over Knoxville when I saw them, but rather, over the Memphis area.

NDLS back in Top 25?

By Brendan Loy

U.S. News and World Report's 2009 law-school rankings aren't due to be officially released until Friday, but there are scattered reports of leaks. (Hat tip: yea.) Specifically, law blog The Shark has published a PDF scan of an apparently Xeroxed copy of the alleged list (purportedly found at an unspecified "newsstand"); Xoxohth poster "Gerbil21" claims he saw the magazine on display early at a local Barnes & Noble and wrote the rankings down by hand; and poster "m1" on Law School Discussion took a digital picture of the alleged new rankings page.

If the leaked list is accurate -- a big "if" -- it would mean Notre Dame Law School has recovered from last year's drop from #22 to #28, climbing back into a tie for #22. However, I can't vouch for the accuracy of these purported leaks in any way, shape or form. I'm just passing on the links. You can consider them sort of like the early unweighted exit polls on election nights: lend them whatever credence you feel is appropriate, with "none" being a perfectly valid answer. We report, you decide.

Oh, and insert your own rankings-don't-matter disclaimer here. :)

P.S. For example.

Translating Hillary Clinton

By Brendan Loy

A few days ago, Jay blogged about Phil Bredesen's proposal for a superdelegate superconvention. Today, Hillary Clinton offered her thoughts on the plan: "The governor from Tennessee suggested that there be a convention of superdelegates, and I think that it is an intriguing idea. I have not considered it long enough to have an opinion on it."

Heh. Translation: "I haven't determined yet whether it would help me or hurt me politically. When I figure that out, I'll let you know whether it's an obviously necessary, undeniably fair and just procedure for determining the nominee, or a horribly undemocratic, totally indefensible alteration of the sacrosanct process we already have in place."

Jim Kelly for Congress?

By Brendan Loy

Former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly is reportedly considering a run for Congress as a Republican.

Let's see: he can serve in the House for four years, run for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat in 2012, win in a stunning upset, make a national name for himself, and then in 2016, when President Obama is termed out...

...can you say Kelly-Norwood '16?

You may scoff, but the ticket has some major built-in political advantages. First of all, they'd win the normally Democratic state of New York in a landslide, by uniting nostalgic Bills fans and grateful Giants fans. And secondly, they'd have no problems motivating the conservative base. After all, nobody knows how to aim for the right like Scott Norwood! It'd be a vast wide-right wing conspiracy!

:P

(Hat tip: Hugging Harold Reynolds. To all my Buffalo readers, including my wife, I apologize. I couldn't resist.)

Another chance to see the Shuttle & ISS

By Brendan Loy

If you're in the South, the lower Great Plains or Midwest, or Texas, and your sky is clear, you may be able to see the Space Shuttle and International Space Station fly across the sky tonight as two distinct, bright dots, the Shuttle trailing about 20 seconds behind the ISS. (That's "seconds" as a unit of time, not as a unit of angular distance.)

The Shuttle Endeavour undocked yesterday, and is scheduled to land tomorrow, so tonight is the only side-by-side Shuttle & ISS viewing opportunity for this mission, barring delays. As I've said before, this is a very cool thing to see, well worth a few minutes standing outside and looking up at the sky.

The flyover will occur between 9:34 and 9:39 PM Eastern time. To find out exactly where in the sky to look, and when, go to Heavens-Above, select your location from the database or the map, and then click on "ISS" or "STS-123" under the heading "Satellites." The closer you are to the solid black line in the graphic below, the better your viewing opportunity will be:

Don't pay too much attention to the red circle, as it "moves" along with the Shuttle and ISS. Just look at the solid black line. The closer you are to it, the better. But don't believe me -- go to Heavens-Above and found out the local details. And then go outside tonight and look up.

Here in Knoxville, I'll be looking up to the western sky -- just barely south of due west, actually -- about one-third of the way from the horizon to the zenith. The sky's clear now; hopefully it'll stay that way. Now I just need to pick a viewing location. If I'm able to get any good pictures, I'll (obviously) post 'em!

For those of you who haven't seen them before

By Jay Johnson

I don't know how many folks are aware of the guys from Red State Update, but I love their redneck takes on politics. The guys are radio DJs/comedians, playing the characters of Jackie Broyles and Dunlap.

Usually, it's simply them sitting at a table, bantering back and forth. This one, however, is a special kind of amusing.

Enjoy. Then, if you haven't already, go check out their other stuff on their site and/or add them to your MySpace friends.

Implausible deniability

By Brendan Loy

Hillary Clinton admitted yesterday that her claim, in a major prepared foreign policy speech last week, that "I remember landing under sniper fire" in Bosnia in 1996 and "we ran with our heads down" to avoid being hit, was false. She says it was a "misstatement," that she inadvertently "misspoke," and that this whole issue is a "minor blip."

Remember, this "misstatement" by Clinton was not an off-the-cuff, throwaway remark. It was in the prepared text of a major speech, and it formed part of a broader argument that Hillary has meaningful foreign-policy experience from her days as first lady. Politico has more, including video of the CBS News report that debunked Hillary's statement and spurred her to correct it:

On an almost-related note, Josh Marshall weighs in, again, on the Clinton campaign's ongoing "fog of nonsense":

Spin is one thing. And it's not a bad thing. But to have utility it must be tethered to some relevant facts, some kind of reality. Otherwise it just descends into ridiculousness. There's always some new clever but inane argument to twist 'up' into something at least somewhat resembling 'down'. Or if not that, enough to keep your head spinning long enough not to notice for a while that 2 and 2 still equals 4.

And finally, on an entirely unrelated note, a goofy picture of President Bush and the Easter Bunny, courtesy of NRO and Drudge:

NRO readers suggested some captions, but I don't think any of them are terribly good. I think Irish Trojan readers can do better. Suggestions?

Vegas odds & Cinderella bandwagons

By Brendan Loy

Vegas has tabbed two of the better-seeded Sweet 16 teams as underdogs: #3 Xavier (by 1 point to #7 West Virginia) and #2 Tennessee (by 2.5 points to #3 Louisville).

Meanwhile, the Vegas oddsmakers -- much like yours truly (see my current Facebook status at right) -- have jumped on the Davidson/Stephen Curry bandwagon. The #10-seeded Wildcats are only 4.5-point underdogs against #3 Wisconsin. WOOO!! Goooo David(son), Beeeeat Goliath!!!

(Curry, incidentally, isn't just a freakin' awesome player who scores like a bazillion points a game and who looks like he's about 16 years old. He's also apparently a really nice, genuinely humble guy.)

The other Cinderellas aren't so highly regarded. #1 Kansas is an 11.5-point favorite over #12 Villanova, and #1 UCLA is favored by 12.5 points over #12 Western Kentucky. That comports with history; top seeds are 16-0 all-time against #12 and #13 seeds that manage to reach the Sweet Sixteen, and it hasn't usually been close. (Twelve of the sixteen games have been decided by double figures.)

But College Hoops Journal says we shouldn't sleep on WKU: "All they’ve got going for them is some late-game mojo (first true buzzer-beater since Drew Nicholas in '03) and a UCLA team that has escaped three of their past five games with terrible non-calls from officials. How vulnerable is UCLA? They only scored 51 points against Texas A&M and clearly can’t shoot when someone’s not afraid to punch back. ... The Hilltoppers are in the perfect position of being able to fly under the radar (as much as any 12-seed can right now) and finally take the stake to UCLA’s heart."

Personally, I'm not buying what CHJ is selling, but man oh man, it would be awesome if the Hilltoppers could topple the Bruins.

Perfection in jeopardy

By Brendan Loy

Dayton is threatening to bust Mark Gardner's perfect NIT bracket.

UPDATE: Dayton wins! So there will be no perfect bracket. Gardner's streak ends at 21 straight. (He did get Ohio State's win.)

I'll update the pool standings (NIT and women's) in the morning. Suffice it to say, however, that Gardner's lead has shrunk from 14 points to 4. Josh Krause, in second place, picked Dayton.

P.S. The wins by tOSU and Dayton also mean there will be all-Ohio regional final between the Buckeyes and Flyers, in Columbus. Fun.

UPDATE, 3/25, 8:03 AM: I've updated both the women's and NIT pool standings. Both are also after the jump.

In the NIT pool, Gardner went 3-for-4 on the day and effectively increased his lead back to 14. (Technically, he's only seven points ahead of Ginny Zak, but their picks are identical for the remainder of the tournament and thus she cannot pass him.)

Meanwhile, the big story yesterday in the women's pool was Carolyn Blessing, who went 8-for-8 on a day with two upsets (#6 Pitt over #3 Baylor and #6 GW over #3 Cal) to move within one point of the co-leaders and their "chalk" brackets.

Those co-leaders -- Tom Caputi, Ken Stern, F.X. McGahee, Chuck Wessell and Kay Torg -- haven't predicted a single upset thus far, and their risk-aversion has largely served them well, as 18 of the first 24 games have gone according to seed. But now others are moving within striking distance. Moreover, the co-leaders' brackets finally begin to diverge tonight, over a pair of 4-5 games. In the Notre Dame-Oklahoma game, Stern and Wessell picked the #5 Irish, while the others picked the #4 Sooners. In addition, Wessell picked #5 Old Dominion over #4 Virginia; the others picked the Cavaliers. So those games will largely determine who has the lead heading into the Sweet 16. There is also a scenario where Michael Rosenkrantz, currently in 12th place, could take sole possession of the lead -- if Oklahoma and Old Dominion win, and #5 Kansas State beats #4 Louisville.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The Justice Department has approved a merger between Sirius Satellite Radio and rival XM Satellite Radio.

Campaign '08 continues its "Places Brendan Used To Live" World Tour

By Brendan Loy

Speaking of the Indiana primary... the South Bend Scenario -- the latest salvo in the "vast right/left-wing conspiracy to piss me off" by making every single place I've ever lived, except the place I'm living now, a major hub of presidential campaign activity -- is proceeding according to plan: Bill and Chelsea Clinton are in South Bend today to celebrate Dyngus Day (video here), and the Obama campaign is opening a South Bend office, declaring that Obama will campaign "in every corner" of Indiana. (Hat tip: JT.)

So, there have now been campaign visits by major candidates and/or their top surrogates in Greater Hartford, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix, South Bend and Denver (my possible next home)... everywhere I've ever lived except Knoxville.

HARUMPH.

North Carolina as the new firewall?

By Brendan Loy

With Hillary Clinton appearing to have an insurmountable edge in Pennsylvania, Mark Halperin says the "developed consensus" is that "Clinton probably has to win North Carolina’s May 6 primary to fight on with a real chance — but/and Obama has to win it to avoid a prolonged fight." Polls there show a slight Obama edge.

You'd think that, at some point, the focus would become exclusively on delegates, rather than on objectively meaningless "wins" and "losses." But of course, you'd be wrong. The objectively meaningless could be subjectively pivotal, because of the importance of the superdelegates, the media narrative, etc.

Thus, although it advances the "wins" vs. "losses" narrative, I gotta ask: what about Indiana, which votes on the same day as North Carolina? Might not Obama need a two-state May 6 sweep to really get the "Hillary should drop out" meme going?

TNR's Noam Scheiber thinks so. Here's the key excerpt from his excellent piece on the "Democratic death march" toward Denver:

Democrats have never been known for Spock-like rationality, but even they see the logic of avoiding a convention fiasco. "It's in nobody's interest in the Democratic Party for that to happen," says Mike Feldman, another former Gore aide. "There is a mechanism in place--built into the process--to avoid that." That mechanism, such as it is, involves an en masse movement of uncommitted superdelegates to the perceived winner of the primaries. Almost everything you hear from such people suggests this will happen in time. "I think once we have the elected delegate count, things will move fairly quickly, " says Representative Chris Van Hollen, who oversees the party's House campaign committee. Increasingly, there is even agreement on the metric by which a winner would be named. Just about every superdelegate and party operative I spoke with endorsed Nancy Pelosi's recent suggestion that pledged delegates should matter most.

Assuming Feldman and Van Hollen are right, that means Democrats won't wait much past June 3--currently the last day on the primary calendar--before crowning a nominee. At the same time, it means there's very little chance of ending the contest sooner. Undecided superdelegates on Capitol Hill, along with party elders like Pelosi, Gore, and Harry Reid, "don't want to be seen as elites coming in and overturning the will of the people," says one senior House aide. A Senate staffer says his boss "thinks this give and take is natural, it will be helpful in the end." "That's a view held by a majority of these guys who have been through the cut and thrust of politics," he adds. Which means early June it is. ...

The most optimistic scenario I could plausibly construct didn't end the campaign until the second week in May. To make it happen, Obama would have to overtake Hillary among superdelegates--a key psychological barrier. He'd have to limit his margin of defeat in Pennsylvania to ten points, then hold serve two weeks later in North Carolina and Indiana, a pair of states he's slightly favored to win. At that point, Hillary would face nearly impossible odds of overtaking him in the delegate race.

Unfortunately for anyone who wants the race to end soon, there are several problems with this scenario. For one thing, even if all this comes to pass, Hillary would still have to bow out voluntarily--an unlikely twist in any event, but highly implausible if the limbo states of Florida and Michigan still offer her hope. Meanwhile, any one of the aforementioned steps could easily fall through. Polls currently show Obama trailing by double digits in Pennsylvania; the good Reverend Wright could make that tough to change. And, though Obama now leads in North Carolina and Indiana, his advantage is either small or, in the latter case, based on a single, flimsy poll. As for superdelegates, as of this writing, the last two out of the closet opted for Hillary.

So, to review: The most optimistic scenario we have relies on a highly tenuous assumption; it's unlikely to happen even if that assumption holds; and, regardless, it allows the Democratic contest to drag on for six more brutal weeks. The dream may never die, but it's seen some better days.

The focus of Scheiber's article, as that latter point implies, is the damage the Democrats are doing to one another. At one point, he writes that "debating national security credentials during the primaries invariably alters the general-election landscape. You can now count on seeing another '3 a.m.' ad sometime this fall--not to mention a '3 a.m.' debate question from Tim Russert, and a shadowy, '3 a.m.'-obsessed 527 group. ('Insomniac Prank-Callers For Truth'?)" Heh.

He also notes, referring metaphorically to Democrat-on-Democrat attacks, that "any missile that hits its target would also destroy the person who launched it":

Given the delegate math, Hillary's only path to the nomination, barring a meltdown by Obama, is to destroy his electability. But harsh attacks on Obama will inevitably discourage African Americans from voting in the fall, and Hillary can't beat McCain without strong black turnout in places like Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Conversely, any attack on Hillary that alienated moderate Republican women could cripple Obama's chances.

Indeed.

Gardner's quest for the perfect NIT bracket continues tonight

By Brendan Loy

With the men's NCAA Tournament taking a three-day breather, the NIT steps boldly into the breach tonight with four Sour 16 games (hey, they can't exactly be "sweet," it's the freakin' NIT). That means Irish Trojan NIT Pool leader Mark Gardner's perfect bracket will be put to the test. Gardner is 20-for-20 and leads the pool with 152 points, 14 more than his nearest competitors.

Tonight's games are #4 Cal at #1 Ohio State, #3 Dayton at #2 Illinois State, #5 UAB at #1 Virginia Tech, and #3 Nebraska at #2 Mississippi. The first two games are at 7pm EDT, the second two at 9pm. Gardner picked the favorites: tOSU, ISU, VT and Ole Miss.

After tonight, only seven games will remain, so if Gardner goes 4-for-4 tonight, his mathematical chance of finishing with a perfect bracket (assuming all teams have an equal chance of winning) would improve from 1-in-2,048 to 1-in-128.

Also tonight is the first half of the second round of the women's NCAA Tournament. In my women's NCAA pool, it's a seven-way tie for first at the conclusion of the first round, with F.X. McGahee, Chuck Wessell, Kevin Curran, Tom Caputi, Michael Rosenkrantz, Ken Stern and Kay Torg all having 145 out of a possible 160 points -- the same total as the "all favorites bracket." Complete standings here and after the jump.

One frog's shining moment

By Brendan Loy

In the aftermath of Duke's win over Belmont on Thursday, the NBC affiliate in the Raleigh-Durham area bypassed the CBS/NCAA embargo on tournament game highlights by re-enacting the game using dolls:

Heh! Somebody get this guy a network gig. And I want to see that frog in One Shining Moment, dammit.

(Hat tip: AOL Fanhouse.)

Ouch.

By Brendan Loy

North Carolina 108, Arkansas 77, final -- and it was only that "close" because Arkansas ended the game on a 10-5 run. UNC led 103-67 with 3:14 left. Like I said: ouch.

So, the greatest four-day weekend in sports is over -- and it was a good one. The first day evoked unpleasant memories of last year's largely upset-free, mostly undramatic opening weekend, but Friday, Saturday and Sunday made up for Thursday in a very big way. Two titans, Duke and Georgetown, went down, as did sexy sleeper picks Pitt, UConn, Clemson and USC (sigh); three double-digit Cinderellas, Davidson, Villanova and Western Kentucky, moved on; a whole bunch of high seeds had a whole bunch of close calls; and game after game was hyper-competitive and extremely enjoyable. Hurrah! Long live March Madness!

Pool update shortly -- including, for the first time, the "Possible Outcomes" page showing who's still alive to win. (Now that there are "only" 32,768 scenarios left, my pool software can calculate this.)

UPDATE: Here are the standings of the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins. And here's the possible outcomes page. (To sort the possible outcomes page by mathematical likelihood of winning, instead of by current rank, click twice on the column header "# First.")

As noted earlier, Ryan Morgan is in first place, 12 points ahead of Ken Wagner. Impressively, Morgan wins in 20% of the 32,768 remaining scenarios -- a very high percentage for this early in the tournament. However, 86 of the 245 contestants, including everyone currently ranked in the Top 30, are still mathematically alive to win.

(The highest-ranked contestants not still mathematically alive are Ken Inadomi and Nathan Evangelista, who are currently tied for 31st but can finish no better than second. The lowest-ranked contestant who still has a shot: George Heidkamp, currently 223rd out of 245, who would win the pool in exactly one of the 32,768 possible scenarios.)

Current standings thru 48 games are after the jump. The maximum possible number of points to date is 272. The pool is scored on a 5-7-10-15-20-25 basis.

Catholics beat Methodists

By Brendan Loy

The Notre Dame men were eliminated by Washington State yesterday, but the Notre Dame women are still alive, headed for a Tuesday second-round matchup with Oklahoma after beating #12-seed Southern Methodist this afternoon. Go Irish!!

In my women's pool, there's a five-way tie for the lead among Kay Torg, Ken Stern, Tom Caputi, Chuck Wessell and F.X. McGahee -- and, in a tournament that has seen only two upsets in 24 games, those co-eaders are also tied with the "all favorites bracket." Complete standings here and after the jump.

Ryan Morgan extends men's pool lead

By Brendan Loy

Ryan Morgan predicted both of the NCAA Tournament's biggest upsets to date -- West Virginia over Duke and Davidson over Georgetown -- and now he's got a sizable lead in the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins. (You can see his bracket here.)

Morgan, a Drake alum and Wisconsin fan who lives in Milwaukee and surfed onto the Irish Trojan's Blog just a week ago, has a 12-point lead over his nearest competitor, Ken Wagner of Nashville. The pool is scored on a 5-7-10-15-20-25 basis.

Morgan has 200 out of a possible 251 points. Wagner has 188. Liz Janelle, Robert Dokes, Khalil Aboukhaled, Alex Whitfield and Amir Sadaghiani are tied for third with 186.

Aboukhaled (a.k.a. "fezafou") briefly tied Morgan, who had led overnight, when Villanova won Sunday's early game. (Morgan picked Clemson.) But when Tennessee beat Butler in overtime, Morgan retook sole possession of the lead (Aboukhaled picked the Bulldogs), and he increased that lead a few minutes later when Davidson stunned Georgetown.

Morgan picked Memphis, North Carolina and Louisville in the final three second-round games. Everyone near the top of the leaderboard made the same picks, so major changes tonight are impossible. Morgan is guaranteed to remain in sole possession of first place heading into the Sweet Sixteen.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

Tennessee, Butler battle

By Brendan Loy

In the battle to determine my rooting interest for the remainder of the tournament, Tennessee leads Butler, 53-49 with 7:53 left.

In the other games still ongoing, it looks like Texas, Western Kentucky and Georgetown have the edge (though I'm still hoping for a Davidson comeback in the latter game). And earlier, Villanova beat Siena. I'll post a pool update after the conclusion of all four of the games currently underway.

UPDATE: What a great bunch of games those turned out to be!! Texas survives a furious Miami comeback, Western Kentucky does the same against San Diego, Tennessee wins a thriller in overtime over a game Butler squad, and Davidson rallies to stun Georgetown! WOO!!!

I realize it's easy to second-guess the committee after the games have been played, but man, Butler is way better than a #7 seed, eh? They should have been able to reach the Sweet Sixteen without playing a team as good as Tennessee (which arguably should have been a #1 seed). But alas. Great win for the Vols. They certainly had to earn it. I'll be rooting for them from here on out -- unless they meet Davidson in the Final Four (not totally implausible) or Western Kentucky in the title game (umm, kind of implausible), in which case I'll probably revert to my usual mid-major lovefest.

Anyway, pool update coming shortly.

Happy Easter!

By Brendan Loy

MP3 File

Siena, are you ready for your closeup?

By Brendan Loy

Somehow, when they set the schedule for tomorrow's games, I don't think CBS was expecting to lead off with a nationwide broadcast of #12 Villanova vs. #13 Siena. Heh.

What a game!

By Brendan Loy

UCLA just won an instant classic, 53-49 over Texas A&M.

Absolutely incredible finish. UCLA's rally was remarkable: their defense was just superb, and it seemed like they scored on three or four straight possessions when they absolutely needed to, often on very tough shots (including one Jordanesque fadeaway by Kevin Love). Then, down the stretch, both teams just kept making huge plays on both sides of the ball. It was exactly what you love to see in the NCAA Tournament. One "shining moment" after another.

Utterly heartbreaking loss for the Aggies, obviously. As for the Bruins, will this be their "great escape" en route to a Final Four and perhaps a national title? We shall see. They now face the winner of a #12/13 game in the Sweet 16, and then if they win that one, either a #3 or a #7 in the regional final.

As for the 13th annual Living Room Times men's NCAA pool presented by those selfsame UCLA Bruins: updated standings are here and after the jump.

Ryan Morgan leads men's pool

By Brendan Loy

Ryan Morgan, a Drake alum and Wisconsin fan, took sole possession of first place in the Living Room Times men's pool when Michigan State beat Pitt moments ago.

Morgan, who lives in Milwaukee, has 172 out of a possible 209 points in the 13th annual pool, presented by the UCLA Bruins. He will stay in first place tonight regardless of the UCLA-Texas A&M outcome.

Kevin Pilz of Newington, Connecticut and Ken Wagner of Nashville, Tennessee are tied for second with 167 points. Liz Janelle, Alex Whitfield and Khalil Aboukhaled -- previously tied with Morgan for first place -- are now tied for fourth with 165 points. (They picked Pitt.) Complete standings here and after the jump.

Trouble's Bruin

By Brendan Loy

Texas A&M leads UCLA 29-26 at halftime. w00t! Go Aggies!

Incidentally, in my pool, I've added four "dummy brackets" for comparison purposes: the "all favorites" bracket, the "aggregate picks" bracket, John McCain's bracket and Barack Obama's bracket.

I've added the "all favorites" and "aggregate picks" brackets to the women's and NIT pools, too. You can see how the actual contestants compare to the dummy brackets by looking at the various pools' standings. (Men's, Women's, NIT.)

Four-way tie thru 38 games

By Brendan Loy

Six games into the second round, there's a four-way tie among Khalil Aboukhaled, Liz Janelle, Alex Whitfield and Ryan Morgan for the lead in the 13th annual Living Room Times men's NCAA pool sponsored by the UCLA Bruins.

Argh.

By Brendan Loy

Wazzu 61, Notre Dame 41, final.

You don't win too many games scoring 41 points, least of all in the NCAA Tournament.

So all three of "my teams" are gone within the tournament's first three days. All four if you count UConn. Harumph. I guess now I'm rooting for... Davidson? The Butler-Tennessee winner? And of course, whoever's playing UCLA. :)

Meanwhile, we've got a thriller in overtime between Marquette and Stanford. Go Pac-10!! GO DRUNKEN TREES!!!

UPDATE: Stanford wins!! Brook Lopez hit the game-winner with 1.3 seconds left. One of the best games of the tournament for sure. And the Trees won despite losing their coach in the first half.

P.S. Incidentally, Notre Dame's loss knocked Khalil Aboukhaled out of sole possession of first place in the pool, back into a four-way tie with Liz Janelle, Alex Whitfield and Ryan Morgan. That's still the situation after Stanford's win, which all four of the co-leaders predicted. Full update coming after the Kansas-UNLV game ends.

Fire Mike Brey?

By Brendan Loy

I kid, I kid! :) But Notre Dame clearly isn't playing too well, down 32-19 at the half. Though we missed almost the entire first half because Purdue-Xavier took so long to finish. Speaking of which,
Khalil Aboukhaled (a.k.a. fezafou) now leads the pool.

UPDATE: Harumph. With the Irish trailing 38-28 with 14:08 left, CBS has switched us over to the closer Stanford-Marquette game. Off to MMOD I go.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Former SLA member Sarah Jane Olson was mistakenly freed a year early from prison Monday, and is back in custody.

Morgan, Janelle, Aboukhaled tied for first

By Brendan Loy

I've updated the standings of the 13th annual Living Room Times men's NCAA pool presented by the UCLA Bruins, reflecting Duke's glorious loss to West Virginia. It's now a three-way tie between Matt Kagan Ryan Morgan, Khalil Aboukhaled and Liz Janelle, all of whom correctly predicted the Mountaineers' upset win. Complete standings here and after the jump. (Now corrected! -6:30 PM)

[UPDATE: Someone will take sole possession of the lead shortly, depending on the outcome of the Purdue-Xavier game. If Purdue wins, Liz Janelle will take the lead; if Xavier wins, Aboukhaled will take the lead. Morgan is bound to fall behind because he picked Baylor, who lost on Thursday.]

In addition, the women's pool standings are updated through the first six games, including Hartford's upset win over Syracuse. (Woo!! Connecticut pride!! Jen Rizzotti!!) Those are after the jump, too.

P.S. This may be my last pool update for a few hours, as I'll want to focus on watching the Notre Dame game this evening. GO IRISH!

Go Huggy Bear! Beat Duke!

By Brendan Loy

Bob Huggins's West Virginia Mountaineers are threatening to beat Duke. I have the Blue Devils in my bracket, but who cares about that? Go WVU!! Duke sucks!!

P.S. Apparently Bob Huggins's "hometown" is "West Virginia." Heh.

UPDATE: Mountaineers win!! Woo!! They're burning couches in Morgantown tonight!!

How excited is UCLA right now? If they beat Texas A&M tonight, they play the winner of a #12 vs. #13 game in the Sweet 16... and now the #2 seed in their region is eliminated. Now watch Purdue beat Xavier and completely bust that bracket.

Gardner still perfect in NIT Pool

By Brendan Loy

Twenty games into the NIT, with half of the quarterfinalists decided, Penn State alum Mark Gardner is still perfect.

Gardner, of Fredericksburg, Virginia, is 20-for-20 with 11 games to go. He has 152 points in the 4th annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool, 14 ahead of Gary Kirby, Patrick Roach, Derek McDonald and Josh Krause, who are tied for second place with 18-for-20 prediction records and 138 points apiece.

Full standings here and after the jump. Scenario info here.

And this time, nuts won't save them

By Brendan Loy

Jericho has been cancelled. Again. (Hat tip: Andrew Hiller.)

I gotta be honest, I've TiVoed all the Season 2 episodes but have only watched the first one. Between the baby, the election and March Madness, I've been a bit distracted. So I guess I'm sort of complicit in the show's latest round of low ratings. Oh, well. I look forward to watching the rest of the episodes.

Karl Rove: my iPhone makes me cool

By Brendan Loy

Karl Rove on his iPhone: "I love it. My life has changed. I have a shred of coolness."

Heh. He goes on. ("I mean it is just shocking how much better, how much more productive I am.") He also sings the praises of his aforeblogged MacBook Air.

The big question is, which effect is more pronounced: hip Mac products making Karl Rove cool, or evil Karl Rove making hip Mac products less cool? :)

10-way tie atop men's pool

By Brendan Loy

Ten contestants are tied for first place in the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins, with 26-for-32 prediction records at the end of the first round.

The ten co-leaders are Matt Kagan, Khalil Aboukhaled, Liz Janelle, Amir Sadaghiani, Ryan Morgan, Robert Dokes, Carolyn Blessing, Joe Swiderski, Benjamin Rumery and Alex Whitfield. Each has 130 of a possible 160 points. 24 contestants are tied for 11th place with 125 points apiece, and 42 contestants are tied for 35th place with 120 points each.

The pool is scored on a 5-7-10-15-20-25 basis, so the 7-point second-round games today and tomorrow will probably begin to break many of the ties.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

Women's pool reminder

By Brendan Loy

The deadline to enter my women's NCAA pool is noon EDT on Saturday. If you're like me and have already seen your men's bracket totally fall apart, it's a chance for redemption!

UPDATE, March 22, 12:34 PM: The deadline has passed. You can view everyone's brackets here.

Tampa is Upset City

By Brendan Loy

After a mostly upset-free day yesterday, we've already seen wins today by #10 Davidson, #12 Western Kentucky and #13 San Diego... and now #13 Siena is leading #4 Vanderbilt at halftime -- in Tampa, the same place where the WKU and USD wins occurred -- and in what would be a bigger upset than the seeds indicate, #9 Oregon is ahead of #8 Mississippi State.

UPDATE: Mississippi State came back to beat the Ducks. But Siena won! Pool update shortly.

UPDATE 2: Through 28 games, Alex Whitfield and Ryan Morgan are tied atop the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins, with 120 points out of a possible 140. Nine contestants are tied for third place with 115 points apiece. Full standings here and after the jump.

This may be the last pool update of the evening. I'm exhausted (I've pulled several late nights during the week getting various aspects of the pool set up, and I was up early this morning, dealing with a fussy baby), so I may go to bed before the final wave of games is over -- once I'm satisfied that UT-Arlington is hopelessly behind Memphis. (I'd never forgive myself I were to miss the first-ever #16 seed victory over a #1.) If so, I'll update the standings in the morning.

San Diego stuns UConn in OT

By Brendan Loy

#13-seed San Diego, carrying the flag for the WCC after better-regarded conference-mates Gonzaga and St. Mary's lost earlier today, is in overtime with #4-seed UConn. Although we've already seen three double-digit seeds win David vs. David (Drake-Western Kentucky, Gonzaga-Davidson) and Goliath vs. Goliath (USC-Kansas State) games, this would be the first tournament upset that really feels like a big upset. It's also the second straight overtime game in the Tampa pod. Winner gets #12-seed Western Kentucky. Could it be: the Sun Belt tourney champ against the WCC tourney champ for a spot in the Sweet 16? UCLA fans have got to be pretty happy about this potential development.

Elsewhere, easy wins for Georgetown, Texas and Butler. Pool update may be a little delayed, depending on the length of Loyette's current nap. :) Bear with me.

UPDATE: Toreros win! 70-69.

So it'll be #12 vs. #13 in the second round on Sunday. Heh.

This is the second straight NCAA Tournament that ended for UConn with an overtime loss to a mid-major. Two years ago, George Mason beat them in overtime in the Elite Eight. Last year, they didn't make the Big Dance.

UPDATE 2: I've updated the standings. It's now a five-way tie in the Times pool presented by UCLA, with co-leaders Alex Whitfield, Carolyn Blessing, Ryan Morgan, Jeff Belisle and Khalil Aboukhaled at 21-for-24 (or 105 points out of a possible 120). Complete standings after the jump.

Meanwhile, here are the latest Loy household standings:

Loyette - 95
Toby, Sasha and Butter - 90
Robbie - 80
Becky - 75
Brendan - 60

Heh.

Getting schooled by a two-month-old

By Brendan Loy

I think I'm going to just start rooting for Loyette's bracket. While I'm tied for 243rd place out of 245, with a dismal prediction record of 9-for-20 (!), Loyette went 4-for-4 in today's early games -- she picked Davidson and Western Kentucky! -- to improve her record to 16-for-20 and move into a tie for 30th place, which means she's only 10 points (two first-round games' worth) off the lead. Remember, her bracket was picked via the modified coin flip method.

ONE SHINING MOMENT!!

By Brendan Loy

Western Kentucky!! Woo!!!! Woooooo!!!!!

Pool update, etc., coming in a bit.

UPDATE: Video clip here:

Meanwhile, UConn just lost A.J. Price to what looks like a serious knee injury. Great. So now if either San Diego or Western Kentucky beats the Huskies, they'll get no credit for it from the mid-major hater crowd. "They're just another overrated, overhyped mid-major, they only beat UConn because Price was out, then they lost to UCLA, they suck."

Anyway... here are the updated standings in the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins.

It's back to a multi-way tie at the top after last night's co-leaders, Carolyn Blessing and Matt Kagan, got two and three picks wrong, respectively, in today's first quartet of games. Blessing is now in a seven-way tie for first place with Ryan Morgan, Ken Wagner, Matt Thomsen, Alex Whitfield, Khalil Aboukhaled and Jeff Belisle. Each has 90 of a possible 100 points. Kagan, meanwhile, is now one of 22 players tied for eighth place with 85 points.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

D'oh.

By Brendan Loy

Gonzaga loses. :( Tennessee holds on. Now Drake and Western Kentucky are going down to the wire. #12 leads #5.

Two thrillers

By Brendan Loy

Davidson has rallied to take the lead over Gonzaga with 7 minutes left. Tennessee-American still tight (Vols by 4) with 3 1/2 to play.

Day 2

By Brendan Loy

The first wave of Friday games is underway. ESPN.com's writers are hoping for some excitement: "Day 1's 16 NCAA tournament games were decided by an average of 16 points. Will Day 2's slate bring a return to the Madness?"

You know, if South Alabama beats Butler later this afternoon, Tennessee might have to beat American and USA to reach the Sweet 16? Unpatriotic bastards! :) Right now, though, they're struggling with American, which is outrebounding them 12-4. Huh?

Also underway: Gonzaga-Davidson. GO ZAGS!!!

Also, Drake-Western Kentucky and Miami-St. Mary's. It's mid-major hour! Only two BCS-conference teams are in action at the moment.

P.S. The latest NIT Pool standings are up, after last night's wins by Syracuse (over Maryland) and Arizona State (over Southern Illinois). Mark Gardner is still perfect, with an 18-for-18 record and 132 points. Ginny Zak is now alone for second place at 17-for-18 and 125 points. Eight contestants are tied for third with 118 points.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The State Department confirms John McCain's passport file was breached as well as Obama and Clinton's files.

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= erson Cooper brings you to the frontlines on the ground in q. Watch an "AC360 Special - Shock and Awe 5 Years Later," orrow at 11 p.m. ET -- only on CNN. http://www.cnn.com/ac360 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Hillary Clinton's passport file was breached in 2007, Secretary of State Rice told Clinton, according to the senator's office.

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= erson Cooper brings you to the frontlines on the ground in q. Watch an "AC360 Special - Shock and Awe 5 Years Later," orrow at 11 p.m. ET -- only on CNN. http://www.cnn.com/ac362 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

Obama's unforced error

By Brendan Loy

The Obama campaign's decision to distribute a photo of Rev. Wright with Bill Clinton is one of the lowpoints of his campaign, IMHO. First of all, it's a Hillary-esque move, trying to spin an insignificant fact (i.e., Bill Clinton met some guy and had his picture taken) into a major talking point (i.e., the Clintons are clearly hypocrites for criticizing Obama's Wright connection, because they like Rev. Wright too! Just look at the photo! And they even wrote him a thank-you note! A THANK-YOU NOTE!!). In that sense, it's reminiscent of the kindergarten essay nonsense from a few months ago. Like I said: Hillary-esque. And, as Jay Carson says, "pathetic."

Secondly, and for much the same reason, it invites ridicule. Whatever point Obama is trying to make here, it's implausible on the facts presented. Nobody can possibly believe that Bill Clinton shaking hands with Rev. Wright, and having a picture taken (one of "tens of thousands" of such pictures taken over the course of eight years, the Clinton campaign plausibly asserts), somehow establishes that Hillary has anything approaching the level of connection that Obama has with the man. The notion is frankly just laughable. And when you're the front-runner for the presidential nomination, you don't want people laughing at you. As Howard Wolfson e-mailed when asked for comment about the photo, "Urgent indeed — a picture — oooooooo!"

Thirdly, it's strategically idiotic. As NBC's First Read says, "Doesn't [the photo] just give cable networks another excuse to run the video of Wright? How does that turn the page? It was an odd decision to say the least." Whatever infinitesimal gains the photo might reap for Obama by pointing out the Clintons', uh, hypocrisy, or whatever, they're wiped out ten times over by the fact that the photo gives the Wright story fresh legs.

All in all, a terrible move by Obama.

P.S. This "typical white person" thing isn't so hot, either.

On the bright side, Obama has just picked up the coveted Richardson endorsement. And it's nice to see a hard-hitting memo on Hillary's history of deception. Though, with March Madness going on, I'm not sure your average voter will notice any of this weekend's developments.

USC postmortem

By Brendan Loy

Conquest Chronicles: "One and Done...Are you Kidding me?"

All Things Trojan: "Was O.J. Mayo's freshman campaign a success?"

Also, let the "will they stay or will they go?" speculation -- about not just Mayo, but also Jefferson and Gibson -- begin in earnest.

Notre Dame 68, George Mason 50, final

By Brendan Loy

George Mason will not be this year's George Mason. Or even this year's Winthrop, for that matter. :) Hurrah! Admire Mike Brey!

Don't fret, Coach! You won!

Up next: Wazzu, Saturday at 6:40. GO IRISH!!

Well, hey, my bracket may be shot, and I may be tied for 242nd out of 245 in my pool, and I may have seen all my major predicted upsets come and go without happening... but at least one of my alma maters won today!

Kagan, Blessing tied atop pool

By Brendan Loy

NDLS 3L Carolyn Blessing and 2004 pool champion Matt Kagan are tied atop the 2008 Living Room Times men's basketball pool with perfect 16-0 prediction records through one day of NCAA Tournament action.

Blessing, a.k.a. "internatlgirl," and Kagan, a Newington High School Class of 1999 grad and Southern New Hampshire University alum who won both the men's and women's pools in '04, each have the maximum possible total of 80 points. They are followed by a tie for third place among twenty-two contestants with 75 points apiece.

Complete standings of the pool, which is presented by the victorious UCLA Bruins, can be found here and after the jump.

Goooo Irish, Beeeeat Patriots!

By Brendan Loy

Notre Dame and George Mason are underway. Go Irish! I want my alma maters to at least go 1-for-2 today...

P.S. Also: Go Fullerton!! The #14-seed Titans are about to tip off against #3 Wisconsin. After all this carnage in my bracket, is it too much to ask that I get my one totally absurd upset pick right? :)

UPDATE: Good news: Notre Dame has jumped out to a 23-7 lead over George Mason. Bad news: CBS has deemed the game a blowout, and sent us out to a different game. Good news: The game they sent us out to is Wisconsin-Fullerton; the Titans lead by 3!

UPDATE 2: 33-21 Irish at the half.

UPDATE 3: And 30-28 Wisconsin. Go Fullerton!!

UPDATE 4: Damn. The Badgers are on a 15-3 run, and just like that, it's 45-34 Wisconsin with 12:19 left.

Three still perfect in pool

By Brendan Loy

Through 11 games, it's a nine-way tie for first place. Meanwhile, BYU and Texas A&M are going down to the wire. Go Mormons!

UPDATE: Make it a three-way tie, after Texas A&M's win. Carolyn Blessing, Chuck Wessell and Matt Kagan are 12-for-12. Thirty-five contestants are tied for fourth at 11-for-12.

P.S. In tonight's last four games, the three co-leaders all picked UCLA, Wisconsin and Notre Dame to win, but they differ on the West Virginia-Arizona game. Blessing and Kagan picked West Virginia; Wessell picked Arizona.

Complete standings of the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins here and after the jump.

Duke sucks

By Brendan Loy

Okay, forget what I said below. I totally want Belmont to win. Seriously, how awesome would it be if DUKE lost to a #15 seed? Go Bruins!!! (There's something you don't hear from me too often...)

Meanwhile, USC is hanging in there with Kansas State, but with Taj Gibson now having four fouls this early in the second half, I'm not too optimistic. Nevertheless: Fight on!! Beat the Wildcats!!

UPDATE: Okay, so USC is totally going to lose. Arrrrgh.

But Belmont leads Duke by 1 with 1:40 left, and they have the ball! GO BELMONT!!!

UPDATE, 9:15 PM: AAAAHH!!! Duke by 1, Belmont ball, 4 seconds left!!!

UPDATE 9:17 PM: ARRRRRRGH.

UPDATE, 9:19 PM: Missed free throw! Timeout! Another chance! Two-point-something seconds left, Duke by 1, Belmont ball on the opposite end of the floor... one shining moment, anyone?? Either Duke is about to win, or we're about to witness an all-time NCAA Tournament highlight.

UPDATE, 9:21 PM: It was the former. :( Duke wins, 71-70. Damn.

Oh, and Kansas State beat USC, 80-67. :(

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The State Department says security on Barack Obama's passport file has been breached, campaign officials tell CNN.

Figures.

By Brendan Loy

The one time I want Duke to win easily, they're getting a tough fight so far from #15-seed Belmont.

Belmont had better either: a) fade soon, or b) win. If I miss the whole USC-Kansas State game just to watch Duke pull out a narrow victory, I'm going to be super-annoyed.

Now, to try MMOD...

UPDATE: MMOD is working well, but the USC Trojans are not. They're down 8 with four minutes left in the first half, and -- far more devastatingly -- Taj Gibson just picked up his third foul. When the foul was announced, I said: "That's it, they're going to lose." Argh.

Through seven games...

By Brendan Loy

...no surprises, a bunch of blowouts, and a 48-way tie atop the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool presented by the UCLA Bruins.

The leader in our household? Loyette, whose modified coin flip method bracket has her at 6-for-7. Becky is 5-for-7, as are the cats; Robbie's 4-for-7; and I'm bringing up the rear at 3-for-7. LOL! D'oh!

Complete standings here and after the jump.

Meanwhile, there's one afternoon game still underway: the Brainiac Bowl, a.k.a. the Shades of Red Showdown, between the Stanford Cardinal and the Cornell Big Red, which just got started out in Anaheim. Possible X-factor: Cornell, to my knowledge, does not have a drunken dancing Tree.

Go Duke!!

By Brendan Loy

I don't root for Duke very often. But with the Blue Devils tipping off against #15-seed Belmont at the same time -- 7:10 PM EDT -- that my Trojans are tipping off against #11-seed Kansas State, and with local TV headlining the Duke-Belmont game because the Bruins are a Tennessee team, I'd really like to see Duke open up a big lead early and never look back. Then we might actually get to watch the second half of Mayo-Beasley on TV, rather than on a small MMOD screen, which may or may not stutter and buffer, and which will always be 30 seconds or whatever behind the real action. (This matters because CBS's little score ticker thingy updates in real time, so if you're trying to watch TV and MMOD at the same time, you risk being exposed to "spoilers.")

So anyway, yeah, GO DUKE!! :)

Through three games...

By Brendan Loy

...it's a 179-way tie for first place. :)

Meanwhile, my brother-in-law Casey is alone in last place, with an 0-for-3 record. Though, um, I'm not sure if his was really a serious bracket...

P.S. It's early, but the second set of games is looking pretty disastrous for me right now. Pitt and UNLV have opened up big leads over Oral Roberts and Kent State, respectively; and Purdue leads Baylor by 5. The only bright spot is Marquette's 4-point lead over Kentucky at halftime. But going 1-for-4 in the second wave of games -- for a 3-for-7 Thursday-afternoon record, pending the result of the Brainiac Bowl between Stanford and Cornell -- would not exactly be an auspicious start. Let's go, Baylor! C'mon, Kent!! GO ORAL!!!

P.P.S. The score of the UNLV-Kent State game at halftime is 31-10 Rebels. 31-10?!? Really?? Good lord, Golden Flashes, you guys are not helping the mid-major cause here!! Argh!!

MMOD question

By Jay Johnson

I'm watching the game live on TV, plus two separate computers with MMOD running. Sweet.

But, as I recall in the past, I have been able to take the MMOD screen to fullscreen. Now, I am not able to find it, using both my Mac and my Windoze lapper.

Is it gone, or am I just not seeing it? Little help, please...

Let the games begin!

By Brendan Loy

The NCAA Tournament is underway (woooo!!!), and so is my 13th annual men's basketball pool, presented by the UCLA Bruins. I'll get the links to everyone's brackets online ASAP.

[UPDATE: Here's the bracket index. Each contestant's name is a link to his/her bracket. Also, here's the pool standings page, currently sorted in alphabetical order, as everyone is obviously tied at zero.]

The most popular champion picks are the four #1 seeds: North Carolina (33%), UCLA (18%), Kansas (14%) and Memphis (8%). The most commonly predicted first-round upset winners: #10 St. Mary's (62%), #9 Texas A&M (57%), #9 Kent State (54%), #11 St. Joseph's (47%) and #10 Davidson (45%).

We have a total of 244 contestants -- a number that may fluctuate slightly if I end up having to disqualify anyone, or if I get any slightly late entries with, um, sufficient indicia of reliability, as we might say for evidence purposes. :) Regardless, this is the second-largest Living Room Times pool ever, behind last year's 263 but ahead of the previous year's 218.

The total of 244 includes five entries that you might call quasi-contestants: two dog brackets (one for Robbie Loy, my dog, and one for Willie Wheaten, Ken Inadomi's dog), two cat brackets (one for Kristin's kitten, Zoe West, and one for our cats, Toby, Sasha & Butter, who collaborated on a single bracket this year), and one baby bracket (for Loyette Loy -- yeah, I made an exception to the "no nicknames" rule for my own daughter, so sue me). In order to maintain the "one entry per person" rule, these contestants are ineligible for the championship t-shirt, and if one of them were to win the pool, I would probably treat the top, uh, adult human contestant as at least a co-champion for historical purposes. :)

P.S. Jenna Auriemma, daughter of Geno, isn't the only kinda sorta famous person in the pool. We've also got the "West F***in' Virginia" guy, Eddie Regan. Who did he pick to win the national championship? West F***in' Virginia, of course!

We've also got a Notre Dame law professor, Rick Garnett, and two judges on the Tennessee Court of Appeals in the pool: my boss, Charles Susano, and his colleague, Sharon Lee. Judge Lee is pretty excited right now because she picked #14-seed Georgia, which leads #3 Xavier 35-26 at halftime. Personally, I'm just really, really glad I changed my mind about Xavier going all the way to the national championship game. Otherwise I'd be a complete wreck right now.

T-minus 3 hours and counting...

By Brendan Loy

Is anybody else a little bit excited? :) If not, this video might help...

One last time: the deadline to enter my men's NCAA Pool (presented by the UCLA Bruins... sigh) is 12:20 PM EDT today. In case you're wondering, we're at 215 entries and counting. It doesn't look like we'll beat last year's record of 263 entries, but I expect we'll easily surpass the second-highest total, 218 in 2006. There's always a steady stream of entries in the last few hours before the tournament tips off.

Here's hoping for a whole bunch of buzzer-beaters, upsets, and assorted shining moments... and of course, wins by USC, Notre Dame and Gonzaga. :) GOOOO MY BRACKET, BEEEEAT OTHER BRACKETS!!

UPDATE, 10:45 AM: We're now officially at 223 entries. Incidentally, one of those entries is from college-basketball royalty: Jenna Auriemma, daughter of UConn women's coach Geno Auriemma (and fiancee of my high-school classmate and two-time pool champion Todd Stigliano), is in the pool! Heh.

I'm a procedural minutiae snob!

By Brendan Loy

Remember a few weeks ago, when I couldn't stop blogging about the Michigan and Florida delegate controversies? And yet now that those controversies are all over the front pages and the mainstream blogs, I've gone silent on this issue. Why, you ask? Well, a big part of the reason is basketball, of course. But, as I was thinking about this the other day, I realized there's something else to it. When it comes to obscure procedural issues like delegate credential battles, the forgotten election calendar, the primacy of superdelegates, etc., I'm sort of like the uber-nerdy equivalent of an indie music snob who only likes a band when it's "undiscovered," then stops paying attention once the band goes "mainstream." I was blogging about Michigan & Florida before it was cool to blog about Michigan & Florida! And now that it's cool to blog about Michigan & Florida, I've sort of lost interest. :)

That said, there have been a bunch of major developments on this issue recently. I haven't found a good general roundup of what's happened, but the bottom line is that re-votes look increasingly unlikely in either state, which is bad news for Obama, IMHO (though he doesn't seem to see it that way; it's been largely his people who have been either actively or passively resisting re-votes, from what I understand). I realize Hillary would likely win Florida and might win Michigan, but I think it would be in Obama's best interest to get this issue settled, even if it costs him two dozen delegates or whatever, because frankly, those delegates aren't going to make the difference, but as long as the issue is still hanging out there, unresolved,  it contributes to the general media storyline of this nomination battle being unsettled, which benefits Hillary. (Also, a possible re-vote victory in Michigan would have given Obama one of those much-ballyhooed "big states.")

Gardner still perfect in NIT Pool

By Brendan Loy

With 15 first-round NIT games finished and one still in progress -- Cal leads New Mexico 56-54 with 7:19 left -- Mark Gardner remains in sole possession of first place in the Irish Trojan NIT Pool with a 15-0 prediction record. Randy Styles, Sean Sullivan and Ginny Zak are in a three-way tie for second at 14-1.

Gardner picked Cal over New Mexico, as did Styles and Zak. But Sullivan picked the Lobos, and thus he would tie Gardner for first if they win. If the Bears win, Gardner will finish the first round with a perfect 16-0 record.

UPDATE: Cal won, so Garner is officially 16-for-16! Well done! Full standings here and after the jump.

Her father's daughter

By Brendan Loy

Heh. I just filled out Loyette's bracket using the modified coin flip method described earlier, and I kid you not -- I swear I didn't rig this -- she's got USC going to the Elite Eight and Notre Dame going to the Final Four. :) That's as far as they possibly could possibly gave gone, given her pre-determined national champion pick of Kansas.

Her other Final Four teams: Kansas, of course; Pitt; and BYU. Her only truly absurd first-round upset pick: UT-Arlington over Memphis. Yeah, that one came up tails three times in a row. Oops.

Now to do the cat and dog brackets...

UPDATE: Robbie predicts an all-Bulldog Final Four of Butler, Gonzaga, Mississippi State and Georgia, with Butler winning it all. Toby, Sasha and Butter, who are collaborating on a single "cat bracket" this year, have two sets of Tigers (Clemson and Memphis), a set of Cougars (Washington State) and a set of Wildcats (Arizona) in this Final Four, with Memphis cutting down the nets.

UPDATE 2: As for my bracket... here it is. I think I'm done messing with it now. :) It's relatively non-ridiculous, by my standards. I have one #12, one #13 and one #14 pulling first-round upsets; one double-digit seed in the Sweet Sixteen (#13 Oral Roberts); #6 USC and #7 Butler in the Elite Eight; and a Final Four featuring two #1s, a #2 and a #4. Hey -- I said relatively. :) It's still pretty wacky, I admit, but I've definitely done wackier.

Incidentally, in regard to those questions about Drake and Xavier, I ultimately answered them in the negative, simply because I don't know enough about those teams to take such huge leaps of faith in them. So I picked UConn to make a surprise run to the Final Four instead, beating both the Bulldogs and the Musketeers along the way. That'll get me back to my Connecticut roots, cheering whole-heartedly for the Huskies! (Now watch them lose to San Diego...)

I'm sticking with Fullerton, though. Oh, and I decided to pick Gonzaga over Davidson (and Georgetown). I know, I know. I can't help myself. GO ZAGS!!!

UPDATE, 11:15 AM SUNDAY: Let the record show that Robbie made a couple of last-minute changes to his picks this morning. He now predicts that the UConn Huskies will beat the Georgia Bulldogs in the West Regional Final, and he is also picking the Huskies to beat the Mississippi State Bulldogs in the Final Four before losing to the Butler Bulldogs in the title game. Apparently Robbie is upset with Georgia for trying to invade his home state, and he likes Connecticut because I'm from there. So the all-Bulldog Final Four is kaput.

In addition, he decided to pick the Georgetown Hoyas, whose mascot is a Bulldog, over the Gonzaga Bulldogs, who generally call themselves the "Zags," in the second round. Thus, he has substituted the Hoyas for the Zags/Bulldogs on his bracket all the way to the Final Four. So his new Final Four is Butler, Georgetown, Mississippi State and UConn.

Obama's bracket

By Brendan Loy

John McCain isn't the only presidential candidate filling out his bracket.

Meanwhile, TPM's David Kurtz makes an analogy between March Madness and Hillary Clinton's campaign:

[Hillary's] goal is to put superdelegates in the position that the NCAA tourney selection committee faces each March: Who deserves to be in the big dance more -- the team with the better overall record on a late season losing streak or the one who started the season slow and is finishing on a roll.

Is it too late to get Direct TV?

By Brendan Loy

The trouble with living in a state that has five NCAA Tournament teams is that you're locked into watching a lot of first-round games involving those teams, whether or not they're the most exciting game in progress. I mentioned this before with relation to Duke-Belmont pre-empting USC-Kansas State tomorrow night, but it's an even bigger issue on Friday, when all four time slots will occupied by games involving Tennessee teams, only one of which (Vanderbilt-Siena at 7:20, a 4-13 game) figures to be potentially competitive. The other games are: #2 Tennessee vs. #15 American at 12:15, #2 Texas vs. #15 Austin Peay at 2:50, and #1 Memphis vs. #16 Texas-Arlington at 9:40.

According to the local CBS affiliate, "At the network's discretion, all games BUT the Kentucky vs Marquette game [Thursday at 2:30] and the Tennessee vs American Game can be switched from/to during play to a better game of the network's choosing." (The Kentucky game gets higher "regional" priority than any of the non-UT teams from Tennessee? Weird.) So, once Texas and Memphis open up big leads, they'll take us out to other games at some point (like maybe Butler-South Alabama in the 2:50 slot). That's a relief. But I'm doomed -- unless I go to a sports bar, which is a chancy proposition when you've got a baby -- to have virtually zero chance of watching any of Gonzaga-Davidson, Miami-St. Mary's or Drake-Western Kentucky, all of which I really want to see, but all of which are scheduled opposite Tennessee-American. Arrrgh.

(I tried MMOD at home the other day. It works okay -- better than it did with our ridiculously slow connection in South Bend -- but I still don't think it'll be acceptably smooth for live, fast-moving basketball action. It's a wee bit jerky, to an extent that might not be bothersome in some contexts, but will, I think, be problematic for watching live sports.)

Pitt: Elite Eight team, or first-round flameout?

By Brendan Loy

As we enter the final hours of my annual ritual of bracket agonizing, I find myself fretting about the top right-hand corner of the bracket, the upper half of the South Region. I've got Pittsburgh penciled in as an Elite Eight team because -- with apologies to Jay -- I've felt ever since the Tennessee game that Memphis's inability to shoot free throws is going to knock them out of the tourney early, and Pitt seems like the logical team to do it.

Only one problem: I really don't feel comfortable picking Pitt to go that far. In fact, I'm not even convinced they'll make it out of the first round. Oral Roberts is good; indeed, after several years of unjustifiably low seedings, they're the classic "quality small-conference team with something to prove." They'll be ready to play. Pitt, meanwhile, is the Big East Tournament champion, which means they're a trendy pick that's probably overvalued. (Chatting with ESPN's Andy Glockner the other day, I said that the Big East tourney champ is "sometimes overvalued." He shot back, "I think you misspelled 'always.'" Heh.) More importantly, it's entirely possible they're overvalued in their own heads, in which case this could be a classic trap situation where ORU rises up and nips 'em.

The thing is, if I knock Pitt out in the first round, I have a #12 vs. #13 second-round game between Temple (which is going to beat Michigan State) and Oral Roberts, which in turn leaves me with nobody plausible to knock off Memphis before the regional final... unless I want to really double down on the South Region Chaos Theory, picking either Mississippi State or Oregon to knock off the Tigers in the second round, thus producing a Sweet Sixteen game between a #8 or #9 and a #12 or #13. Dare I predict that the bracket will blow up to such an extreme degree? Seems a little wacky, even for me.

I dunno. I think maybe I'll do the Oral Roberts/Temple thing, grudgingly advance Memphis to the Elite Eight without actually having to play anybody (cough cough, Bradley), and then have Texas knock 'em out in the regional final. (Argh, I can't believe I'm putting myself in the situation of having to root for Texas in order to preserve my bracket...)

Other things I'm fretting about: Gonzaga or Davidson? And can I really justify putting Drake into the Elite Eight? And can I really justify putting Xavier in the title game? And am I out of my mind with the Fullerton thing? And, Gonzaga or Davidson???

Whoa.

By Brendan Loy

That's a healthy-looking line of thunderstorms that's headed our way.

Tennessee's Governor angling for spot on Democrat ticket

By Jay Johnson

Well, I think that Governor Phil Bredesen is looking to slide into a VP slot with whichever candidate the Dems nominate. He's pushing a proposal for Democrat Superdelegates to convene in advance of the convention, in order to sort the whole mess out.

He's featured in an Op-Ed in today's New York Times.

Honestly, Gov. Phil is a pretty appealing candidate to add to a Democratic ticket. He comes across as much more moderate than I think either Hillary or Obama do. He's a yankee by birth, but the governor of a southern state.

The fandom that dare not speak its name

By Brendan Loy

While watching a SportsCenter commercial last night featuring the Tennessee Lady Vols' head basketball coach, I came to a horrifying realization:

I think I'm starting to like Pat Summitt.

This is simply not acceptable. Pat Summitt is the enemy! She is UConn's nemesis! She is the anti-Geno! She is the devil-woman! It is the solemn duty of every good Connecticutian to resist the Evil Pat and all Her Works! I'm allowed to grudgingly respect her, but under no circumstances am I supposed to like her! Must... resist...

"We are the Big Orange Army... you will be assimilated... resistance is futile..."

Nooooooooo!!!!

A question for sports fans

By Brendan Loy

On this NCAA Tournament Eve, here's a question I've been meaning to pose to my blog audience -- or, more specifically, to the sports fans within that audience. What's the most devastating loss you've ever suffered as a sports fan?

After the jump, my answer to this question. But I'm really curious about your answers.

It's all about Cal State Fullerton, baby

By Brendan Loy

College Hoops Journal tries the coin flip bracket. The result? Three of the four #1 seeds lose to #16 seeds, and the Final Four is Stanford, BYU, George Mason and Cal State Fullerton, with Mason winning the national championship.

Dane did a coin-flip bracket once, in 2004. I remember because he had me flip the coin for him, and enter his bracket accordingly. He finished 67th out of 76. That means he beat nine people! Well, okay, six people and three cats. :) And I'm pretty sure Craig Stern, in last place, was trying to get everything wrong. But the coin-flip bracket legitimately beat five human contestants who were trying to win -- including my wife. Sorry, Becky. But hey, she picked Hampton in 2001, so I really can't talk. (She'll hold that one over my head till the day I die, because it was the first pool she'd ever entered and, when I saw her bracket, I rather condescendingly informed her that it wasn't a good idea to pick #15 seeds. Heh.)

Anyway, speaking of Cal State Fullerton (and, more generally, of crazy upset picks that are utterly ridiculous on their face, but who knows?), I'm not predicting a Final Four run for the Titans, but I do have them penciled in over Wisconsin on my bracket. I have no logical basis for this whatsoever. (I don't think "it's Bea's alma mater, and I want to see the USC vs. Fullerton Long-Duque throwdown" counts as a logical basis.) Then again, I didn't have a logical basis the last time I picked a #14 to beat a #3, and that worked out okay. (And clearly, that's a good reason to hope for lightning to strike twice... is it any wonder I always lose my pools, usually spectacularly?)

P.S. The key to an effective coin-flip bracket, I think, is to stack the deck a little bit. Suppose heads is for the favorite and tails is for the underdog. For games involving a #16 or #15 seed, you should pick the favorite unless it comes up tails three straight times. For games involving a #14, #13 or #12 seed, you should pick the favorite unless it comes up trails twice in a row. For all other games, just do a straight coin flip. Under those modified rules, I bet you could get some intriguing, non-DOA brackets with the coin-flip method.

P.P.S. Hmm... maybe we can use the above-described, modified coin-flip method to make a bracket for Loyette! With one exception, though: she is definitely picking Kansas to win the national championship. She told me so. Well, to be more precise, I asked her on Selection Sunday who she thinks will win it all, in response to which she promptly gurgled something to the effect of: "Gaaa." Using my powers of babyspeak translation, I interpreted this as meaning "Kansas." So I asked her, "You think Kansas, huh?" She immediately smiled back, a super-cute, heart-melting smile. So clearly, Loyette is picking Kansas. But that only accounts for 6 of the 63 tournament games. Her other 57 picks could be determined by the modified coin-flip method...

Mark Gardner leads NIT Pool

By Brendan Loy

Mark Gardner has the lead in the 4th annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool with a perfect record through seven games, and will hold onto sole possession of first place unless Arizona State blows its 53-38 lead with 8:52 left against Alabama State in the night's final game. (Brandon Minich would tie Gardner for first if Alabama State wins.)

UPDATE: The Sun Devils won, so Gardner does indeed maintain his hold on first place. 22 contestants are tied for second. Complete standings here and after the jump.

NIT Pool standings online

By Brendan Loy

The NIT pool standings are up. 62 contestants entered the pool -- 58 of whom are currently tied for first place, through 2 games. (Alas, I'm one of the four tied for last place. Damn you, Stephen F. Austin!!!)

You can view each contestant's picks by clicking their name in the standings. Here's a summary of everyone's picks. The most common champion picks are the four #1-seeds: Ohio State (17), Arizona State (13), Virginia Tech (10) and Syracuse (6).

UPDATE: Now current through 4 5 games (of 8 tonight), standings here and after the jump.

Play-in game madness!!

By Brendan Loy

The NCAA Tournament is underway! Er, sort of.

Mount St. Mary's wins. Woo.

Arthur C. Clarke takes his final odyssey

By David K.

An aide to the famed science fiction writer has reported his passing.  Details to follow as they become available.  Sir Arthur C. Clarke was 90.

Clarke was a prolific science fiction writer and futurist, most famous as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was later turned into an epic film under director Stanley Kubrick.

UPDATE: A little bit more here.

Tonight: NIT, CBI, play-in game. Woo!!

By Brendan Loy

If you're looking for online resources to consult before filling out your men's NCAA Tournament bracket, MSNBC's "Beyond the Arc" blog has an incredibly thorough roundup.

Incidentally, don't forget, if you want to enter my NIT Pool, you have exactly one hour left to do so! That's because the first game of the NIT, #7-seed Stephen F. Austin at #2-seed UMass, tips off at 6:00 PM EDT, kicking off a full evening of scintillating hoops action that also includes the NCAA play-in game (7:30 PM on ESPN) and the first four games of the CBI. Don't pretend like you're not excited.

P.S. No promsies about exactly when I'll get everybody's NIT Pool picks online (and the initial standings, etc.), but I'll try to do it sometime tonight.

Fed cuts interest rates by 80 gajillion points

By Brendan Loy

Or something like that.

Well, hey, it's pretty sweet for my student loans.

P.S. If the economy gets bad enough, will the Fed make interest rates negative, such that Citibank will have to start paying me for the privilege of holding my debt? Because that'd be awesome. :)

Oooooklahoma, where the bombs are falling from the planes

By David K.

Last Thursday, Tulsa, Oklahoma joined Boise City, Oklahoma in a strange brotherhood. Both cities have now been bombed by American forces. A National Guard plane en route to a bombing practice run at a range in Kansas apparently lost one of its bombs, which crashed through an apartment complex in Tulsa. The bomb was a 22-pound dummy bomb, and no one was at home at the time it crashed into the bathroom of Tulsa residents Jeremy Isbell and his wife.

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

Obama advisor David Axelrod, on the Clinton campaign's ever-shifting rhetoric: "When they started off, it was all about delegates. Now that we have more delegates, it’s all about the popular vote. And if that does not work out, they will probably challenge us to a game of cribbage to choose the nominee.” Heh.

"A More Perfect Union"

By Brendan Loy

Here is the full text of Obama's speech on race.

P.S. Politico's Ben Smith says the speech "embraces complexity" and notes that it "insists on things that you don't get much of in politics: context and nuance." TPM's David Kurtz says the speech "is remarkable for its nuance, for its long view of history, and for its decency."

Kurtz adds, however: "I am not sure, on first take, how effective it is politically." Along the same lines, Politico's Jonathan Martin says the "insta-reviews" from media "elites" will inevitably be that the speech was a "great success," but "what actual voters think is a different story, of course."

UPDATE: Here's the video clip:

Captain Ed on "real" Irish music

By Brendan Loy

Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey (the guy who beat me for "Blogger of the Year" in 2005) and the Michelle Malkin-founded site Hot Air are usually good sources for right-wing political commentary -- not Irish music nerdery. And yet Irish music nerdery is exactly what I found there, to my great delight, thanks to my Google News Alert for "'barra macneils' | 'liam clancy' | 'tommy makem' | 'clancy brothers'." Here what Ed wrote on the topic, they day before St. Paddy's Day*:

“Danny Boy” is a beautiful, haunting song … the first thousand times you hear it. After that, it gets pretty tiresome, and even more so to those in the Old Country who tire of supplying renditions of it for American tourists. Irish music consists of much more than “the pipes, the pipes are calling” and “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen” — which owe more to America than Ireland. ...

The Irish tolerate Danny Boy and the other “Irish songs” of America, but only just. When my uncle visited Ireland almost 30 years ago, he asked one publican where he could hear authentic Irish music. The Irishman asked, “Oh, you mean like Danny Boy and I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen?” “Yes,” my uncle said. “Nearest place I know is Boston,” came the reply. ...

If you want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with some authentic Irish music, try listening to The Chieftains, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Lunasa, The Corrs, or even U2.

Hear, hear! (Morrissey later added the Pogues and The Dubliners to his list. I'd add the Wolfe Tones, the Irish Rovers and, for a rather different but still related style, Flogging Molly. And then you can branch out into Irish-inspired Atlantic Canadian bands like Great Big Sea, the Barra MacNeils, etc.)

I have to make a confession, though. For all my nodding in agreement with Captain Ed and making fun of the "sort of maudlin stuff that Bing Crosby sang," yesterday I totally cued up "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" on my iPod and, in unison with ol' Bing, sang it to my shamrock-clad baby girl, in honor of St. Paddy's Day. I feel so... dirty. :) But hey: she does have really beautiful Irish eyes. And when they're smiling, they'll steal your heart away!

Hey, sometimes it's okay to be maudlin. :)

(Relevant background for those who haven't read it: "Tommy Makem, 1932-2007 … and what he means to me." More here.)

*Or the day after St. Paddy's Day, depending on your perspective.

Obama's big speech on race

By Brendan Loy

Barack Obama will give a major speech Tuesday morning on "the larger issue of race in this campaign," with a nod to the recent controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which appears to have (unsurprisingly) hurt him in the polls. Says Politico:

In the past, Obama has made racial issues, and his own precedent-shattering status, a minor note in his message. But Obama said Monday he recognizes that there is no way he is going to become the Democratic nominee without a forthright statement about the role of race in American life.

“I think it would have been naive for me to think I could run and end up with quasi-front-runner status in a presidential election as potentially the first African-American president, that issues [of] race wouldn’t come up, any more than Sen. Clinton could expect that gender issues might not come up,” Obama told interviewer Gwen Ifill on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”

“I think we’ve got to talk about it,” he added. “I think we’ve got to process it. But we’ve got to remind ourselves that what we have in common is far more important than what’s different and that if we’re going to solve any of these problems, we’ve got to come together and bridge our differences in ways that we just have not bridged them before.”

I guess this is sort of like the racial equivalent of Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech. So... what will he say?

New option: pick by mascot!

By Brendan Loy

For those who might like to consider filling out their NCAA and NIT brackets based on the teams' mascots, I've created special entry forms containing mascots for the men's NCAA, women's NCAA and the NIT pools. :)

I typed in the mascot names manually, and in many cases from memory, so please let me know if you spot any mistakes!

And here I thought Bear Stearns was a scrappy mid-major team from the WAC

By Brendan Loy

I haven't blogged anything about this J.P. Morgan-Bear Stearns business, partly because of March Madness and partly because I don't really understand it very well. But even to a economics & finance ignoramus like myself, it seems like an obviously big deal. This paragraph from the linked WSJ article struck me as particularly ominous:

The sale of Bear Stearns and Sunday night's move by the Fed to offer loans to other securities dealers mark the latest historic turns in what has become the most pervasive financial crisis in a generation. The issue is no longer whether it will yield a recession -- that seems almost certain -- but whether the concerted efforts of Wall Street and Washington can head off a recession much deeper and more prolonged than the past two, relatively mild ones.

Yippee!! [/sarcasm]

Women's pool delayed online!

By Brendan Loy

The women's NCAA Tournament bracket is out. Due to technical issues, however, I will be unable to get the pool entry form online until sometime tomorrow (Tuesday), probably in the evening.

UPDATE: Nevermind. The women's pool is now online!

Meanwhile, don't forget that the deadline to enter my NIT Pool is 6:00 PM EDT tomorrow (Tuesday).

Can you beat John McCain's bracket?

By Brendan Loy

John McCain is running his own NCAA pool. You can "Win Great McCain 2008 Prizes!" Heh. (Hat tip: Eric Soskin.)

I'm guessing McCain will pick Arizona to upset West Virginia and Duke. Just a hunch.

SoCal VoCals win West Region title!

By Brendan Loy

For the first time ever, the USC SoCal VoCals are going to collegiate a capella's version of the Final Four: the ICCA International Finals in New York City!

Over the weekend, the VoCals won the ICCA semifinal -- basically the Western regional championship -- at Marin Center for the Performing Arts in San Rafael, California, beating out the University of Oregon Divisi, the UCLA ScatterTones (ha ha! take that, Mike Tran!), defending national champion BYU Noteworthy, BYU Vocal Point, the Cal-Berkeley Golden Overtones, Mt. San Antonio College Fermata Nowhere, and These Guys from Fullerton and Citrus colleges. (Full results here; scroll down to "ICCA West Region.")

The VoCals' previous best finish at the ICCA semis was second place in 2001, and they've finished third four times: in 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2006. Long-time readers might recall that I trailed the VoCals for a photojournalism project -- producing, among others, this photo -- during their 2002 third-place ICCA appearance, and later wrote about it in a Daily Trojan opinion article analogizing the competition to March Madness, with which it always roughly coincides.

Anyway, on April 19, this year's crop of SoCal VoCals will compete for the international championship of collegiate a capella (that's what ICCA stands for, natch) against the Northwestern University Purple Haze (Midwest Region champs), Oxford University Out of the Blue (Western Europe champs), and as-yet undetermined champions from the South, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Fight on, SoCal VoCals!! Beat those other schools!! Wooo!!

Arrrrrgh.

By Brendan Loy

The good news is, the Notre Dame-George Mason game will be the primary ~9:30 game on the Knoxville CBS affiliate Thursday night. Sweet!

The bad news is, contrary to what I guessed last night, USC-Kansas State won't be the primary ~7:00 game. I guess they think Belmont, a Nashville university with 4,700 students, has a large enough following in East Tennessee that it makes sense to prioritize #2 Duke vs. #15 Belmont over the super-frosh showdown of Mayo vs. Beasley. Ugh.

I just hope our Comcast connection can handle MMOD. (Speaking of which, if you want a "VIP pass," you'd better sign up now -- they're 86% full!)

Spring has sprung!

By Brendan Loy

Knoxville's Krutch Park in bloom. ... Meanwhile, I just got a text message from Kristin in South Bend -- where I'm guessing it's decidedly less springlike -- reporting that Notre Dame Law School has been evacuated due to a fire alarm. Hmm.

UPDATE: Our intrepid NDLS correspondent reports: "All ok, incident involved a microwave, a sandwich wrapped in tin foil, & a styrofoam plate." Heh.

Enter my pools!

By Brendan Loy

Just to reiterate, here are the links to enter my free, "moneyless" men's NCAA pool and women's NCAA pool.

The NIT pool deadline has passed. Standings are here. The men's NCAA pool deadline is 12:20pm EDT Thursday. The women's NCAA pool deadline is noon EDT Saturday.

This post will stay on top of the homepage until further notice; new posts will appear below.

Top o' the mornin'!

By Brendan Loy

As a follow-up to my dad's post, Loyette and I would like to wish you & yours a very happy St. Patrick's Day:

Awww. :) Cutest. Leprechaun. Ever.

The other other tournament

By Brendan Loy

The inaugural CBI bracket was released overnight. Please, try to contain your excitement. :)

With Washington in the CBI, Arizona State and Cal in the NIT, and of course, UCLA, Stanford, Wazzu, USC, Oregon and Arizona in the NCAA Tournament, fully nine-tenths of the Pac-10 will be playing in the postseason. (Somehow, 6-24 Oregon State, RPI #269, was snubbed. EAST COAST BIAS!! ;)

P.S. Seriously, how bad is Oregon State? According to the RPI, they played literally the worst non-conference schedule in all of D-1... and they went 6-5 against it. And that's not including their loss to Division II Alaska Fairbanks!!

And in brief tribute to that other madness of March...

By Joe Loy

...a very blessed Saint Patrick's Day to one and All ~ and a reasonably ;> Enjoyable one as well.

:}

Tournament schedule unveiled

By Brendan Loy

The NCAA Tournament first-round schedule for Thursday and Friday is out. And guess what? Just in case Georgia wasn't tired enough from their incredible three-wins-in-30-hours run through the SEC Tournament, their game with Xavier is the first game of the tourney, tipping at 12:20 PM EDT Thursday. LOL!  [CORRECTION: Er, that's the "first game" not counting the play-in game, of course.]

USC-Kansas State is at 7:10 PM Thursday. I imagine it will be the national game, given the Mayo-Beasley matchup, and I'm glad it's not opposite a Tennessee, Vanderbilt or Memphis game, in which case it probably would have been pre-empted here in Knoxville. I'm hoping Belmont won't get special TV coverage for their game against Duke beyond the Nashville market.

Notre Dame-George Mason is at 9:50 PM Thursday (or, more precisely, 30 minutes after the conclusion of the Wazzu-Winthrop game, which tips at 7:20). In terms of which contest will be the national game in that time slot, I think it'll be between ND-GMU and Arizona-West Virginia, but I'd put my money on the latter.

Annoyingly, three of the first-round matchups I'm most interested in watching are all in Friday's first block of games, and all opposite Tennessee-American, which will of course get wall-to-wall coverage here. I'll be at home, as I have Good Friday off, but I'll have to rely on MMOD to watch any of Gonzaga-Davidson, Drake-Western Kentucky or Miami-Saint Mary's. Harumph.

NCAA, NIT pools now online

By Brendan Loy

The 13th annual Living Room Times men's NCAA pool, presented by the UCLA Bruins, is now online and ready to accept your brackets! The deadline is Thursday at 12:20 PM EDT.

Also, the 4th annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool is online as well. Its deadline is Tuesday at 6:00 PM EDT.

Complete pool rules are here. As always with my basketball pools, I ask that contestants please use their real names, first and last. Anonymous, pseudonymous, first-name-only, and first-name-last-initial entries are NOT allowed. If this rule presents a problem for you, please e-mail me and we can hopefully work out some sort of compromise.

If you enter and then later decide to change your picks, simply re-enter from scratch. The last entry received before the deadline will be treated as your final entry.

The women's NCAA pool will begin Monday night.

P.S. One minor technical thing that's different from previous years: after you submit your picks, you'll be presented with a confirmation page displaying your bracket. At the top of this page, it will say, "To send these picks to your OfficePool Manager, select the button below," followed by a "Send Emails" button. Clicking this button is not required; your entry is already entered into the pool database by the time you see the screen I'm describing. However, although not required, clicking the "Send Emails" button is highly recommended, because otherwise you will not receive an e-mailed copy of your picks.

P.P.S. Earlier, I was planning to have a pool for the new CBI as well. However, I've changed my mind. It turns out they reseed their Final Four, which makes it way too difficult to have a pool, especially considering that no one cares about the CBI anyway. :)

David vs. David, Goliath vs. Goliath

By Brendan Loy

Ugh. The NCAA selection committee has once again bracketed the tournament in such a way as to prevent many potentially compelling matchups where mid-major and low-major teams would be able to test their mettle against big-conference teams.

Among the 8-9 games, two are Goliath vs. Goliath (Indiana-Arkansas, Mississippi State-Oregon) and one is David vs. David (UNLV-Kent State). Only one is sort of a David vs. Goliath (BYU vs. Texas A&M). Would it have killed them to flip a couple of those teams, producing, say, UNLV-Arkansas and Indiana-Kent State?

Among the 7-10 games, it's a similar story, as we get two David vs. Davids (Butler vs. South Alabama and Gonzaga vs. Davidson) and one Goliath vs. Goliath (West Virginia vs. Arizona), and only one David vs. Goliath, Miami vs. St. Mary's -- which isn't really that interesting anyway, as Miami is hardly a traditional basketball powerhouse. Again, would it have killed them to pit, say, Butler vs. Arizona and West Virginia vs. South Alabama?

I won't complain about the 6-11 games, since there really wasn't anything to work with there; all of those teams are from power conferences, except St. Joe's. But what about the 5-12 games? Again, we get Clemson vs. Villanova in one bracket, while Drake faces Western Kentucky in another. Why not flip them, so it's Clemson vs. Western Kentucky and Drake vs. Villanova? Much more compelling.

I realize the committee supposedly doesn't look at matchups, but this is the second consecutive year they've done this, and it really detracts from the drama of the tournament's opening weekend. Nobody tunes into the first round to watch David vs. David and Goliath vs. Goliath. We all want to see how the "little guys" stack up against the "big guys." Instead, the committee has created a situation where the mid-majors are inevitably going to cannibalize each other.

CBS's Seth Davis said during the Selection Show that "some of these non-power-conference teams need to step up and win some games." But this bracket denies them a ton of potential opportunities to do just that, against major-conference opponents at least. Is anyone in the mainstream sports media going to give proper credit to Western Kentucky if they upset Drake, or South Alabama if they upset Butler, or Davidson if they upset Gonzaga? Of course not. And that's a damn shame.

This unfortunate bracketing really takes away from one of the very best things about the NCAA Tournament. I don't know if the committee is doing this on purpose, or just by accident, but like I said, it has now happened two years in a row. They need to make an effort to prevent this from happening so commonly in future years if they want the tournament's early rounds to remain the most compelling four days in sports.

NCAA Pool coming shortly

By Brendan Loy

I'll get my pool entry form online as soon as possible. It may take a little longer than in past years because of Loyette. :) Stay tuned.

P.S. That would be the 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool, presented by the UCLA Bruins. In case anyone was confused...

Selection Show! Wooo!

By Brendan Loy

No surprises in the #1 seeds. North Carolina is #1 overall, and the top seed in the East Region; Memphis is tops in the South; UCLA in the West; and Kansas in Midwest. Tennessee probably got knocked out of the spot now occupied by the Jayhawks when they lost to Arkansas yesterday.

Selections coming up!

UPDATE: #5 Notre Dame vs. #12 George Mason!

And a possible second-round rematch with #13 Winthrop!

UPDATE, 6:11 PM: How does Tennessee get stuck with North Carolina?? That's not fair. The Vols cannot have been the #8 overall seed. Lame.

UPDATE, 6:15 PM: South Alabama gets in! And as a #10 seed, matched up with Butler in Birmingham, Alabama. So it's another mid-major vs. mid-major matchup (ugh). I'm not too upset about Butler's #7 seed, though. They're overrated in the polls. But the matchup is annoying. Hopefully that's our only "David vs. David" matchup.

The other bubble team in so far is St. Joe's, as an #11 seed. One region down, three to go...

UPDATE, 6:25 PM: ARRRGGH!!!! More stupid mid-major vs. mid-major matchups!! #8 UNLV vs. #9 Kent State and #7 Gonzaga vs. #10 Davidson!

If Gonzaga can reach the second round, a possible Battle of the Jesuits looms against Georgetown... and if they can reach the Sweet Sixteen, they could face USC, the ultimate Brendan Loy dilemma. But I doubt that will happen; I will probably be picking Davidson. More likely, the Sweet Sixteen could pit USC vs. my dad's alma mater, #2 Georgetown. But only if the #6 Trojans can get past #11 Kansas State (Mayo vs. Beasley!) and then probably #3 Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, Villanova gets in. Joe Lunardi is perfect on the bubble teams so far. The Wildcats were his "last team in."

It's now pretty much impossible for Arizona, Arizona State and Oregon to all make it, unless somebody from the "very likely in" list doesn't make it.

Two regions down, two to go.

UPDATE, 6:29 PM: A decent David vs. Goliath matchup, sort of, in #7 Miami vs. #10 St. Mary's.

Note also the Battle of the Brainiacs, #3 Stanford vs. #14 Cornell.

Oregon is a #9 seed. That suggests so much respect fpr the Pac-10 that you'd almost think Arizona and Arizona State will both get in. But that would require either Baylor or Texas A&M to not make it.

Glad to see Oral Roberts finally get a decent seed (#13).

UPDATE, 6:31 PM: With one region to go, here's where things stand on the bubble: four teams from the "true bubble" category have made it already, leaving only one spot left, unless one of the two remaining "very likely in" teams -- Baylor or A&M -- is left out.

Among the bubble teams still waiting to hear their names called: Arizona, Arizona State, Illinois State, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, VCU. Again, only one of those teams can make it, unless Baylor and/or A&M doesn't.

Lunardi is still perfect. He has Arizona as the only unannounced team getting in.

UPDATE, 6:35 PM: Joe Lunardi PERFECT for (I believe) the first time ever!

Very interesting that Oregon gets a #9 and Arizona gets a #10, but ASU gets left out. Clearly the committee penalized them for the terrible non-conference strength of schedule.

"Some of these non-power conference teams need to step up and win some games," says Seth Davis. Well, it's a bit hard for them to prove anything when they're all matched up against each other... sigh...

UPDATE, 6:51 PM: Is Billy Packer a d**k or what? He keeps talking about how the Big East gets 8 teams in, versus the ACC's 4, without mentioning that the Big East has 16 teams to the ACC's 12.

Final Scoresheet Update

By Brendan Loy

I've updated the Official BrendanLoy.com Bubble Scoresheet to reflect the Georgia win and the Illinois loss. Here's the PDF version, and here's the Word version.

Selection Show liveblogging coming up!

UNBELIEVABLE!!!

By Brendan Loy

Georgia wins 3 games in 30 hours and earns an NCAA bid!! Absolutely incredible!! The most amazing story in the entire history of Championship Week, IMHO. And somebody's bubble just burst. Illinois lost, though. T minus 18 minutes till the selection show!

Selection committee puts political correctness ahead of basketball, again

By Brendan Loy

Whatever happens with the bubble teams, the NCAA Tournament selection committee has already made its most outrageous, indefensible, egregiously absurd decision of the year. According to ESPN's Andy Katz, Tuesday's play-in game will feature MEAC champion Coppin State against NEC champion Mount St. Mary's -- not SWAC champion Mississippi Valley State, which is, by any objective measure, one of the two worst teams in the NCAA Tournament.

There is no basketball-related explanation for this decision. None. The only reason they've done it is because of their reluctance to pit two historically black universities, the MEAC and SWAC champions, against one another. This kowtowing to political correctness, despite the MEAC and SWAC consistently producing the two worst teams in the field, has been a recurring theme since the play-in game was created in 2001. But never has the situation been so blatant as this year.

Mississippi Valley State is 15-15 against Division I competition, #229 in the RPI, and #318 (out of 341!) in the Pomeroy ratings. Mount St. Mary's is 18-14, #159, and #169, respectively. Mississippi Valley State won the worst conference in America, according to the conference RPI ratings. Mount St. Mary's won the ninth-worst conference.

Coppin State and Mississippi Valley State aren't just the two worst teams by far in this year's tournament, they're two of the worst teams ever to qualify for the NCAA Tournament. There is no possible justification, under the selection committee's own criteria, for putting any other two teams in the play-in game. Yet the committee has done exactly that -- because they care more about Jesse Jackson's approval, apparently, than about following their own rules and procedures and creating an intellectually honest bracket.

Jim Nantz and Billy Packer will probably focus their annual inquisition of the committee chairman on the alleged "snubs" of various mediocre major-conference teams. If so, they'll be missing the boat completely on the day's real scandal. They need to ask the chairman about this decision, because it is totally ridiculous, and it's about time someone held their feet to the fire for this egregious nonsense.

Baby's first Selection Sunday!

By Brendan Loy

Heh:

Actually, that photo was taken on Thursday during the Pac-10 tournament. But I have a feeling it will be a common scene both tonight and throughout the next few weeks. :)

(Just before the picture was taken, Loyette was actually staring straight at the TV screen for several minutes. It was really cute.)

Oh, and yes, we realize our entertainment center isn't remotely baby-proofed. But we should have a little while yet before she starts crawling around and that becomes an issue...

Cinderella's chance

By Brendan Loy

SEC East last-place team Georgia, trying to win its third game in 30 hours to win an automatic bid to the Big Dance, leads 28-9 (!) over Arkansas, the SEC West's second-place team, with 9:15 left in the first half. This is an ideal scenario for the Bulldogs; if they can build up a huge early lead, they might be able to hang on even if exhaustion takes hold in the second half.

Meanwhile, in the Big Ten title game, first-place Wisconsin has a 20-18 lead over 10th-place Illinois.

Also underway: the Big 12 title game between Kansas and Texas, which may be a play-in game for a #1 seed. Texas leads 46-45 at halftime.

Updated Bubble Scoresheet

By Brendan Loy

I've updated the Official BrendanLoy.com Bubble Scoresheet to mirror Joe Lunardi's final(?) "Bracket Math" column. Lunardi thinks there are only 12 "true bubble" teams, not 15 as in my earlier scoresheet, and I think he's probably right, so I've moved Kentucky into the "very likely in" column, and Dayton & Ole Miss into the "very likely out" column. I could see either the Flyers or Rebels getting in, or the Wildcats being left out, but it would certainly be a surprise.

The new version of the Scoresheet also displays Lunardi's S-curve rankings, from +6 to +1 (last six in) and from -1 to -6 (last six out). Here's the PDF version, and here's the Word version.

Joe Lunardi's S-curve

By Brendan Loy

His last six in, from safest to least safe: South Alabama, Saint Joseph's, Oregon, Arizona, Villanova, Virginia Tech.

His last six out, from closest to furthest from the cut line: Illinois State, Arizona State, Ohio State, New Mexico, VCU, UMass.

P.S. The experts are getting all keyed up to be outraged about Arizona State's possible exclusion. I'd love to see the Sun Devils make it, but I'd also love to see some intellectual honesty from those who object strenuously to their exclusion, if indeed they're excluded.

For example, it's fine to emphasize ASU's big wins (Xavier by 22 at home, Stanford in OT at home, USC by 14 at home), but you can't just ignore their bad losses (Illinois, Nebraska, Cal at home), nor their utterly horrible non-conference schedule (ranked #298, or 46th-worst in Division I), nor their 2-7 record against the Pac-10's top four teams. You need to make a case that takes into account all of the pertinent facts, not just the ones that are helpful to your argument.

Similarly, it's fine to point out ASU's head-to-head sweep of Arizona, but you shouldn't "double-count" those wins by saying, "They beat Arizona head-to-head and they finished ahead of them in the Pac-10 standings," as if those are two independently significant accomplishments. They're not; they're just two ways of saying the same thing. ASU finished one game ahead of Arizona in the Pac-10 standings because they beat 'em head-to-head. Outside of the head-to-head games, the Sun Devils were 7-9 in their other conference games, while the Wildcats were 8-8.

P.P.S. And as for Virginia Tech, I wonder if the experts who think they should definitely be included in the field of 65 -- or the head coach who believes that those who disagree with his fuzzy math are "certifiably insane" -- all because the Hokies almost beat #1 North Carolina yesterday, would have extended the same courtesy to Davidson (which almost beat North Carolina, Duke, UCLA and N.C. State) if the Wildcats hadn't won their automatic bid? For that matter, I wonder if they'll use the same logic vis a vis South Alabama (which almost beat Vanderbilt and Ole Miss)? Heck, if almost winning games is such a key factor for NCAA considering, Notre Dame should have been a freakin' #1 seed back in 2005-06...

I will see your Georgia, and I will raise you a Coppin State

By Brendan Loy

I e-mailed ESPN's Andy Glockner last night, asking him whether he agrees with me that a Georgia victory in today's SEC championship game would, in light of the bizarre circumstances that have caused the last-place Bulldogs to need three wins in 30 hours to reach the NCAA Tournament, be "the single most incredible story in the entire history of Championship Week."

He replied, "No, I think that's Coppin State, which won the MEAC tonight by winning four games in four days by a total of six points. They beat the top three seeds in the tournament on successive nights and closed by winning 12 of their last 13 games after starting the season 2-19 in D-I games. Unreal."

I still think Georgia is the better story, but there's no doubt Coppin State is an incredible one, too. Even with their torrid 8-out-of-9 finish to the regular season, the Eagles were the seventh-place team in the second-worst conference in America. They enter the NCAA Tournament with a 16-20 record (14-20 against D-I opponents) -- making them the first 20-loss team ever to go dancing -- and an RPI ranking of #217.

It'll be interesting to see whether the committee does the right thing and matches up Coppin State against Mississippi Valley State, the champion of the worst conference (the SWAC), in the play-in game. The selection committee has been reluctant to pit the SWAC champ against the MEAC champ in the play-in game, because those are the "historically black college" conferences, and it's seen as politically incorrect to put both of their champions in the play-in game, even though those conferences pretty consistently produce the two worst teams in the field. (Last year, the committee did Niagara a massive injustice by putting the MAAC champ Purple Eagles, RPI #136, who should have been a #14 or #15 seed, into the play-in game in place of the SWAC champ Jackson State, RPI #168.)

This season, though, I don't see how you can deny, with a straight face, that MEAC champ Coppin State (14-20 against D-I, RPI #227) and Mississippi Valley State (15-15 against D-I, RPI #229 are by far the two worst teams in the field. RPI-wise, the next-closest contender is #159 Mount St. Mary's, surprise champion of the NEC, which has an 18-14 record. That's 68 spots behind Coppin State -- equivalent to the difference between North Carolina and IUPUI. If there's ever going to be a year when the committee puts basketball ahead of politics, and puts the two worst teams in the play-in game regardless of what Jesse Jackson might think about it, this is that year.

Bubble Scoresheet

By Brendan Loy

It's Selection Sunday!!! Whee!!!!

With no bubble teams in action today, the bubble pecking order is now pretty well fixed, so I've gone ahead and created the Official BrendanLoy.com Bubble Scoresheet (Word format, PDF format).

Big win for Obama in Iowa (again!)

By Brendan Loy

Remember my posts about the forgotten election calendar, and how the multi-stage nature of the caucus process could result in changes to the delegate count?

Well, Iowa held its county conventions on Saturday, and it looks like Obama made a net gain of 10 delegates over Clinton (mostly at Edwards's expense), as compared with the originally estimated results from the precinct caucuses in January. To put it in perspective, that's a bigger gain than Clinton's 9-delegate edge in Ohio!

Of course, these new results are still estimates, since the county conventions only elected state and congressional-district delegates, not national delegates. Nevertheless, a good day for Obama.

OMG!

By Brendan Loy

Georgia, the last-place team in the SEC East, which won four conference games all year, is 45.5 seconds away from winning its second game today (over a team playing its first game today) and advancing to the SEC championship game! Unbelievable!

UPDATE: GEORGIA WINS!! Woo!! Incredible!! Two upset wins in 11 hours!!

(Specifically, according to ESPN, Georgia/Kentucky tipped off at 12:11 PM; the game ended at 2:30; Georgia/Mississippi State tipped off at 8:45; the game ended at 10:42.)

P.S. Did I mention the first game went to overtime? So they had to play eighty-five minutes of basketball today? All against superior basketball teams? And their best player fouled out of both games? And they won? Amazing!

P.P.S. As I said earlier, if the Bulldogs win tomorrow, this could be the most incredible story in the entire history of Championship Week.

P.P.P.S. The Big Ten and SEC title games are both scheduled to begin at 3:30 PM tomorrow. Both feature teams with no at-large hopes (Illinois, Georgia) playing for an automatic bid. Something I've always wondered: what happens if one of those games goes to overtime, perhaps multiple overtimes, and continues past 6:00 PM, when the Selection Show is supposed to start??

Temple wins A-10

By Brendan Loy

Temple is the Atlantic 10 champion. Will the team they beat, St. Joe's, also get a bid? What about UMass? Dayton? We'll find out tomorrow.

Also, UCLA is the Pac-10 champ. And Arkansas upset Tennessee, on a last-second shot, to earn a spot in tomorrow's title game.

Georgia: team of destiny?

By Brendan Loy

I know it's unlikely, but if SEC East last-place team Georgia -- which beat Kentucky in overtime in this afternoon's tornado-delayed quarterfinal on a game-winning shot by unlikely hero Zac Swansey -- plays its way into the NCAA Tournament with three wins in 30 hours, it will be one of the greatest stories in the entire history of Championship Week, no?

Incidentally, if Georgia wins the Battle of the Bulldogs tonight against Mississippi State (on five hours' rest or whatever it is), the selection committee will have two bubble contingencies to plan for: the aforementioned Big Ten headache, and another headache in the SEC. That's because the SEC title game has been moved from 1:00 to 3:30 PM, in order to give the competitors from tonight's weather-delayed semifinals a little more rest.

But what would Georgia's seed be? They're #141 in the RPI, which puts them below a bunch of teams that Joe Lunardi has estimated as #14, #15 and #16 seeds!

UPDATE: The Bulldogs (15-16 overall, 4-12 SEC) aren't the only sub-.500 major-conference team still alive for a bid. Illinois (16-18 overall, 5-13 Big Ten, RPI #112) just advanced to the Big Ten final. I love it!

Georgia Dome tornado footage

By Brendan Loy

Here's the live TV broadcast from last night's Alabama-Mississippi State game as a possible tornado struck the Georgia Dome:

It just goes to show that the SEC is a war. ;)

Close-up view of the moment the storm hit here. And here's a video taken by a fan in the stands.

Big Ten upsets create bubble headache

By Brendan Loy

The Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals yesterday saw a couple of big upsets: #10-seed Illinois over #2 Purdue, and #6-seed Minnesota over #3 Indiana on a miracle Christian Laettner-esque buzzer-beater:

These upsets mean that today's second semifinal will feature two teams with no shot whatsoever at an NCAA at-large berth: the 20-12, RPI #101 Gophers and the 15-18, RPI #125 Illini. (NIT-ology currently projects Minnesota as a #7-seed in the NIT, and Illinois as not being invited to either the NIT or the CBI.)

The winner of the 4:05 PM semifinal will advance to tomorrow's 3:30 PM title game against either #1 Wisconsin or #4 Michigan State, both of whom are safely in the field of 65. So it's guaranteed that the championship game will be between an at-large lock and at an-large non-contender.

This means the NCAA selection committee will have to create an either/or bracket, dependent on the outcome of the Big Ten title game, which won't be decided until mere minutes before the Selection Show. The "last team in," whoever it is, will instantly become the "last team out" if today's Illinois/Minnesota winner steals a berth tomorrow afternoon.

If that happens, it'll be interesting to see how the Big Ten's surprise winner gets seeded. By rights, based on their RPIs, the Gophers or Illini should be around a #13 or #14 seed (maybe even a #15, if it's Illinois). But in the interest of simplifying the bracketing process, given the timing issues, the committee might simply give them whatever seed the would be "last team in" was going to get, which would-be an #11 or #12.

It'll also be interesting to see whether Ohio State is the bubble team that gets left out if Illinois or Minnesota earns the auto bid. The committee always says it doesn't add up the number of teams per conference, but it's still hard to believe the Big Ten would get six teams (possibly the same as -- or more than?!? -- the Pac-10) -- and with Ohio State squarely on the bubble anyway, it would be awfully convenient for the committee to designate the Buckeyes as the team whose fate is dependent on whether the Illini/Gophers win tomorrow. Regardless, I daresay tOSU fans will be rooting awfully hard for either Wisconsin or Michigan State tomorrow, just in case.

The only other possible major-conference party-crasher still standing is Georgia (14-16, RPI #137), the last-place team in the SEC East, which is still alive in the SEC Tournament. But thanks to the severe weather problems in Atlanta, the Bulldogs would need to win three games in about 27 hours to earn the auto bid.

Possible tornado hits Atlanta, damages Georgia Dome, halts SEC tourney

By Brendan Loy

Yikes: "The Mississippi State/Alabama overtime was already exciting, but it got even more exciting when what was either a hailstorm or a tornado -- referred to here as a 'hailnado' for convenience -- ripped past the Georgia Dome sometime around 9:45 p.m., halting play on the court and scaring the living daylights out of the SEC crowd." In addition to ripping a hole in the Georgia Dome roof and causing a ton of other damage in and near the arena, the storm also damaged CNN Center and caused all sorts of other havoc in downtown Atlanta. (Hat tip: NDLauren.)

They managed to finish the Mississippi State-Alabama game (the Bulldogs won), but the night's final SEC quarterfinal, between Kentucky and Georgia, was postponed till tomorrow morning. The winner will then have to play again tomorrow night, in the semis against Mississippi State. The SEC has no choice in this, really; its title game is on Selection Sunday afternoon, so it's not like they can delay the semifinals by a day.

Coming soon...

By Brendan Loy

The 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool, presented by the UCLA Bruins.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Showtime at Staples

By Brendan Loy

They're underway in L.A.

FIGHT ON, TROJANS!!!!! BEAT THE BRUINS!!!!! WIN ME THE BET!!!!!

(I think I'm going to use that bear for every anti-UCLA post from now on. Hahaha.)

UPDATE: USC leads at halftime, 34-29. I'm not too happy, though. Frankly, the margin should be bigger. The Trojans' defense was great, and the Bruins' shooting was cold until the last couple of minutes, yet USC's offense wasn't clicking on all cylinders. From the 16-minute mark to the 9-minute mark of the half, UCLA only scored 4 points (increasing their total from 7 to 11), which would have presented a great opportunity for USC to build a big lead, but they only managed to get up 17-11 during that stretch. I feel like the Bruins have a good run in them sometime in the second half, and I'd like to see the Trojans build up enough of a lead beforehand that they can withstand it.

Also of concern: Hackett and Jefferson each have 2 fouls. Hopefully neither of them picks up a quick third in the second half. You don't want to put your fate in the hands of Pac-10 refs!!

Meanwhile, UCLA's Luc Richard Mbah a Moute went down with an ugly-looking injury. Hopefully he's OK and will at least be back for the NCAA Tournament.

UPDATE 2: Aaaaand, while I was in the other room helping Becky with the baby, UCLA opens the second half on a 17-4 run. They're up 46-38 with 14:43 minutes left. Yikes. Oh, and Hackett just got his third foul. And Gibson has 3, too. Crap, crap, crap.

UPDATE 3: Trojans within 5 points with 3:43 to go. Gibson and Jefferson both have 4 fouls. I'm so nervous. I feel like I have such a huge personal stake in the outcome of this game... stupid bets with Mike Tran...

I just really, really hope the Pac-10 refs don't decide this one.

UPDATE 4: UCLA by 3, USC ball, 39 seconds left. My heart is pounding. I swear I'd be less nervous if I had a couple hundred dollars on this game, rather than having my pool's honor riding on it.

UPDATE 5: DAMMIT.

DAMMIT.

DAMMIT.

That was a weird strategy at the end there...

Ugh.

Dammit.

Finally!

By Brendan Loy

A bubble team that actually wants to go dancing!

American wins Patriot League

By Brendan Loy

For the first time ever, American University is going dancing.

Bubble update

By Brendan Loy

Florida State: done.

Virginia Tech: still alive.

Ohio State: still on the bubble.

(If not for yesterday's carnage, I'd say Ohio State is "done," but since nobody within spitting distance of the "cut line" can win a damn game, some conference-tournament flame-outs are going to have to get bids -- they've still gotta invite 65 teams -- so you can't count the Buckeyes out yet. Florida State, though, was way down near the bottom of the pecking order anyway, so they're done for. Virginia Tech, meanwhile, was also pretty far down the S-curve, so this win doesn't get them in, necessarily. A win over North Carolina tomorrow, though, probably does, since it would make them the one and only major-conference bubble team to achieve anything worth a damn during Championship Week.)

Now, all bubble-watching eyes turn to the Atlantic 10. If Xavier and Charlotte win, could that conference be, as Andy Glockner suggests, a one-bid league?! I don't know, but personally, I'll be rooting for St. Joe's and Temple. It would be nice to see someone actually earn their way into this tournament.

P.S. Apparently it is now Irish Trojan policy that all posts' titles shall begin with the word "Bubble." ;)

Me on Sirius radio in 10 minutes

By Brendan Loy

I totally forgot to plug this earlier, but if anyone has Sirius satellite radio, and happens to see this post in the next half-hour, tune to Channel 110, Indie Talk -- I'm scheduled to be on their "Blog Bunker" program from 5:00 to 5:20 PM EDT.

I have absolutely no idea what the topic(s) will be, so if I seem stumped or surprised, now you know why. :)

Bubble Scoresheet preview

By Brendan Loy

Sometime on Sunday afternoon, I'll publish this year's version of the Official BrendanLoy.com Bubble Scoresheet, which provides an easy tool for bubble-watchers to use while watching the Selection Show, to make sense of things as the regions are announced. I figured I'd briefly plug it now, to encourage y'all to come back Sunday afternoon. :)

By specifically keeping track of how many "probably in," "bubble" and "probably out" teams have been selected thus far, I find that it's much easier to figure out what the stakes are, and what the as-yet unselected teams' chances are, as the show proceeds.

For example, two years ago, during a commercial break 3/4 of the way through the Selection Show, I was able to write definitively that "either Northern Iowa or Cincinnati is NOT dancing. The bubble is tapped out." Thus, when Northern Iowa's name appeared in the final region, I knew that Cincy was doomed. And last year, again 3/4 of the way into the show, I noted that "unless either Syracuse or Xavier [both of whom I had listed in the 'probably in' column] is left out ... the rest of the bubble teams aren’t going to the tournament." As a result, when CBS announced the inclusion of Xavier and then of bubble-team Stanford, I knew immediately that Syracuse had been, stunningly, snubbed.

Bubble carnage!

By Brendan Loy

Yesterday morning, Joe Lunardi said there were 25 teams on or near the bubble, competing for 11 spots. Of those 25 teams, 18 were in action yesterday -- and they went a whopping 6-12! (And that's not even including Baylor!)

But it gets worse. The ten teams closest to the "cut line" -- the "last five in" and "last five out" -- went an incredible 0-7, with only Ohio State, Illinois State and VCU managing not to lose (because they were idle; in the Redbirds' and Rams' cases, their seasons are already over).

Here's a graphical representation of yesterday's carnage, using Lunardi's Thursday-morning pecking order as a starting point. The teams are listed in S-curve order, from best to worst, as of yesterday morning. Green means they won yesterday, red means they lost, italics means their season was done before the day started. Here goes:

• IN: Miami, Texas A&M, Arizona, UNLV, Arkansas, South Alabama, Oregon, Massachusetts, Illinois State, New Mexico, Arizona State

• OUT: Ohio State, Florida, VCU, UAB, Dayton, Saint Joseph's, Villanova, Mississippi, Syracuse, Maryland, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Temple, Houston

So, where does this leave us?

Geraldine Ferraro is right... sort of

By Brendan Loy

The big kerfuffle in the Democratic presidential race this week -- albeit largely overshadowed by the trials and tribulations of New Year's "pay for luv gov" -- has been the controversy over Geraldine Ferraro's comments suggesting that Barack Obama wouldn't be where he is now if he weren't a black man.

[Caveat: I've only followed this story cursorily, as I've been much more interested in basketball the last few days. As such, take my opinion with a grain of salt. For instance, I haven't actually watched any of the interviews with Ferraro, so if the details of her initial or subsequent comments are more (or less) outrageous than what's reflected in the bare-bones news and blog reports I've read, I may not be aware of that. The point of this post is more to react to the general concept of someone saying that Obama's race helps him, rather than to pass judgment on Geraldine Ferraro specifically.]

From what I know of it, I regard this controversy as much ado about not much. Ferraro's comments were unnecessary and inappropriate, in the sense that they serve no possible purpose except to inflame racial tensions and further divide the party. And yet, they're also not "racist," any more than it'd be "sexist" to say that Hillary Clinton wouldn't be where she is now if she were a man, or if she weren't Bill Clinton's wife. (Or, for that matter, to say -- as Ferraro herself did -- that Ferraro wouldn't have been the 1984 vice-presidential nominee if she were a man.)

Does anyone want to go dancing?

By Brendan Loy

This is unbelievable. Fans of South Alabama, Illinois State and VCU ought to be jumping for joy, because today has been an absolute disaster for the bubble teams still in action. Almost nobody is playing their way in, and a lot of teams are playing their way out. If there is ever going to be a year when four low- or mid-majors (i.e., the three above-mentioned teams plus St. Mary's) can all reach the Big Dance despite disappointing conference tournament finishes, this is that year.

The list of bubble teams that have lost today now includes Oregon, UMass and -- in humiliating fashion -- Florida, in addition to the ones I've mentioned previously: Dayton, Villanova, UAB, Houston, and Arizona State... plus Baylor, which wasn't even a bubble team this morning, according to Joe Lunardi, but may be one now. (On the other hand, maybe not; who's going to take their place?)

The only bubble teams that have won today are Miami (which was at the very top of the bubble, per Lunardi, and presumably can now be considered a lock), Florida State and Temple (both of whom were at the very bottom of the bubble, but may have a realistic shot in this crazy environment), UNLV (barely!) and St. Joseph's.

Bubble teams with unfinished games tonight: Texas A&M (winning), Arizona (hasn't tipped off yet), New Mexico (hasn't tipped off yet), Mississippi (losing) and Maryland (losing).

Bubble teams who start their conference tournaments tomorrow: Arkansas, Ohio State, Virginia Tech.

What a crazy day of basketball this has been.

UPDATE: Of the five "unfinished" teams mentioned above, only Texas A&M won. Arizona, New Mexico, Mississippi and Maryland all lost! Unreal!

This reminds me a bit of a really compressed version of the last few weeks of college football season, when all one BCS contender after another kept losing, thus opening the door for teams who thought they'd been definitively eliminated from the championship picture. Remember when Illinois "crushed" Ohio State's title hopes, and when Arkansas "knocked out" LSU from any possibility of reaching the title game? Well, yesterday's bubble "eliminations" are similarly suspect, thanks to all the other losses. Arizona State, Villanova, UMass, etc. -- you may yet get in. After all, somebody's gotta! They aren't going to shrink the tournament to 60 teams just because no one seems to want the final few spots.

Goooo Irish!

By Brendan Loy

Beeeeat Eagles!

Winner gets Pitt tomorrow at 9:30.

UPDATE: Marquette wins, 89-79.

Oh, it's on.

By Brendan Loy

USC 59, ASU 55. UCLA 88, Cal 66.

You know what this means: my season-series bet with Mike Tran will be decided in a dramatic Pac-10 semifinal rubber match, an intra-city battle royale at the Staples Center tomorrow night at 9:00 PM EDT.

As specified by the terms of the bet, if UCLA wins, I have to change the name of my men's basketball pool to "The 13th annual Living Room Times men's basketball pool, presented by the UCLA Bruins." I have to include the "presented by the UCLA Bruins" in every full-fledged pool update that I post on the blog, and UCLA also has to appear somewhere in the pool's official logo.

If USC wins, Mike has to go to Tommy Trojan and get his picture taken in front of Tommy, doing the victory sign and wearing a USC shirt of some kind (with "USC" in big letters, clearly visible). He has to get me this picture by next Wednesday, and I get to post it on my blog as often as I want during March (and early April, i.e. Final Four weekend).

FIGHT ON, TROJANS!!! BEAT THE BRUINS!!!

And the winner is...

By Brendan Loy

The winning logo in the NCAA pool design contest comes from Tom Greca, the designer of last year's logo, who strikes again with this nifty-looking design:

At my request, Tom also made a simpler version that will work better for the 200-pixel-wide thumbnail that'll eventually go in my left-hand column:

Some additional minor tweaking is possible -- and of course, in according with my bet with Tran, something about UCLA will have to be added if the Bruins win tomorrow -- but that's the basic gist.

Thanks, Tom! And thanks to the other entrants as well.

Baylor stunned

By Brendan Loy

As of this morning, Joe Lunardi had Baylor listed as a lock. Does that still hold after the Bears lost -- albeit in double overtime -- to last-place Colorado in the Big 12 first round? Yikes!

On the other hand, Baylor can't very well lose its spot in the Big Dance if nobody rises up to claim it. So far, the question today has been, "Does anyone want it?" Bubble teams losing today: Villanova, Dayton, UAB, Houston and Arizona State. The only bubble winners are Florida State, which is just barely on the radar, and St. Joe's, which likewise probably needs at least one more win. (Although, with all this bubble carnage, who knows?) Oh, and Miami won, too, but they're a near-lock anyway. Likewise, West Virginia solidified its position. But among the teams truly on the bubble, nobody's distinguishing themselves. If things continue in this vein, the committee is going to have some very tough decisions to make.

Oh, and with UAB and Houston going down in the quarterfinals, how freakin' easy is Memphis's road to a C-USA title? Good grief.

Pop!

By Brendan Loy

...goes UAB's bubble. And Dayton's and Villanova's, probably. Good news all around, so far, for the VCUs and Illinois States of the world.

But what about Arizona State's bubble? Fight on Trojans! Pop Beat the Sun Devils! (Actually, I hope ASU loses, then makes the Big Dance anyway.)

UPDATE: Uh-oh... another controversial ending to a Pac-10 game?

I don't know what the rules are on over-the-back fouls, and the FSN announcers are doing an absolutely horrible job of explaining what's going on. Can someone fill me in? I really hope the Trojans aren't winning this one illegitimately.

UPDATE 2: USC won 59-55. Here's the ending:

What do y'all think?

Design contest & open thread

By Brendan Loy

One final reminder that the design contest for my NCAA pools' logos ends at 5:00 PM EDT today; that's the deadline to submit your entries. I've already got some good choices, but the more, the merrier! Details here.

Also, if any of y'all are in front of a TV watching this afternoon's basketball games -- lucky dogs -- or otherwise want to comment on the results, feel free to do so on this thread. There's solid basketball from noon until after midnight today, with bubble implications galore, so there's plenty to talk about. God, I love March. :)

P.S. Here is Joe Lunardi's current assessment of the bubble, with 25 teams competing for eleven spots. They're listed in "S-Curve order," so the higher on the list your team is, the better. Italics indicate the team's season is over.

• IN: Miami, Texas A&M, Arizona, UNLV, Arkansas, South Alabama, Oregon, Massachusetts, Illinois State, New Mexico, Arizona State

• OUT: Ohio State, Florida, VCU, UAB, Dayton, Saint Joseph's, Villanova, Mississippi, Syracuse, Maryland, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Temple, Houston

Of course, a whole bunch of those teams have games today -- every non-italicized team, in fact, except Arkansas, Ohio State and Virginia Tech, all of which have byes until tomorrow -- so the situation is very fluid.

NOTE: This post will stay on top all morning & afternoon. New posts will appear below.

Oh, no, they didn't! Tattle-tale Tennessee reports UConn recruiting violation

By Brendan Loy

In the latest escalation of the Pat Summitt-Geno Auriemma War, Tennessee recently reported UConn for an alleged recruiting violation -- arranging a tour of ESPN's studios in Bristol for star freshman Maya Moore  back when she was a recruit who was heavily prized by both schools.

ESPN, obviously keen to avoid "becoming the story" again in the future, says that "to avoid future incidents, our tour policy will now prohibit high school athletes from receiving tours at the request of a college or university athletic official."

But the bigger story here, in my mind, is the Summitt-Auriemma angle. It has become increasingly clear that these two really don't like each other. In fact, here is some exclusive footage of Pat and Geno going at it before a recent ballgame:

Correction: I'm told those are the Oral Roberts and IUPUI mascots. My bad. But if Connecticut and Tennessee meet in the Final Four, that's pretty much what it'll be like.

Harry Potter 7... and 8

By Brendan Loy

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be split into two movies. Part I will be released in November 2010, Part II in May 2011. David Yates will direct both. (Hat tip: Andrew H.) [Bumped. -ed.]

All I can say is, I seriously cannot wait for the climactic Battle of Hogwarts scene. It'll be, for me personally, the most-anticipated cinematic event since the Mount Doom scene in Return of the King. :)

Resignation

By Brendan Loy

The New York Times busted out its MAN WALKS ON MOON / CLINTON IMPEACHED / U.S. ATTACKED headline style for Governor Spitzer's resignation:

Meanwhile, the Post, Daily News and Newsday all seem more interested in the latest revelations about the identity of the governor's call girl than about the fact that, er, the governor resigned yesterday. Heh. God bless tabloid journalism. (And some people say the interest in this story is primarily prurient in nature. Puh!)

Cal beats UW; Bruins next

By Brendan Loy

Cal will get a rematch tomorrow of its controversial season regular-finale against UCLA.

That'll be at 5:30 PM on FSN, right after the 3:00 game between USC and Arizona State. I'm hoping to get to work early tomorrow, and to work through lunch, so I can come home for at least the second half of that one. :)

If the Trojans and Bruins both win, then my bet with Mike will be decided Friday night. If, on the other hand, either team loses tomorrow, the season series remains split 1-1 and the bet's a wash.

Also tomorrow, at 9:30 PM on ESPN: Notre Dame vs. Marquette or Seton Hall. All in all, it's going to be a big day in Irish Trojan land...

Stunning upset in women's MWC

By Brendan Loy

Wow... just wow:

In by far the biggest upset so far this March, the 3-27 Colorado State women's team beat 27-3 Utah in the quarterfinals of the Mountain West Conference Tournament. ...

To give an idea of how big an upset this was, the Sagarin ratings ranked Utah as the 18th best women's basketball team in the country and Colorado State as the 305th best. The corresponding upset in men's basketball would be Farleigh Dickinson beating Connecticut.

In regular-season conference play, Colorado State was 0-16; Utah was 16-0.

P.S. Put another way: if Oregon State were to beat Arizona tonight in the men's Pac-10 tourney, it would be not as big of an upset as CSU over Utah was. (Oregon State is #240, according to Sagarin; Arizona is #29.)

UB football on ESPN2 on Election Night

By Brendan Loy

The University at Buffalo football team will play a home game on ESPN2 on Election Night against Miami of Ohio. It'll be Buffalo's first nationally televised game since moving to Division I-A, and the first-ever nationally televised game out of UB Stadium. And according to UB grad Weston (pictured below with yours truly on the night of the Buffalo-Rutgers game last fall), they're calling it the "Blue vs. Red Game," in reference to its Election Night timing. Heh.

Speaking of Buffalo, the Bulls are currently trying to extend their men's basketball season in unlikely fashion. At 3-13 in conference play and 10-19 overall, UB is the lowest seed in the conference, #12, but they're leading aforementioned Miami, the #5-seed, by a score of 51-42 with 11:39 to go. Can Buffalo get four wins in four days to win the MAC Tournament? Um, probably not. But hey, you never know. Crazier things have happened -- like the UB football team winning five games in a season. :) Winner gets #4-seed Ohio tomorrow.

UPDATE: Buffalo loses, 69-68. :(

Mount St. Mary's upsets Sacred Heart

By Brendan Loy

Moments ago on ESPN2, #4-seed Mount St. Mary's defeated #3-seed Sacred Heart, 68-55, on SHU's home floor in Fairfield, Connecticut, to earn the Northeast Conference title. So that leaves just Hartford and UConn still alive from the Nutmeg State. (Hartford plays for the America East title on Saturday morning. UConn plays West Virginia in the Big East quarters tomorrow, but is, of course, going dancing regardless.)

The NCAA bid for the Mountaineers is their first since 1999. Between Mount St. Mary's from the NEC, St. Mary's from the WCC, and Notre Dame from the Big East, the Blessed Virgin will be very well-represented in this year's NCAA Tournament. :)

Bobby Knight is not a mid-major fan

By Brendan Loy

ESPN's newest basketball analyst, Bobby Knight, made his SportsCenter debut tonight. His analysis of the Villanova-Syracuse game was underwhelming -- his expert opinion was that the momentum 'Nova built by finishing the first half on an 8-0 run was, er, important -- but he'll probably get better at saying slightly more insightful things as he gets more used to his new role. What was more concerning was his answer when asked his opinion about the respective at-large merits of Villanova and South Alabama, and, more generally, how he feels about the always-vexing question of comparing major-conference teams from the middle ranks of the standings with top-tier teams from mid- and low-major conferences.

Knight's answer was -- and this isn't an exact quote, but it's a close paraphrase -- that he pretty much always favors major-conference teams, whenever they're anywhere near the bubble, because they play tougher schedules.

Needless to say, he didn't address the fact that those tougher schedules are already taken into account by the fact that we're comparing mid-major teams with records like 26-6 to major-conference teams with records like 20-11. As far as Knight is concerned, schedule strength is apparently pretty much the only thing that should matter. The fact that the non-major teams under consideration at least partially made up for their weaker schedules by winning more games apparently doesn't even figure into the equation.

So basically, if it were up to Bobby Knight, teams like St. Mary's, Illinois State, VCU, South Alabama, and (if they lose the MAC tourney) Kent State would all be out, replaced by mediocre BCS-conference squads like Syracuse, Maryland, Virginia Tech, Florida and Ole Miss. Oh, that'd be thrilling. An NCAA Tournament utterly devoid of potential Cinderellas. Awesome.

Luckily, Bobby Knight isn't on the selection committee. But on top of the possible Great Billy Packer Eruption of 2008 over on CBS, I guess we can look forward to Knight's grumpy commentary on ESPN, wondering how a team like St. Mary's could possibly get in over a team like Ohio State. I hope ESPN lets Knight and Dick Vitale appear on-air together at some point during the post-selection show. It would be fun, in the seemingly inevitable event of a major-vs.-mid-major selection controversy, to watch the always-energetic champion of the little guy go toe-to-toe with the chair-throwing defender of the BCS conferences.

He's a killer candidate

By David K.

Jack Kevorkian is planning to run for Congress.

Alternate headlines considered: 
-  Kevorkian hopes to inject some honesty into Congress
-  He's dying to be elected

Syracuse is NIT-bound

By Brendan Loy

That "pop" you just heard was Syracuse's bubble bursting.

Including today's game, the Orange finishes 9-10 in Big East play. They couldn't even win 10 f***ing games.

This is excellent news for teams like Illinois State and VCU, and other bubblers like Arizona State, Oregon, Ohio State, UMass, etc. Although today's Villanova-Syracuse game was widely described as an "elimination game," the Wildcats came into it lower in the bubble pecking order, by most accounts, than the Orange did. Syracuse might have been able to get into the tournament just with a win over 'Nova, and perhaps a close loss to #1-seed Georgetown tomorrow. Villanova almost certainly needs to beat Georgetown, or else they, too, will be NIT-bound, and the Big East will be a seven-bid league. In which case, a spot opens up for somebody else.

Year of the mid-major?

By Brendan Loy

Y'all know where I stand on the perennial big-conference vs. small-conference debate: I'm firmly on the side of the little guy, and I love to see teams from low-major and mid-major conferences excel in March. For me, a 12-over-5 upset in which, say, Texas A&M beats Syracuse or Missouri beats Miami, always feels sort of cheap and anticlimactic. Those are power-conference teams, not cuddly underdogs! Give me Pacific over Providence, Wisconsin-Milwaukee over Alabama, Butler over Mississippi State, etc. Those are upsets I can feel good about. I also love to see well-seeded mid-majors confirm the hype and prove their mettle, which is why it was so great that Butler and Southern Illinois advanced to the Sweet Sixteen in last year's otherwise rather underwhelming NCAA Tournament.

This year, as events have unfolded, I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for the little guys to crash the party in a big way. There is a quality crop of mid-major and low-major conference teams who should be seeded on the 13-line or better -- in several cases much better -- giving them a real opportunity to make noise in the NCAAs. I just hope the committee, this time, sets up the seeds and brackets in way to give them a fair shot.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer today announced his resignation after allegations of his involvement in a prostitution ring.

Design contest reminder

By Brendan Loy

Just a reminder that I still need entries in the Irish Trojan design contest for the 13th annual Living Room Times basketball pools' official logos. The deadline is 5:00 PM EDT tomorrow. Details here.

NOTE: This post will stay on top of the homepage for a while. New posts will appear below.

Spitzer to resign this morning

By Brendan Loy

As the New York Post first reported, and now the New York Times is reporting as well, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is expected to announce his resignation this morning at around 11:30 AM EDT.

Here, incidentally, are this morning's Post and Daily News front pages:

ORU, WKU, Butler win auto bids

By Brendan Loy

The states of Tennessee and Indiana failed yesterday to pad their totals of NCAA teams, as IUPUI lost to Oral Roberts and Middle Tennessee State lost to Western Kentucky. So it'll be five Tennessee teams (UT, Memphis, Vandy, Belmont, Austin Peay) and, barring an unlikely run to the MAC title for #10-seed Ball State, four Indiana teams (Notre Dame, Purdue, Indiana, Butler). Only California, with nearly twice as many Division I schools, will have more teams dancing than the Volunteer State.

Speaking of Butler, they won the Horizon title game, thus earning the automatic bid and preserving an at-large spot for some bubble team. The Bulldogs, who went to the Sweet Sixteen last year as a #5 seed and damn near beat eventual champion Florida, will probably get a similar seed this year. Lunardi currently has them as a #5; maybe they'll be a #4 after this win. Either way, watch out for these guys -- they can ball.

Oh, Wolf, how I'll miss your calls...

By Brendan Loy

With no primaries or caucuses until April 22, tonight presented the last opportunity for the next six weeks to see Wolf Blitzer "call" a state -- complete with his typical pattern of stammering, stalling and repeating himself, as well as his gratuitous overuse of the word "now," his self-referential commentary, his time-wasting restatements of obvious facts (Democratic primaries are proportional, superdelegates are party leaders, etc.), and his "questions" to CNN's other correspondents and analysts that aren't actually questions at all, but are in fact declarative sentences that again repeat facts that Blitzer has already reported two or three times. Wolfie, you're doing a heckuva job!

Nobody wastes as much time listening to himself talk -- while reporting "breaking news" -- as Wolf Blitzer. And oh, I do love it so.

By the way, with 77 percent of the precincts reporting, Obama leads 58% to 40%. And exit polls find that nearly half of the voters said she isn't honest and trustworthy. These are Democrats, remember.

Daily Trojan staffers to "grill" Bill Clinton

By Brendan Loy

USC Daily Trojan staffers will get to ask Bill Clinton questions as part of a mtvU series designed to "take some of the top college reporters from across the country and have them grill key policy makers and influencers." The forum will be taped on Sunday, and "highlights" will be posted on mtvU.com Sunday evening, followed by a full broadcast on March 26 at noon. The other college newspapers participating are the Howard Hilltop, Smith Sophian and Tulane Hullabaloo. More info here and here.

Blogger Alex Weprin writes, "The hope is that in selecting top college journos, the forums will be serious, substantive talks, and not gossip," so "I wouldn’t expect too many 'boxers or briefs' questions here."

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

CNN projects that Sen. Barack Obama will win the Mississippi Democratic primary.

Brey, Harangody win Big East honors

By Brendan Loy

Luke Harangody, as expected, is the Big East Player of the Year -- and Mike Brey is the conference's Coach of the Year for the second straight season. (Hat tip: JohnMac.)

Brey was apparently unsatisfied by the crow I ate last year, and decided to continue coaching like a champion, thus making me look like even more of an idiot for my endlessly repeated demands back in 2005, 2006 and 2007 that he be fired. :)

Seriously: Great job, Coach Brey! Fire Brendan Loy! Go Irish!

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Correction: Exit polls show Obama leading Clinton in Mississippi. CNN has not projected this race.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Barack Obama wins the Mississippi Democratic primary, CNN projects.

The perfect Billy Packer storm?

By Brendan Loy

It occurs to me that bubble-related events may be conspiring to produce a Billy Packer Eruption on Selection Sunday that will make his 2006 explosion look like a walk in the park.

Think about it: with San Diego's win and South Alabama's loss yesterday, it looks very likely that the West Coast Conference will get three teams in the NCAA Tournament, and the Sun Belt Conference will get two. Meanwhile, several huge "name" programs from Packer's favorite conferences are in precarious positions: Syracuse could be left out (again!) if it beats Villanova but loses to Georgetown; Ohio State is probably out unless it beats Michigan State in the Big Ten quarters; Maryland could very well advance to the ACC semifinals, maybe even the final, and still be left home; Florida is in much the same boat as Maryland in the SEC. Heck, even Arizona, which played the #1 schedule in the country, could be in trouble if it loses badly to Washington State Stanford in the Pac-10 quarters, or, heaven forbid, loses to Oregon State in the first round tomorrow.

Imagine Packer's blubbering outrage if two or three of those teams just barely miss the tournament, while the WCC gets three bids and the Sun Belt gets two. OH, THE HUMANITY!!! It would truly be a sight to behold.

LSU contacts USC coach Tim Floyd

By Brendan Loy

Not content with pissing all over USC's football championships, now LSU wants to steal our basketball coach. :P

Floyd responded with a non-denial denial. I'm sure Les Miles will be rushing to the microphone any minute to castigate the media for reporting on such rumors when Floyd is busy trying to focus on winning a Pac-10 and NCAA championship. ;)

(Hat tip: Jay.)

Mississippi predictions?

By Brendan Loy

Polls close in Mississippi at 7:00 PM tonight. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to the candidates' percentage totals?

And, as a bonus, at what date and time will Eliot Spitzer resign?

Unwatchable Zags

By Brendan Loy

La Rev on last night's Gonzaga-San Diego game:

I think it's safe to say that the Virginia game last season was probably the only time the Mark Few Zags have ever been as completely unwatchable as they were last night. They were pathetic, and I don't care to ever talk about it again.

Gonzaga has had an unfortunate habit of not bringing its "A" game to the WCC tourney in recent years. They've barely skated by several times, but last night, it finally caught up with them. Hopefully they find their "A" game sometime between now and next Thursday/Friday.

La Rev also predicts St. Mary's will be snubbed by the selection committee. "Nothing the Committee has ever done dictates that they'll let three WCC teams in," he says. "Every year there's got to be a snub that all the media-types get all huffy-puffy about for the TV audience, and this year, I think it's going to be Saint Mary's."

Lunardi has St. Mary's as a #9 seed, safely away from the bubble. So if they aren't picked, it will indeed be quite a kerfuffle -- particularly since the only plausible explanation for such a snub would be the three-WCC-bids thing, which would blatantly contradict what the committee always says about how it "doesn't look at conferences."

Lunardi: Syracuse, ASU bubbles burst

By Brendan Loy

Joe Lunardi's updated Bracketology page is out. He thinks South Alabama is still in, but drops them from a #9 seed to a #11 seed, just barely avoiding the "last four in" list. (The seed implies that they're one of the "last seven in.") Yesterday's bubble-bursting wins by MTSU (over USA) and San Diego (over Gonzaga) ousted Syracuse and Arizona State from the field, according to Lunardi.

Of course, the Orange and Sun Devils can still play their way in. ASU probably just needs to beat USC (which raises the intriguing question of who Becky roots for, under the circumstances), while Syracuse may need to defeat both Villanova and Georgetown. In potentially deeper trouble are the bubble teams whose seasons are finished, like Illinois State, which has dropped into dangerous territory as one of the "last four in" (and also a #11 seed), and VCU, which Lunardi has now dropped to the bottom spot on the "last four out" list.

Tennessee: center of the basketball world

By Brendan Loy

With the state of Tennessee having such a great basketball year, I've been wondering how we stack up against other states in terms of our number of NCAA Tournament teams. Now, thanks to this nifty Wikipedia map, I have the answer.

If Middle Tennessee State knocks off Western Kentucky tonight in the Sun Belt title game, Tennessee will have six teams in the NCAA Tournament -- meaning exactly half of its 12 Division I schools would be dancing. (MTSU would join at-large locks Memphis, UT and Vanderbilt, and automatic bid winners Belmont and Austin Peay.) If that happens, Tennessee would probably finish tied with California for the largest number of teams in the Big Dance, and would either tie Indiana or finish first all by itself for the percentage of its Division I teams going dancing (among states with at least five Division I teams).

Wanted: basketball pool logos!

By Brendan Loy

All right, artsy readers, it's time for another Irish Trojan design contest.

My 13th annual men's basketball and 11th annual women's basketball pools will be starting up on Sunday, and once again, I need a logo. Two years ago, Marel Nasinnyk won the design contest, while last year, I skipped the contest process and simply commissioned Tom Greca to create the logos, in Halliburton no-bid-contract-like fashion. :) This year, I'm going back to the open contest model.

[Details after the jump. This post will stay on top of the homepage for a while. New posts will appear below.]

The New York papers on Spitzer

By Brendan Loy

(Via the Newseum. More after the jump... including a few New Jersey and Connecticut papers thrown in for good measure.)

Space Shuttle blasts off

By Brendan Loy

The Space Shuttle Endeavour's wee-hours launch was a success. Endeavour is scheduled for the longest Shuttle mission ever, 16 days. I hope the crew members aren't hoops fans! They're going to miss Selection Sunday and the always-exciting opening weekend of the tourney! :)

Anyway, the Shuttle is scheduled to dock with the ISS late tomorrow night, and undock on Monday the 24th at 7:55 PM EDT. There will be an excellent viewing opportunity here in Knoxville about 24 hours after the time of scheduled undocking, so hopefully everything stays on schedule this time.

USA loses; Gonzaga, too

By Brendan Loy

Will South Alabama join VCU and Illinois State on the list of mid-majors sweating bullets on the bubble after conference-tournament losses? USA is losing by 4 to Middle Tennessee State with 1:45 left.

UPDATE: MTSU wins! Does South Alabama still get a bid? Yikes. The bubble picture keeps getting murkier and murkier. (And it could get murkier still: Gonzaga trails by 3 at halftime. On the bright side for bubble teams, Davidson's up by 8 at the break.)

UPDATE 2: Down goes Gonzaga, 69-62. The bubble carnage continues! The Zags are a lock, as are their conference-mates St. Mary's, so the WCC will be a three-bid league for the first time ever -- and somebody else who would have gone dancing, won't.

Well, at least Davidson won. Bubble teams will be rooting like crazy for Butler in the Horizon final against Cleveland State tonight (Tuesday) at 9:00 PM on ESPN. Also, Kent State needs to win the MAC and Memphis needs to win C-USA. Out-of-nowhere winners in the Atlantic 10 and/or Mountain West -- or any of the major conferences, for that matter -- would also be trouble.

P.S. As an aside, it's absolutely silly to say that San Diego "stunned" Gonzaga. The Toreros are good, they were competitive with the Zags in both regular-season meetings, they had more to play for, and the tournament was played on USD's home court. At most, this was a mild upset.

They're baaaack

By Brendan Loy

George Mason is going back to the Big Dance.

Feds suspected bribes, discovered sex

By Brendan Loy

This is interesting. According to ABC's The Blotter, the federal investigation of the "Emperors Club VIP" prostitution ring actually started as an inquiry into suspicious money transfers from Governor Spitzer's account that "initially [led] agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes."

So basically, everyone else who got caught in this investigation has got to be pretty pissed at Spitzer for ruining the fun. ;)

Spitzer, by the way, is expected to resign in the next 48 hours.

Shuttle liftoff tonight

By Brendan Loy

The Space Shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to blast off in less than six hours, at 2:28 AM EDT.

Just sayin'

By Brendan Loy

One of the big bubble debates of the next week will revolve around Virginia Commonwealth, which won the Colonial Athletic Association regular-season title, then lost in the semifinals to William & Mary last night. VCU is now firmly on the bubble, and will be hotly debated right up until the field of 65 is announced on  Sunday -- and beyond, probably. If they don't get in, the mid-major-loving blogosphere (ahem) will erupt in rage, while if the Rams do get in ahead of, say, Syracuse or Maryland, Billy Packer's head will most likely explode. In the latter scenario, the presence of VCU's athletic director on the selection committee will figure prominently into the commentary.

Anyway, I just thought it might be worth noting that this isn't the first time a CAA champion or co-champion has triggered intense debate after being eliminated in the semifinals of that tough conference's tournament. In fact, it happened a mere two years ago, causing me to write at the time:

With the NCAA selection show exactly 100 hours away, the most intriguing question right now — supplanting the whole Missouri Valley vs. power conferences debate — is what the selection committee will decide to do with George Mason.

Ahem. I think we all remember how that decision turned out. :)

In fairness, this isn't actually a valid argument for letting VCU in -- nor is the fact that they beat Duke last year. We mid-major-philes always insist that previous years' records shouldn't matter (in contrast to the Billy Packers of the world, who think teams should be rewarded for what they did in 1985), so to be consistent, we really shouldn't advocate letting VCU in as a bubble team just because George Mason got in as a bubble team in a superficially similar situation two years ago, and pretty well proved they belong.

Still, I couldn't resist mentioning it in passing. ;)

P.S. Speaking of George Mason, the Patriots lead William & Mary 27-26 at the half in the CAA title game.

Obama: Clintons can't have it both ways

By Brendan Loy

About this whole Eliot Spitzer business, I share the reaction of the Politico commenter who said: "Great!  Now this idiot is going to take away from the press coverage of Obama's VP retort to Hillary. crap."

Well, I figure I should do my small part to remedy that problem. So, in case you missed it, here is Obama's brilliant rebuttal to the Clintons' shameless "dream team" nonsense. Money quote: "I don't understand. If I am not ready [to be commander-in-chief], how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president?"

Watch the video. The crowd was eating it up.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer apologized to his family and the public after a report that tied him to a prostitution ring.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

New York Times reports Gov. Eliot Spitzer admits involvement in a prostitution ring.

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: Josh Marshall: "Fox saying Spitzer will resign; me saying, no kidding."

UPDATE 2: Here's his statement. No resignation yet, just an apology, and a statement that "I will report back to you in short order." Whatever that means.

More details from the Times on what happened:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.

The wiretap recording, made during an investigation of a prostitution ring called Emperors Club VIP, captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a room. The person briefed on the case identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

The Smoking Gun has more on Emperors Club VIP, "which charged up to $5500 an hour for one of its 50 prostitutes, who operated in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, London, and Paris." And TPM Muckraker has more on "Client 9."

Anyway, back to the Times article...

The governor learned that he had been implicated in the prostitution probe when a federal official contacted his staff last Friday, according to the person briefed on the case.

The governor informed his top aides Sunday night and this morning of his involvement. He canceled his public events today and scheduled an announcement for this afternoon after inquiries from the Times.

The governor’s aides appeared shaken, and one of them began to weep as they waited for him to make his statement at his Manhattan office. Mr. Spitzer was seen leaving his Fifth Avenue apartment just before 3 p.m. with his wife of 21 years, Silda, heading to the news conference.

The Times was apparently working this story all night yesterday, and they're expecting another long night tonight. A memo has been sent out to the staff: "Obviously, we're going to have much late news, thanks to the governor. So we really need you to file all nonrelated stories as early as possible. It's going to be a long night...."

NY governor Spitzer reportedly admits involvement in prostitution ring

By Brendan Loy

WTF?

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He is set to make an announcement about 2:15 this afternoon at his Manhattan office.

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

I imagine this will cause levels on schadenfreude on the Right similar to those experienced on the Left over the Larry Craig incident.

UPDATE: As governor, Spitzer is a superdelegate, and he has endorsed Hillary. So has Lieutenant Governor David Paterson -- and he, too, is a superdelegate, not because of his elected position but because he's a DNC member. So if Spitzer were to resign and lose his superdelegate status, and Paterson were to replace him as governor, there would be one less superdelegate from New York State, and one less vote for Clinton. Just saying! :)

When raccoons attack

By Brendan Loy

The Tennessee Lady Vols managed to win the SEC Tournament over the weekend despite Coach Pat Summitt's lingering injury from a raccoon attack. (Hat tip: Michael Silence.)

Personally, if I were a raccoon, I wouldn't tangle with Pat Summitt. (And if I were Erin Andrews, I'd stay the hell away from Bruce Pearl. But that's another story entirely.)

USD beats SMC, faces Gonzaga for title

By Brendan Loy

WCC #3-seed San Diego beat #2 Saint Mary's in double overtime early this morning -- an "upset" in name only, as San Diego finished a close third in the regular season and is playing the conference tournament on its home floor. So it'll be a Gonzaga-USD final, again in San Diego, tonight at 9:00 PM on ESPN. If the Toreros can pull another "upset," the West Coast Conference will almost certainly be a three-bid league, as the Zags and Gaels are both considered NCAA "locks." Could the WCC get more bids than the MVC and the CAA combined? It's possible. Illinois State and VCU, along with all other bubble teams, need to root hard for Gonzaga tonight!

There are three other conference-title games tonight, as Championship Week (or Fortnight) really kicks into high gear. At 7:00 PM on ESPN, it's #3 George Mason vs. #5 William & Mary for the CAA crown. At the same time on ESPN2, the top two seeds in the MAAC, Siena and Rider, face off. Then at 9:00 PM, while ESPN broadcasts the Zags-Toreros showdown, the Deuce will have the Southern Conference title game between #1-seed, #25-ranked, bubble-if-they-lose Davidson (25-6) and #7-seed, #231-RPI Elon (14-18).

Also tonight, the semifinals of the Summit League (formerly the Mid-Continent Conference), #1 Oral Roberts vs. #5 IPFW and #2 IUPUI vs. #3 Oakland; and the semifinals of the Sun Belt Conference, #1 South Alabama (a bubble team if they don't get the auto bid) vs. #4 Middle Tennessee and #2 Arkansas-Little Rock vs. #3 Western Kentucky. (Don't let the division-based seeds fool you: Western Kentucky is the clear favorite in that matchup.) Personally, I'm hoping that South Alabama and American University somehow end up playing each other in the Big Dance. It'd be U.S.A. vs. American! :)

Hitler is a Cowboys fan

By Brendan Loy

Robert Cox of Asgard Press (the people who make those vintage college-football calendars, which y'all bought $150 worth of in December) sent me this video last Thursday. It's a bit dated, as it was obviously made before the Super Bowl, but it's still freakin' funny, if you ask me. (Warning: subtitled profanity!)

Heh.

And while we're on the topic of funny, vulgar, YouTubey goodness: if you haven't seen them already, Sarah Silverman's Matt Damon video and Jimmy Kimmel's Ben Affleck rebuttal are pretty f***in' funny. Again, though: Warning! Bleeped-but-obvious profanity. Not recommended for the workplace. :)

It's 3 AM, do you know who your ad is voting for?

By David K.

The girl who appears in the now infamous "3 AM" ad that the Clinton campaign aired in Texas prior to last week's primaries supports Obama. Casey Knowles filmed some footage for a railroad company advertisement 10 years ago; the Clinton camp bought it from Getty Images. Knowles will be 18 next month and met Obama at a rally held last month in Seattle. She has already been in touch with the Obama campaign and may work with them to film a counter ad.

Hillary values loyalty over competence. Sound familiar?

By Brendan Loy

It is sometimes said by Democrats who prefer Clinton to Obama -- or who simply have their doubts about Obama, on account of his relative inexperience -- that to elect him president would be to repeat the same mistake we made by electing an inexperienced neophyte named George W. Bush in 2000. Heck, I once voiced this concern, and although I think Obama has a lot of other things going for him, it's still something I worry about a bit.

I would argue, however, that the real history-repeating-itself danger would be in electing Hillary, in light of her managerial skills (or lack thereof) and her veritably Bush-like views on management, competence and loyalty:

[I]nterviews with campaign aides, associates and friends suggest that Mrs. Clinton, at least until February, was a detached manager. Juggling the demands of being a candidate, she paid little attention to detail, delegated decisions large and small and deferred to advisers on critical questions. Mrs. Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding that often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching consensus on basic questions like what states to fight in and how to go after Mr. Obama, of Illinois.

Mrs. Clinton showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates said. Her choice of lieutenants, and her insistence on staying with them even when friends urged her to shake things up, was blamed by some associates for the campaign’s woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.

I've read similar observations about Hillary numerous times elsewhere, and they really concern me. Do we really want another "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" sort of president? I think not.

Nutmeg pride & George Mason's return

By Brendan Loy

NEC #3-seed Sacred Heart this evening became the second Connecticut men's basketball team to reach a conference championship today, joining Hartford from the America East conference. Sacred Heart beat #2 Wagner to set up a Wednesday meeting on ESPN2 against #4 Mount St. Mary's. Because SHU has the better seed, they'll host the title game on their home floor (an unexpected treat made possible by the Mount St. Mary's upset of #1 Robert Morris).

In other Championship Week news, I mentioned earlier that #5-seed William & Mary upset #1 VCU, putting the latter on the bubble -- well, now we know who will be the Pride's opponent in tomorrow night's CAA title game, and it's none other than #3-seed George Mason. This will be Mason's second straight year playing in the CAA final; last year, they made a Cinderella run as a #6 seed, but lost 65-59 to VCU. (In 2006, the year they went to the Final Four, they were actually booted in the semifinals of the CAA tourney!) Tomorrow's game will be at 7:00 PM on ESPN.

Also tomorrow night, at 9:00 PM on ESPN2, it'll be Southern Conference top seed Davidson vs. the Cinderella story of this year's Championship Week to date, #7 Elon -- a team with a 14-18 record and an RPI of #231, now one win from the Big Dance (or rather, the play-in game).

Gonzaga hopes they'll be playing tomorrow night at 9:00 PM on ESPN, in the WCC title game. But first they need to beat Santa Clara in the semis, and right now they're trailing 35-34 with 13:04 left. Go Zags!

UPDATE: Gonzaga wins, 52-48! Not a great game for the Zags -- Pargo only scored 4 points -- but they survived and advanced (albeit with the help of yet another terrible call by the refs down the stretch, as a blatant charge was wrongly called a defensive foul, increasing Gonzaga's lead from 1 to 3). Tomorrow, they'll go for their ninth WCC title in ten years against either St. Mary's or homestanding San Diego.

Hillary: caucus delegates not "elected"

By Brendan Loy

In an interview with Newsweek, Hillary Clinton trots out a new bit of spin, offhandedly asserting that there are three types of delegates: "elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates."

Unpacking that statement, I notice two things. Firstly, what happened to calling superdelegates "automatic delegates"? I guess that bit of Clinton spin has officially bitten the dust -- replaced with the equally silly notion that only delegates allocated by primaries are "elected," while delegates allocated by caucuses are not. That one doesn't pass the laugh test, but terminology aside, I think the Clinton campaign might be on to something here.

I assume the campaign's ultimate goal is to encourage the media to delineate the primary and caucus delegates in separate counts. Regardless of its merits or lack thereof (an arguable point, IMHO), I think this tack just might work. The Obama campaign had considerable success in arguing early last month that the media should stop conflating the pledged-delegate and superdelegate counts, and in light of her recent success "working the refs," I think Clinton may now be able to convince the media that a tripartite count is appropriate.

If she can accomplish that, she will then presumably try to argue that she is a legitimate option for the nomination if she's ahead, or within striking distance, among the primary (or "elected") delegates by the end of the primaries in June. I haven't done the math on it, but I imagine that's a much more realistic goal than coming within striking distance in the overall pledged-delegate count, and possibly even more realistic than winning the "popular vote."

(I hasten to add that, whatever the merits of a tripartite delegate count, a legitimacy argument based solely on primary delegates would be totally, well, illegitimate. It's one thing to argue that primaries and caucuses are different and should be treated as such, and that primaries should matter more. It's another thing to completely ignore the caucuses altogether, thus effectively disenfranchising all the voters in those states.)

Less likely to work, IMHO, is Clinton's attempt to re-raise an argument that her campaign floated and then quickly rejected last month: "Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to." If she starts making a public effort to "poach" pledged delegates, I think there will be a massive backlash.

One last point: her statement that "[t]his is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process" could very well come back to haunt her, if anyone remembers it (not that blatantly self-contradictory comments have stopped her before). Several of her spin tactics -- including the denigration of caucuses -- are in direct opposition to the notion of respecting this "very carefully constructed process that goes back years."

In other news, the New York Times Caucus Blog has the latest on Michigan and Florida. A pair of "do-overs" appear increasingly likely.

Revisiting the South Bend scenario

By Brendan Loy

Back in January, when I wrote about how the major candidates for president were campaigning "in or near practically every single place I used to live...as well as a place I may someday live...but NOT the place I currently live" -- a phenomenon which I referred to as "a vast left/right-wing conspiracy to piss me off" -- I noted that the only former Brendan Loy domicile they hadn't visited was South Bend. Then, as an afterthought, I added:

And come to think of it, if the Dem race really does drag on, there's an excellent chance they'll eventually hit South Bend! Between Pennsylvania (April 22) and West Virginia (May 13), the only primaries are in Indiana and North Carolina, both on May 6. So there's a two-week window for campaigning in just those two states. If Hillary and Barack are still going at it by then (probably unlikely, I admit, but certainly not impossible), they'll have more than enough time to travel up and down the entirety of the great state of Indiana trolling for votes, stopping in every major and minor city along the way. So they'd certainly make it to South Bend, which is [one of the] biggest cit[ies] in northern Indiana. Heck, forget South Bend, I bet they'd end up coming to Notre Dame itself, perhaps for a rally (or rallies) at the Joyce Center (as President Bush did on his Social Security Unplugged tour back in 2005).

Again I say, harumph.

Well, here we are, just over five weeks later, and that "unlikely...but certainly not impossible" scenario looks, well, likely. Unless Hillary loses Pennsylvania, you have to think the campaign will continue into May. And you also have to think Hillary, fresh off victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania, will focus heavily on the next logical target in her tour of economically depressed "rust belt" areas: northern Indiana. Forget visiting South Bend, she might practically move in. :) Obama, for his part, will presumably spend most of his time in large population centers with reasonably large black populations -- which would put South Bend high on his list, as well.

So basically, it looks like every single place I've ever lived except East Tennessee (Greater Hartford, NYC, Phoenix, L.A., South Bend), plus my possible future home (Denver), will have played host to one or more major candidate visit by the time this campaign is over. Jealousy, thy name is Brendan Loy.

P.S. With my luck, we'll probably end up moving from Tennessee to Colorado sometime in between the Democratic National Convention in Denver (August 25-28) and the presidential debate in Nashville (October 7), thus missing both events. ;)

American beats Army in patriotic clash

By Brendan Loy

American University's quest for its first-ever NCAA berth moved a step closer to fruition this afternoon as American beat Army, 72-60, in a conference semifinal showdown that put the "patriot" in Patriot League. I bet it was enough to make even Michelle Obama feel proud. ;)

American, the #1 seed, will play #3 Colgate in Friday's title game, at 4:45 PM on ESPN2. Colgate dispatched with Cinderella-minded Bucknell, 54-40, today. 'Twas Bucknell, of course, that ended the potential for a patriotic championship game by knocking out #2-seeded Navy last week in a stunning upset ending with a miracle shot.

Also advancing to a low-major conference title game: the #2-seeded University of Hartford Hawks, who beat Boston U. 59-52 this afternoon, and will face top-seeded UMBC at noon next Saturday on ESPN. Go Hartford!

UPDATE: Big bubble news from the Colonial Athletic Association, as regular-season champ Virginia Commonwealth loses in the semifinals to William & Mary. VCU now sits squarely on the NCAA bubble, and, like Illinois State, will now have a very long week of watching & waiting. Here's what Glockner said this morning about the Rams:

The Rams closed out the season in style, winning eight of their last nine to take the CAA by three games over George Mason and UNC-Wilmington. They're now into the CAA semifinals and may be one win away from having a very legit claim to an at-large bid. They beat Akron, Houston and Maryland in nonconference play, so there's some good stuff there, too. The committee seems to value conference regular-season championships, especially by multiple games in good leagues, so this bodes well for VCU's ability to overcome a conference tourney loss.

One thing's for sure: either #5 seed William & Mary, #2 UNC Wilmington or #3 George Mason will be going dancing as the CAA champion. (The latter two are about to tip off in a semifinal game. The title game is tomorrow at 7:00 PM on ESPN.)

Drake routs ISU in MVC final

By Brendan Loy

Illinois State, the alma mater of Irish Trojan contributor Mike Quinn (a.k.a. "isuquinndog"), is fighting for an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament in the Missouri Valey Conference tournament championship game on CBS right now. I assume Mike is at the game; he goes to Arch Madness every year. Anyway, if he is there, he can't be happy that Drake has the early lead.

Even with a loss, though, Mike's Redbirds have a pretty decent chance of getting an at-large bid -- which is pretty amazing, considering that they had previously been an MVC bottom-feeder (as had Drake, for that matter) during the conference's recent rise to glory. But Drake's a lock, ISU is a bubble team, and everyone else is out. (NIT-ology has Southern Illinois and Creighton as NIT teams and Bradley as a CBI team.)

[UPDATE: Drake wins, 79-49. Ouch! Andy Glockner, who writes ESPN's Bubble Watch, wrote this morning that "[b]arring a disaster against Drake, the Redbirds should like their chances [of an at-large bid] at this point." I'm thinking that a 30-point loss in a nationally televised game would qualify as a "disaster," and Illinois State will have a looong seven days watching other bubble contenders play and wondering what the committee will do.]

In other mid-major action later today, Gonzaga plays Santa Clara and Saint Mary's plays San Diego in the West Coast Conference semifinals at 9:30 PM and midnight, respectively, on ESPN2. Both the Zags and Gaels are almost certainly NCAA-bound, so bubble teams around the country need to root against Santa Clara and San Diego, who could potentially crash the party and turn the WCC into a three-bid league.

Speaking of bubble teams, Kentucky got a huge win over Florida today. The loss probably eliminates the Gators from at-large contention, barring a deep SEC tourney run. Meanwhile, the Wildcats improve to 12-4 in the SEC and 18-11 overall. If they happen to flame out early in the conference tournament, they'll make for fascinating debate fodder on Selection Sunday. Which matters more: their horrible non-conference start, or their strong performance in the (admittedly weaker than usual) SEC?

Heh.

By Brendan Loy

Manhattan: Foley's Pub bans "Danny Boy" for the whole month :)

By Joe Loy

And here you always thought March Madness consists merely of Basketball, Politics, and half-arsed-baked Recruitment Center Bombings in Times Square but OH No: now it's Katie bar th' Door to boot ~

It's depressing, it's not usually sung in Ireland for St. Patrick's Day, and its lyrics were written by an Englishman who never set foot on Irish soil.

Those are only some of the reasons why a Manhattan pub owner is banning the song "Danny Boy" for the entire month of March.

"It's overplayed, it's been ranked among the 25 most depressing songs of all time and it's more appropriate for a funeral than for a St. Patrick's Day celebration," said Shaun Clancy, who owns Foley's Pub and Restaurant, across the street from the Empire State Building.

The 38-year-old Clancy, who started bartending when he was 12 at his father's pub in County Cavan, Ireland, promised a free Guinness to patrons who sing any other traditional Irish song** at the pub's pre-St. Patrick's Day karaoke party on Tuesday.

...At least one patron at Foley's was glad to hear the song was banned from the pub for the rest of the month.

The song is "all right, but I get fed up with hearing it — it's like the elections," Martin Gaffney, 73, said in a thick Irish brogue...

Particle-physicist Democrat wins former House Speaker Hastert's seat

By Joe Loy

Thus collapsing the Illinois GOP's quantum wave function. (Or if you prefer, the Measurement of the votes [Curiously enough] killed the Republicans' previously-Indeterminate kittycat. :) Links added:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A Democrat on Saturday captured the Illinois U.S. House of Representatives seat former Speaker Dennis Hastert held for more than two decades before he retired.

Returns showed physicist and businessman Bill Foster beating dairy owner Jim Oberweis by 52 percent to 48 percent of the vote in a long-time Republican district that currently stretches across northern Illinois from the Chicago suburbs nearly to the Mississippi River.

...While the area has been a Republican stronghold for years, redistricting brought geographic changes and population shifts including more Hispanics and younger suburban families that changed its make-up. The 2008 edition of the Almanac of American Politics rated the district as "a tough one for Democrats to win but not impossible."

Evidently Not. / Mu on, Representative-elect Foster. :)

Irish tie for second in Big East

By Brendan Loy

Notre Dame edged South Florida on Saturday to finish tied for second place in the Big East -- ND's best finish ever. The Irish went 24-6 overall, 14-4 in conference. Woohoo!

Black & Green writes: "Coach Brey is third behind only Jim Calhoun and Jim Boeheim in all time Big East victories. There's a good trivia question for your next party. A guy who was on the hot seat two years ago is now going back to a top seed in the Big East tournament and could win his second straight Coach of the Year award."

Next comes the always-exciting Big East Tournament, starting on Thursday. Notre Dame will be the #3 seed, and will play the winner of Wednesday's 6-11 game between Marquette and Seton Hall (or Cincinnati?). Go Irish!

Upsets roil Southern Conference

By Brendan Loy

It was Upset Saturday in the Southern Conference, as the #5, #6 and #7 seeds advanced to the conference semifinals.

The wins by UNC Greensboro, Charleston and Elon (over #4 Appalachian State, #3 Georgia Southern and #2 Chattanooga, respectively) presumably clear the way for top seed Davidson, which walloped #8 Wofford 82-49, to waltz to a conference championship, NCAA automatic bid, and possible 8/9-ish seed in the Big Dance.

On the other hand, the upsets also raise the stakes for the #25-ranked, #44 RPI Wildcats (24-6), who would be a bubble contender if they were to need an at-large bid, because a loss in the conference tournament would now mean that they fell to a very bad team. The other remaining semifinalists are #138, #204 and #246 in the RPI.

In fact, if Davidson's going to lose (which they haven't done yet in conference play; they were 16-0 in the regular season), it might be better to do so in the semifinal against Greensboro (the #138 team) than in the final against either #204 Charleston or #246 Elon. But Charleston might be the biggest threat to pull the stunner, despite their distinctly unintimidating ranking and 16-16 record, since the tourney is being played in their back yard, in North Charleston. The semis are Sunday and the title game is Monday.

In other low-major conference tournament news, two Connecticut teams faced potential elimination Saturday, and one was in fact eliminated, while the other lived to play another day. MAAC #5-seed Fairfield lost to #4 Loyola, ending the Stags' season. But America East #2-seed Hartford beat #7 New Hampshire, and will face #6 Boston University in the semis Sunday at 2:30 PM. Also in semifinal action on Sunday: Connecticut's other remaining non-UConn team, NEC #3-seed Sacred Heart, which plays #2 Wagner in the semifinals at 7:30 PM.

USC gets #4 seed in Pac-10

By Brendan Loy

USC's Pac-10 tournament seed hangs in balance as UW and Wazzu head to overtime. If Washington wins, the Trojans will be the #3 seed, with a quarterfinal game against tonight's Arizona-Oregon winner and a likely semifinal against Stanford. If Wazzu wins, they'll be the #4 seed, with a quarterfinal game against Arizona State and a likely semifinal against UCLA.

All this because of USC's impressive win over Stanford earlier today, which gave them a shot at the #3 seed.

UPDATE: Despite multiple chances to win, the Huskies coug it, and Wazzu wins 76-73 in 2 OTs. So it'll be #4 USC vs. #5 ASU in the first round of the Pac-10 tourney, with the winner taking on either #1 UCLA, #8 Washington or #9 Cal in the semifinals.

Obama wins Wyoming

By Brendan Loy

He's up 58% to 41% with 91 percent of the precincts reporting.

Our long-distance babysitter

By Brendan Loy

Back in December, as I pondered what to buy Becky for our second wedding anniversary, I had a brainstorm: wouldn't it be cool to get her (er, us) tickets to the Ron White comedy show on March 8 in downtown Knoxville? Becky's a huge live comedy fan generally, and a Blue Collar Comedy fan specifically, so I knew she'd love it.

There was only one problem: by March 8 we'd have a two-month old, so we'd need a babysitter. And I figured new mom Becky wouldn't want to entrust our brand-new little one to just any old babysitter. But I knew Loyette's SHA-girl "aunties" all wanted to come visit at some point, so I figured maybe I could get one of them to come out that (i.e., this) weekend. I e-mailed Kristy, she enthusiastically agreed to come visit, and long story short, yesterday she flew in from Denver, and tonight she'll be babysitting Loyette while Becky and I go out on out first real post-baby date.

You know your friends rock when they'll fly in from 1,500 miles away to babysit. :) Anyway, here's a shot of Loyette and her Aunt Kristy at the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame this afternoon:

Awww.

P.S. Here's a photo Kristy took of me blocking Becky's shot at the Hall of Fame's court:

Fight on Trojans! Beat the Farm!

By Brendan Loy

USC leads Stanford, 45-35, with 16:51 left at the Galen Center. If the Trojans win and Washington State loses to UW tonight, USC will be the #3 seed in the Pac-10 tournament, and any possible Loy-Tran bet-deciding USC-UCLA game wouldn't happen until the conference final. If USC loses or Wazzu wins, the Trojans will be the #4 seed, setting up a possible semifinal matchup with the top-seeded Bruins.

In other news, last year's Notre Dame-conquering Big South champion, Winthrop, earned another auto bid to the NCAAs, joining Cornell on that short list and sending regular-season champ UNC-Asheville to the NIT as that tournament's first automatic qualifier.

Later today, three Tennessee teams will try to earn automatic NCAA bids of their own, as Cinderella story #6 seed Tennessee State, 15-16 and #215 in the RPI, faces #1 seed Austin Peay, also from Tennessee, in the Ohio Valley title game (ESPN2, 5pm), and Belmont, yet another Tennessee school, faces Jacksonville in the Atlantic Sun final (ESPN2, 7pm)

No love for Geno

By Brendan Loy

We're at the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame here in Knoxville with Kristy. Geno Auriemma's book doesn't seen to be selling to well at the gift shop. I'm shocked, SHOCKED... :)

Foreign policy experience?

By Brendan Loy

What foreign policy experience?

(See also here.)

On Clinton spin and electoral math

By Brendan Loy

Jonathan Chait on the subject of Clinton spin:

All politicians, including Obama, spin. But the way the Clinton campaign says night is day is just especially audacious. ... I think Obama and his staff say things they at least believe to be essentially true. Working for Clinton has to be a soul-deadening experience.

Chait is echoing Josh Marshall, who wrote last month that "good spin is clever and forward-leaning pitches of actual realities, facts. ... But this Clinton campaign has been doing it in a weird parody mode. Not sharp 'spins' on favorable realities, but aggressive pitches of complete nonsense."

Meanwhile, Obama supporter Nick Beaudrot engages in the "good" kind of spin -- forward-leaning pitches of actual realities -- in his interpretation of those Survey USA polls. Beaudrot's bottom line:

At the moment, Barack Obama is the better general election nominee. Period. Full stop. He will have to spend less time defending blue states. He's competitive in a larger number of red states. And he's more competitive in states that have Senate elections. Barack Obama: because this is the year to bust the map wide open.

Sounds right to me. I hadn't even thought about the Senate angle. But yeah: coattails matter. Even if Obama doesn't win the Great Plains and Mountain West states, he could make it easier for Democratic Senate candidates to win there. Whereas Hillary would make it harder.

P.S. Casey offers a new slogan for Hillary: "I am that rat, America."

Referees strike again: ETSU robbed

By Brendan Loy

One night after Stanford was blatantly robbed of a possible Pac-10 title share by a foul call so bad that even the UCLA players admit they got lucky, highly questionable refereeing struck again in the lower-profile, yet in some sense higher-stakes, setting of the Atlantic Sun quarterfinals.

Unlike NCAA-bound UCLA and Stanford, A-Sun semifinalists Belmont and East Tennessee State were fighting to extend their respective seasons -- win or go home -- when, with 19.4 seconds left and ETSU holding a 1-point lead and the ball, an official took it upon himself to completely change the course of the game by calling a technical foul on ETSU player Kenyona Swader, who appeared to lose his temper slightly after being fouled by a Belmont player. Belmont hit both technical free throws to take the lead, and ultimately won the game.

The TV announcers on Comcast Sports Southeast mostly defended the call, with the analyst repeating several times that Swader "swung an elbow." But his elbow made no contact with anyone, and it didn't even look like he's intentionally doing anything aggressive with it. I don't know what he said, of course, but unless it was about the ugliest, most egregious thing anyone's ever said in the history of college basketball, I'm not convinced that it justifies calling a game-deciding "T." All in all, to me, it looked like a very weak call, and one that's pretty ridiculous to make in that situation. But judge for yourself:

Good grief. Let the players, not the refs, determine who wins and loses. Is that so much to ask?

A verdict for the defense

By Michael Walsh

Mike Tran took his first jury verdict yesterday, and it was a very good one. Almost every count was 12-0 for the defense. Sitting second chair, Mike's been in trial virtually every day since he got sworn in (by his trial judge) in November. A lot of civil litigators go an entire career without ever taking a case that long and complex to trial, much less defensing it. I think he had fun, too. He's only a three-month lawyer and he already has half a dozen really good war stories -- and a huge victory in a trial where the other side's two lawyers had more than 50 years of experience between them. The case won't make the L.A. Times, but it'll probably be in the Daily Journal's Verdicts & Settlements in a few weeks.

Gardner-Webb won't be going dancing

By Brendan Loy

#2-seed Jacksonville beat #6 Gardner-Webb in the Atlantic Sun semifinals tonight, ending any thought of an unlikely trip to the NCAA Tournament for the RPI #192-ranked team that stunned Kentucky at Rupp Arena earlier this season.

Jacksonville will play the winner of the ongoing Belmont-East Tennessee State game. I've been half-watching it with the sound down on the local Comcast Sports network, and it's been insanely entertaining, particularly in the first half, when very little defense was being played and both teams were raining 3s. For example:

That ridiculously long-range ETSU three-pointer, with tons of time left on the shot clock, reminds me of what Ruth Riley used to do for the Notre Dame women's team, back in the day. Amazing range, to be able to effortlessly swish a shot from that distance.

Speaking of amazing shots, here's the video of that Bucknell miracle shot to beat Navy the other night:

Sabres fans, note the Rick Jeanneret reference at the end of the clip!

Meanwhile, in today's big(-ish) Championship Week upset so far, #6 Valparaiso beat #3 Wright State in the Horizon League quarters.

Blogroll suggestions?

By Brendan Loy

In a sure sign of the changing "seasons" here on the Irish Trojan's Blog -- the lull before the Pennsylvania  Primary and the approach of Selection Sunday means that, inevitably, politics will increasingly take a back seat to basketball this month -- I've updated and expanded my College Basketball blogroll, and bumped it up above the Politics blogroll.

As I did with the Politics blogroll, I'd like to ask for your suggestions. Fellow hoops fans: what sites am I missing? Which ones should I take out? I haven't really been reading basketball blogs very much this season, so I don't know what's the new hotness in the CBB blogosphere. Any thoughts will be much appreciated!

And never fear, fellow political junkies. I'll still blog about politics. :) Just maybe not quite as much... but I think there'll be plenty of time for USC/ND/Gonzaga-rooting and Hillary-bashing!

USC will be #3 or #4 seed in Pac-10; possible bet-deciding UCLA game looms

By Brendan Loy

Although the Pac-10 regular-season title was decided in UCLA's controversial overtime escape against Stanford across town, USC's overtime win over Cal was arguably more important. Both the Bruins and Cardinal are, obviously, mortal locks for the Big Dance, and were just fighting over NCAA seeding and Pac-10 bragging rights. But the Trojans have been trying to get off the bubble and into the "lock" category for weeks, and last night's win probably did it.

With the win, USC clinched at least fourth place in the Pac-10, and will finish no worse than 10-8 in what's widely regarded as the best conference in the country. (Put another way, they're 8-8 in the Pac-9. Sorry, Oregon State.) Andy Glockner's most recent Bubble Watch said USC "probably only need[s] one win [in this weekend's homestand against the Bay Area teams] to feel very good about their chances." Well, they got their one win. w00t!

Admittedly, it would be better if they can avoid losing to Stanford and then following it up with a first-round Pac-10 tourney loss, which would leave them at 19-12 overall, with that season-opening loss to Mercer preventing them from reaching 20 wins. But even then, it's hard to imagine the committee leaving home the fourth-place team in the Pac-10, especially given USC's quality wins (and two very impressive near-wins against Top 5 teams), and particularly in this "weak bubble" year. Joe Lunardi currently has the Trojans as a #7 seed, and I very much doubt that two losses to quality teams (Stanford and probably Arizona State) would drop them from that perch all the way out of the tournament.

The bigger question is what the Trojans' Pac-10 tournament seed will be, which has major implications for my bet with Mike Tran. As you'll recall, Mike and I made a high-stakes bet on who would win the season series between USC and UCLA -- if it's the Bruins, I have to rename my NCAA pool after UCLA; if it's the Trojans, he has to humiliate himself in front of Tommy Trojan and photograph it for posterity -- and because the teams split during the regular season, a possible matchup in the Pac-10 tournament would be the decisive rubber match.

UCLA will be the #1 seed. USC and Washington State are tied for third at 10-7 in conference play right now, but the Cougars own the head-to-head tiebreaker, having swept the Trojans. That means the Trojans will be the #4 seed unless they beat Stanford and Wazzu cougs it against Washington in the teams' respective Saturday finales. In that scenario, USC would be the #3 seed. Obviously, the big difference is that USC being the #4 seed would make a semifinal matchup with UCLA highly likely -- the Bruins would simply need to beat the #8 or #9 team, probably Washington or Cal, and USC would simply need to beat the #5 team, probably Arizona State -- whereas USC being a #3 seed would increase the chances that one or both teams would get knocked off before they can meet in the title game (thus causing the bet to be a wash).

Gardner-Webb two wins from Dance

By Brendan Loy

Gardner-Webb -- the team that shocked Kentucky at Rupp Arena back in early November, then went 14-15 for the rest of the season and finished sixth in the Atlantic Sun conference -- is suddenly two victories away from the Big Dance after upsetting #3-seed Stetson in the quarterfinals of the A-Sun tourney yesterday.

The Runnin' Bulldogs will play #2 Jacksonville in the semifinals tonight, and if they win that one, they'd face either #1 Belmont or #4 East Tennessee State in the championship game on ESPN2 tomorrow night at 7:00 PM. All games are at Nashville's Allen Arena, home floor of Lipscomb (whom ETSU eliminated yesterday).

You have to think the ESPN powers-that-be are rooting for Gardner-Webb to reach the title game. They've probably got more name recognition than any team in the history of the Atlantic Sun, thanks to their win over Kentucky. And a possible Cinderella run to the Big Dance by the Wildcat conquerors would be quite a storyline -- and would probably boost ratings for that game -- especially with Kentucky now an improbable bubble contender! It would be like if Appalachian State had somehow been invited to a minor bowl game or something.

Anyway, the rest of yesterday's Championship Week action went according to form. That's bad news for Central Connecticut State and Quinnipiac, the #6 and #5 seeds in the NEC, who gave us such a memorable March Madness-ish moment in late February, but who both lost yesterday in the conference quarterfinals, thus joining Yale on the list of Connecticut Division I men's basketball teams whose seasons are over. (Still alive: UConn, obviously; Sacred Heart, which beat CCSU and advances to the NEC semis; Hartford, the #2 seed in the America East; and Fairfield, the #5 seed in the MAAC. Both the Hawks and the Stags begin conference tournament play on Saturday; Sacred Heart's semifinal is Sunday.)

The lack of upsets yesterday is good news, however, for the Big South conference, which saw its two best teams, #1 UNC Asheville and #2 Winthrop, advance to Saturday morning's title game. Winthrop, as my fellow Domers will recall, knocked off Notre Dame in a 6-11 game last year. However, despite the lack of upsets in the conference tourney, it doesn't look like this year's Big South champ will get such a good seed. Joe Lunardi has UNC Asheville as one of the teams in the play-in game, and Winthrop's RPI is basically the game (#132 rather than #135), so it's pretty likely the winner will be a #16 seed, barring a rash of upsets in other low-major conferences. (E.g., teams like RPI #192 Gardner-Webb making it to the Dance.)

So, what's on top today? Well, there's first-round action in the CAA (the 8-9, 7-10, 6-11, and 5-12 games), MAAC (8-9 and 7-10), America East (8-9), Southern (8-9, 7-10 and 6-11), and the double-byed WCC (5-8, 6-7). There's also the two quarterfinals of the similarly double-byed Horizon League tourney, the Tennessee-dominated semifinals in the Ohio Valley (#1 Austin Peay vs. #4 UT Martin, #2 Murray State vs. #6 Tennessee State -- all of those schools except Murray State are in the Volunteer State), the aforementioned Atlantic Sun semis (with both Belmont and ETSU also representin' Tennessee). And, last but not least, the quarterfinals of Arch Madness -- the Missouri Valley Conference tourney.

A free musical treat

By Brendan Loy

HUGE crowd at the WDVX Blue Plate Special today for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's string quartet and, in the show's second half, renouned Cape Breton Island fiddler Natalie MacMaster. So cool.

Puerto Rico cancels June 7 caucus, schedules June 1 primary

By Brendan Loy

Politico's Ben Smith: "Puerto Rico's Democrats tonight voted to ditch their June 7 caucus, and to replace it with a June 1 primary." More details here.

Although this move prevents any possibility of the Michael Barone scenario, in which Puerto Rico could have been effectively a winner-take-all victory for Hillary Clinton (a scenario that I think wouldn't have happened anyway), it's nevertheless good news for Hillary in two ways:

Walk a mile in a tree's, uh, shoes

By Brendan Loy

Pat Forde was the Stanford Tree for a day during the Cardinal's game against Washington last week. Heh.

Although I must say, if he was sober at the time, I'm not sure he really got the true Stanford Tree experience.

Fun with Electoral College maps!

By Brendan Loy

A new set of Survey USA 50-state polls on McCain-Obama and McCain-Clinton general election matchups show McCain losing narrowly to either candidate (280-258 to Obama, 276-262 to Clinton), but on the basis of very different electoral maps.

Survey USA has Obama winning nine states that Hillary doesn't: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, Virginia, and New Hampshire. They also say he'll win two of Nebraska's three congressional districts, but lose the state.

Meanwhile, they show Clinton winning five states that Obama doesn't: Arkansas, Florida, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Inching toward legitimate votes in MI, FL

By Brendan Loy

The movement toward a "re-vote" in Michigan and Florida -- which would not actually be a "re-" anything, but rather the first legitimate primaries they've held, as I'll keep stubbornly pointing out -- appears to be steadily gaining momentum.

The Obama campaign now says it will "support whatever the DNC rules are, including a fair remedy to this problem." And the aforeblogged Hillary pivot toward accepting "re-votes," raised first by Terry McAuliffe and then by Ted Strickland, continued today as prominent Clinton supporter Ben Nelson added his voice to the "re-vote" chorus, and Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson signaled a possible opennness toward such a scenario: "Given how well we did in those states, were there to be a primary, we would have a good opportunity to do well again."

Wolfson then reiterated the campaign's official line: "Our position is that the voters of Michigan and Florida have spoken." But that position is entirely untenable once the "re-vote" option comes to be seen as a viable alternative, which appears to be happening.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Seven people slain by two terrorists at Jewish seminary at entrance of Jerusalem, police tell AP. Terrorists also dead.

Hillary's only hope: the popular vote

By Brendan Loy

I think Jonathan Alter is right:

I've asked several prominent uncommitted superdelegates if there's any chance they would reverse the will of Democratic voters. They all say no. It would shatter young people and destroy the party.

Clinton's only hope lies in the popular vote—a yardstick on which she now trails Obama by about 600,000 votes. Should she end the primary season in June with a lead in popular votes, she could get a hearing from uncommitted superdelegates for all the other arguments that she would make a stronger nominee (wins the big states, etc.). If she loses both the pledged delegate count and the popular vote, no argument will cause the superdelegates to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters. It will be over.

Of course, a big question is, which popular vote? The Clinton campaign is currently quoting the popular vote including the January "primaries" in Michigan and Florida, but that's absurd -- at least with regard to Michigan, where Obama wasn't on the ballot. Moreover, Clinton herself said, months before Michigan voted, that "it's clear this election they're having isn't going to count for anything."

Another must-read for political junkies

By Brendan Loy

Peter Baker and Anne E. Kornblut have a fascinating story in today's Washington Post about the ongoing turmoil within the Clinton campaign, with a heavy focus on how everybody hates Mark Penn.

A lot of focus will inevitably fall on the portion of the article that quotes Clinton aides shouting the f-word at one another, but I actually think the buried lede is this:

[The campaign] essentially did not compete in smaller states holding caucuses [on Super Tuesday]. Clinton, feeling burned by Iowa, had become allergic to caucuses, deeming them unfair.

Ickes and political director Guy Cecil argued that such states were important because even if she lost, she would pick up delegates with a strong showing. That would soon become clear. Clinton racked up big wins in California, New Jersey and even Kennedy's Massachusetts. But she lost the caucus states, and because of the party's proportional rules, it cost her.

"That was one of the biggest blunders we had," a senior official said.

We already knew that the decision to "skip" the caucuses was a huge blunder, but the general assumption up until now has been that it was a sign of arrogance on the campaign's part -- they skipped the caucuses because they made a fatally flawed calculation that they didn't need 'em, they could win without 'em. In contrast to that CW, this article makes it sound like it was not really a strategic decision by the campaign at all, but rather a fit of personal pique by Hillary herself, who "deemed "caucuses "unfair" because she lost one.

And thus it emerges that the Clinton campaign's strategy of marginalizing the caucus states -- to the
point of twisting the results in a way that totally disenfranchises the voters of caucus states, arguing that merely that caucuses should count for less than primaries, but that they shouldn't count at all -- is not so much a spinmeister's gambit as a position based on Hillary's actual, deeply held beliefs. I'm not sure which is worse!

P.S. A secondary "buried lede": the Clinton campaign spent $7 million in South Carolina... and only $300,000 in Wisconsin!!

IED explodes at Times Square recruiting station

By Brendan Loy

A small improvised explosive device exploded in Times Square this morning, blowing a hole through the door of the Army recruiting station there, but causing no injuries, thank goodness. Excerpt:

Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the large Police Department and F.B.I. unit that investigates terrorism, were at the scene of the blast, supporting the Police Department’s Bomb Squad, which along with other police detectives likely will take the lead role in investigating the incident, an F.B.I. official said. The official said that in today’s attack, a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt was seen leaving the scene on a bicycle.

The authorities were looking into whether the explosion was connected to two earlier blasts that were similar in method and timing, the official said. At about 3:40 a.m. on Oct. 26, 2007, two dummy hand grenades that had been fashioned into crude bombs exploded outside the Mexican Consulate at 27 East 39th Street in Murray Hill, shattering windows. The building was not occupied and no one was hurt. At 3:55 a.m. on May 5, 2005, two crude but powerful explosive devices detonated outside the British Consulate at 845 Third Avenue in East Midtown, shattering windows and damaging a planter.

Confederate Yankee has pictures, and says, "This was an act of domestic terrorism." He adds:

I do not, however, feel comfortable blaming any specific anti-war group for this act, or even pinning this as an anti-war act at this point in time.

Anti-war groups, in general, are non-violent in nature, and those that lean towards the anarchist fringe that are violence prone tend towards vandalism, and generally, don't have the technical expertise to manufacture even such a simple device.

Whoever built this bomb may have sympathies towards the anti-war movement and/or anti-military feelings, but I would be surprised to find them affiliated officially with any specific anti-war or anti-military group, and would be even more surprised if anyone inside one of these groups had advance knowledge of the attack.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

10 years on: the Alumni Road shootings

By Brendan Loy

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Newington lottery shootings  -- a.k.a. the "lottery massacre," or as I called it in The Living Room Times the next day, the "Alumni Road massacre." Disgruntled state lottery employee Matthew Beck shot and killed four co-workers, then himself, at the Connecticut lottery headquarters on the road behind the high school's athletic fields, with the last two deaths literally occurring in the NHS football parking lot.

There was a moment of silence at 8:45 this morning in memory of the slain employees: state lotto director Otho Brown; chief financial officer and former New Britain mayor Linda Mlynarczyk (formerly Blogoslawski); vice president of operations Rick Rubelmann; and information systems director Michael Logan. Governor Jodi Rell, who was lieutenant governor on March 6, 1998, issued the following statement:

On that horrible morning, four devoted public servants were killed and the lives of their colleagues were forever altered. Sadly, Connecticut has all too often seen state employees such as highway workers and state police officers killed in the line of duty. Yet the events of March 6, 1998, are etched in our memory with particular shock. I ask that state residents pause with me on Thursday morning to pray for the victims, their fellow lottery employees and their families.

Amen.

I was out sick from school that day, and slept till sometime after noon. When I woke up, I found several messages on the answering machine from my parents, telling me there'd been a shooting at lottery headquarters, near the high school. (If I remember correctly, they'd heard about it because the shooter had been a member of their union.) I quickly turned on CNN, to find live coverage of the tragedy in my hometown. Helicopters were hovering overhead; satellite trucks were everywhere. While I'd been sleeping, Newington had become the center of the nation's attention. I logged on to AOL and saw an article beginning with words I never thought I'd read: "NEWINGTON, Conn. (AP)." The article went on to describe Newington as a "small, sleepy town" -- my hometown was a cliché for a day.

This was during my junior year, only a few months after the deaths of Bob and Jen. Those tragedies had hit the NHS community harder, of course, since they were more personal and specific to the high school, rather than being a mere matter of traumatic proximity. Still, the lottery massacre certainly contributed to the overall sense of 1997-98 being a rather hellish year at Newington High School. It also came at a time when school shootings were becoming major news items: the Pearl and Peducah tragedies had occurred a few months earlier, and the Jonesboro massacre would take place 2 1/2 weeks later. (Columbine was over a year away.) Although the lottery shootings were not actually at the school, they were close enough that I'd say they definitely reinforced a general feeling of edginess about such things.

Long term, the shootings led to a new gun control law in Connecticut, which has since been used to confiscate more than 1,200 guns from "people who are considered a serious danger to themselves or others." Also, the Hartford Courant won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the shootings.

Bucknell stuns Navy on 40-foot bank shot in third OT

By Brendan Loy

One week ago, when Navy beat American to take over first place in the Patriot League, it looked like the Midshipmen were en route to their first regular-season conference title since 2000 -- and, more importantly, guaranteed home-court advantage throughout the league tournament, putting them in the driver's seat for their first NCAA Tournament berth in a decade.

But then on Saturday, Navy lost to Colgate, American won over Lafayette, and suddenly the Eagles were the conference's #1 seed, despite having been swept by the Middies in the season series. Still, the #2-seeded Midshipmen just needed three wins in the conference tournament, and all that would be forgotten.

They couldn't even get one.

Last night, playing at home against #7-seed Bucknell -- the team that wowed the college-basketball world four years ago with a win over Kansas that I predicted :) -- mighty Navy lost in about the most heartbreaking fashion imaginable, blowing a 17-point second-half lead and ultimately losing in triple overtime on a desperation half-court heave at the buzzer:

[After taking the inbounds pass with 2 seconds left, down 86-84, Bucknell senior John] Griffin got just across halfcourt before heaving a 40-footer. The ball banked off the backboard and swished through the nets, giving the seventh-seeded Bison an 87-86 3OT win over second-seeded Navy that was every bit as improbable as that 2004 NCAA Tournament win against the Jayhawks.

"Thank goodness the Navy backboards are soft," Griffin said. "Whatever it takes at this point, that's what every team is saying at this point -- do whatever it takes to play another day." ...

"It's sort of like a dream that replays in your mind," Griffin said. "Everyone who's played basketball has envisioned himself in that environment."

The official Bucknell site is calling it a "miracle" shot, and "one of the most improbable finishes in Bucknell basketball annals":

Griffin's game-winning shot was the last in a flurry of clutch plays from both teams in the final seconds. Only a minute earlier Griffin hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key that tied the game at 81. Chris Harris answered with his own 3-pointer to put Navy ahead 84-81 with 58 seconds left, but Bison freshman G.W. Boon hit the shot of his life, a tying 3-pointer with 41 seconds left. Harris tried to win it with a three for Navy, but T.J. Topercer put back his miss with three seconds left to give Navy an 86-84 lead.

Justin Castleberry then inbounded to Griffin on the run, and Griffin juked around one defender before letting fly from just inside the "N" logo at center court. The ball hit the center of the box on the backboard and banked in, setting off a wild celebration from the Bucknell bench.

Wow. It sounds like Quinnipiac's win over CCSU, except it happened in a single-elimination, win-or-go-home conference tournament. Anybody know where I can find a video?

Although it was the most dramatic, Bucknell's stunner over Navy wasn't the only upset in yesterday's Championship Week action. Also in the Patriot League, #5 Army topped #4 Lehigh, 64-61 in OT -- so, improbably enough, Army (6-8 in conference play) is still alive for an NCAA bid, while the season is over for archrival Navy (9-5). I'm sure this fact is lost on no one at either academy.

Also pulling an upset yesterday were the Troy Trojans, the worst team in the Sun Belt, knocking off homestanding Louisiana-Lafayette in a 12-over-5 shocker. Everything else went according to form in the Sun Belt, Patriot League and Atlantic Sun, the three conferences with tournament action yesterday.

So, what's on tap today? Well, we've got two more Atlantic Sun quarterfinals (the #1 and #2 seeds play the day before the #3 and #4 seeds, I guess to give them a day's rest as a reward for their regular season success), the Big South semifinals (featuring the top 4 seeds -- #1 UNC Asheville vs. #4 Liberty, #2 Winthrop vs. #3 High Point), the NEC quarters (including #6 Central Connecticut State at #3 Sacred Heart, 7:00 PM), and first-round action the Missouri Valley (#7 Missouri State vs. #10 Evansville, #8 Indiana State vs. #9 Wichita State). Complete schedule here.

Oh, and if you're wondering what's next for Bucknell, Army, and the rest of the Patriot League: the semifinals are Sunday (#5 Army at #1 American, #7 Bucknell at #3 Colgate) and the championship game is next Friday, March 14.

Hillary's hope

By Brendan Loy

RealClearPolitics's Jay Cost has an excellent analysis of what it will take for Hillary Clinton to make a "moral claim" on the Democratic nomination.

On the flip side, the best argument for the superdelegates to coalesce around Obama, and end this thing sooner rather than later, is simply this: Clinton can only win the nomination in a bloodbath. She cannot win it cleanly. Obama can.

YEAAARRH!!! Dean lays down the law on Michigan, Florida delegate battle

By Brendan Loy

The most intense debate over Florida and Michigan since the 2006 BCS controversy heated up late today, as the governors of the two states issued a statement demanding -- demanding! -- that the Democratic Party find a solution to the ongoing delegate impasse. Never mind that Governors Granholm and Crist are the very people who effectively disenfranchised their own constituents by moving their states' primaries to forbidden dates, thus inviting the parties' promised delegate-stripping penalties. They now want the DNC to fix the mess that the states themselves created:

"The right to vote is at the very foundation of our democracy. This primary season, voters have turned out in record numbers to exercise that right, and it is reprehensible that anyone would seek to silence the voices of 5,163,271 Americans. It is intolerable that the national political parties have denied the citizens of Michigan and Florida their votes and voices at their respective national conventions."

Look, I don't deny that the "disenfranchisement" thing is a real issue, but it's pretty hard to stomach this sort of righteous rhetoric coming from two governors who walked into this situation with their eyes wide open. Just as Obama says to his supporters, "we are the change we seek," I say to Governors Granholm and Crist: you are the disenfranchers you decry!

Anyway, DNC chairman Howard Dean is having none of it:

"We're glad to hear that the Governors of Michigan and Florida are willing to lend their weight to help resolve this issue. As we've said all along, we strongly encourage the Michigan and Florida state parties to follow the rules, so today's public overtures are good news. The rules, which were agreed to by the full DNC including representatives from Florida and Michigan over 18 months ago, allow for two options. First, either state can choose to resubmit a plan and run a party process to select delegates to the convention; second, they can wait until this summer and appeal to the Convention Credentials Committee, which determines and resolves any outstanding questions about the seating of delegates. We look forward to receiving their proposals should they decide to submit new delegate selection plans and will review those plans at that time. The Democratic Nominee will be determined in accordance with party rules, and out of respect for the presidential campaigns and the states that did not violate party rules, we are not going to change the rules in the middle of the game.

Amen, Howard!

Said a source close to Dean: "Everyone seems to be asking what the DNC will do. But the question is: what will the state parties do."

According to Politico's Ben Smith, the Clinton campaign's "official line remains to reject re-votes in Florida and Michigan." But as I've noted previously, there have been some hints of that position softening in the last couple of days. In particular, it sure sounded like Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland was endorsing a re-vote last night:

I expect the Clinton position will continue to soften. Demanding re-votes (actually, the first and only legitimate votes), instead of demanding that the illegitimate delegate slates be seated, is obviously the right move for them, both morally and strategically. Prepping for an August credentials fight is a losing proposition for them; fighting for re-votes is a winning one. How can Obama argue against such a proposal? If he does, he'll look as shamelessly opportunistic and self-serving as Clinton usually does.

Bottom line, if she plays her cards right, a "re-vote" -- unlike a "just count the delegates" gambit -- is something Hillary can actually make happen. And what's more, it's the right thing to do.

Anyway, very interesting stuff. This issue is definitely not going away.

P.S. What's the statute of limitations on referring to the Dean Scream in headlines about the former Vermont governor and/or his home state? At least five years, right? Phew. :)

It's 3 AM, your children are asleep, and Barack Obama is black. Black!!

By Brendan Loy

Kos: Clinton campaign making Obama "blacker." And blatantly lying about it, to boot! Lovely! (Hat tip: yea.)

[UPDATE: Upon further review, I think this story is much ado about not much. On the one hand, Clinton certainly hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt, but on the other hand, this seems, just on its face (no pun intended), more likely to be a slightly ham-handed application of a standard negative-ad tactic than anything racially motivated... and I don't think I can justify imposing a double standard on anti-Obama ads just because he's black and people are hypersensitive to it.

As I said in comments, "I guess I've gotten cynical enough about Hillary where I'm a bit too eager to ascribe the worst possible motivations to her." But I'm going to walk this one back a bit.

Original post after the jump.]

It's Championship Week!

By Brendan Loy

You may have missed it amid all the political drama -- I know I did -- but Championship Week, which actually lasts the better part of two weeks, began yesterday with first-round games in the Horizon League and quarterfinals in the Big South and Ohio Valley conferences. There were two upsets: #8 Loyola over #5 Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Horizon, and #6 Tennessee State over #3 Morehead State in the OVC.

The action continues tonight with the Sun Belt first round, the Patriot League quarterfinals, and two of the four Atlantic Sun quarters. Probably the most interesting storyline comes out of the Patriot, where #2-seed Navy is looking for its first NCAA bid in a decade. They host recent Big Dance (and Brendan Loy) darling Bucknell, the #7 seed, in the quarters tonight.

Here's the full schedule. Tomorrow, the first of "my teams" puts its season on the line, as NEC #6-seed Central Connecticut State travels to #3 Sacred Heart for a conference quarterfinal. The Blue Devils haven't had a great season, but all they gotta do is win three straight (probably against #3, #2 and #1, in that order), and they're in! God, I love March.

Heh.

By Brendan Loy

TPM Café contributor cscs: "I think one thing is clear this far into the Democratic primary race: Both Obama's and Clinton's supporters must now drop out of the race."

Jerome Armstrong's fuzzy logic

By Brendan Loy

Jerome Armstrong, father of the netroots, has a post up on MyDD arguing that "Obama has a huge electability problem in [Ohio]." Armstrong's evidence?

[Obama] took a total of 5 counties [in last night's primary], and lost in 82 counties. ... You don't win a general election in Ohio if you can only win in 5 counties.

Arrrgh. This is such obviously, transparently flawed reasoning. As I've noted previously, "winning a primary in a given state [or county] does not mean you'll win the general election there, and likewise, losing a primary doesn't imply that you'll lose the general."

In a Democratic primary, between two Democratic candidates, some Democrat has to lose every county. (And every state, for that matter. But cf., Hillary's bogus swing-state argument.) The fact that somebody loses in the primary doesn't in any way suggest that the losing candidate couldn't win in November, running against a Republican. Those are two entirely separate calculations.

The fact is, in order to win in November, either Obama or Clinton will need to win the votes of a large majority of the Democrats who supported his/her opponent in the primaries. But it's impossible, by definition, for either of them to win a majority of their opponent's votes when they're running against each other. Again: someone's gotta lose. So a loss, by itself, tells us nothing about the November landscape.

Put another way: a vote for Clinton, without more, does not imply "I would never vote for Barack Obama." And a vote for Obama, without more, does not imply "I would never vote for Hillary Clinton."

Armstrong's argument could be just as easily, and with equal validity (i.e., none), be turned against Hillary Clinton:

She lost all of Ohio's major urban counties. You don't win a general election in Ohio if you can't win the urban counties. Clinton has a huge electability problem in Ohio.

But that's crap! Obama's victories in those urban counties in no way suggest that Hillary would lose to John McCain there. Likewise, Clinton's victories in various "swing" counties (as well as tons of solidly Republican counties) tells us nothing about her, or Obama's, general-election prospects there. Nothing. Nilch. Nada.

Simply put, last night's Ohio results provide no valid cause for concern about either candidate's chances in November, because primary elections simply are not a remotely reliable or relevant gauge of general-election prospects.

Well... maybe not quite no valid cause for concern. This, I'll admit, is a little disconcerting:

[B]oth exit polling and copious anecdotes from my colleagues on the trail suggest that some Ohioans were less ready than white voters elsewhere to elect, as Obama says, a black guy with a funny name. ... [T]he exit polls had about 20% of Democrats (and these are Democrats, remember) saying that race was a factor in their decision; of those, three quarters went for Clinton.

That data point is, I must admit, potentially a reason to worry about Obama's general-election chances. (If Ohio's Democrats cite race as a reason for voting against the black guy, what will happen when you add Republicans and independents into the mix?) TNR's John B. Judis elaborates:

The exit polls ask voters whether the "race of the candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote. If one looks at the percentage of Clinton (and earlier Edwards) voters who said it was "important," that is a fair estimate of the overall percentage of primary voters who were not inclined to vote for Obama because he was black. ...

In some February 5 states, the overall percentage of white (or Latino) primary voters who voted for white candidates partly because of race was pretty high. It was 9.5 percent, for instance, in New Jersey. In the general election, that percentage is likely to double; and some of these additional voters will be white working class or Latino voters that a Democratic candidate needs to win. In Wisconsin, the number was very low--only 6 percent. But in Ohio, a crucial swing state, it was 11.4 percent. That's a real danger sign for Obama in a state where elections can be decided by one or two percentage points.

If Armstrong wants to build a case that Obama has an electability problem, those are the numbers he should be citing, and then maybe he'd have a respectable argument. But the mere fact, without more, that Obama lost a bunch of Ohio counties to Clinton, is an absolutely ridiculous basis for such an analysis.

P.S. It should be noted that people who cite "race" as an important factor in their vote, and then vote for the white candidate, are not necessarily racists. They may simply be partisan Democrats who are worried about electability, and believe that other people, who are racists, would derail Obama in November. Such a stance enables racism, but it is not itself based on racism, as such. More importantly, this rationale would not carry over to a general election.

A more complete election calendar

By Brendan Loy

There will be a lot of talk in the coming days about how only 612 pledged delegates remain to be allocated in the Democratic presidential race; 2,642 have already been given out. However, those numbers aren't entirely accurate, technically speaking.

As I've explained before, most of the states that have held caucuses to date haven't actually allocated their national convention delegates yet. Rather, they've allocated and elected delegates to county, district and/or state conventions, which will in turn apportion and select delegates to the national convention, often in a multi-stage process. For instance, Iowa, the state that got this crazy primary season going just over two months ago, won't actually finish allocating its national delegates until June 14! Anyway, when you add it all up, there are actually 965 pledged delegates still to be allocated.

Rather than recognizing this procedural reality, the media's delegate counts generally extrapolate from the Election Day results and pretend those extrapolations are final, assuming that the various county, district and state conventions will reflect the election results and will produce no surprises. Making such an assumption is probably preferable to simply ignoring the technically-unallocated caucus delegates, as the New York Times is doing, because in truth, major surprises are unlikely -- and ignoring the caucuses altogether is much more misleading, in terms of providing an accurate picture of the "state of the race," than ignoring the formalities.

However, with the candidates scraping and clawing for every delegate, it would be foolish to completely ignore the forgotten election calendar. While major shifts are unlikely, it's entirely possible we could see at least a handful of delegates going in unexpected directions due to procedural snafus and shenanigans, back-room deals, and people simply changing their minds. So, after the jump, I've combined the "forgotten calendar" of low-profile delegate-selection events with the primary and caucus calendar, to produce a more complete picture of what the next few months will look like, if this nomination battle continues into the summer.

Well, there it is

By Brendan Loy

So, Hillary's "firewall" holds. It looks like she'll win by a large margin in Ohio, and a narrow one in the Texas primary.

Given the delegate math, it remains very, very difficult to see how she can win the nomination, barring a major Obama collapse that causes both voters and superdelegates to have some serious buyer's remorse (and fast). Moreover, in the big picture, she's clearly in far worse shape than she hoped to be by this point, even as of Super Tuesday's immediate aftermath. (Various Clinton surrogates are on record as saying in mid-February that they expected to be ahead, or nearly tied, in the delegate count after Texas and Ohio. Instead they're still down by triple digits.)

But certainly, this means she'll fight on, at least to Pennsylvania on April 22. That's a long seven weeks away, and as one commentator on Fox pointed out, she really has nowhere to take her newfound "momentum." She'll lose Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi on Tuesday, and then run into an empty calendar (well, except for those low-profile delegate-selection events) with no opportunities to convert momentum into delegates.

Ultimately, her success will depend not really on winning primaries (which, barring a game-changing event, she can't realistically do consistently and convincingly enough to turn the pledged-delegate tide), nor on swaying large numbers of superdelegates (which she can't realistically do without first turning the pledged-delegate tide), but rather on shaping the campaign narrative in such a way that an Obama collapse -- i.e., a game-changing event, or series of events -- can occur. It's all about the news cycles now.

P.S. A less obvious ramification of Hillary's success on Ye Olde Super Tuesday is that it severely complicates the transition from obsessive political blogging to obsessive college-basketball blogging here on the Irish Trojan's Blog. :)

P.P.S. Speaking of the blog, I'm going to un-mark the open thread, so it can return to its natural place in the post chronology. If you want to view all of my posts from yesterday, click here.

Shenanigans!

By Brendan Loy

Y'all know I support Obama over Clinton, but if the facts reported by Fox's Steve Brown are true, I don't like this... I don't like it one bit:

In the end, of course, Hillary won Ohio, so this probably didn't matter (though I haven't looked at the district delegates). But whatever the facts of this particular situation, this business of judges arbitrarily ordering certain polling places to stay open later than others is a big, and growing, problem. (It would be an even bigger problem if we elected the president by popular vote. In fact, I may add something about this issue to my Electoral College paper.)

We need to improve the rules that are set up beforehand for dealing with contingencies like bad weather -- and then we need to stick with those rules. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is obviously wrong when she claims that "things like flooding and ice and bomb threats" are "things no one can predict." All you had to do is watch the Super Tuesday television coverage a few weeks back, when it was reported that tornadoes had literally destroyed polling places in Arkansas and Tennessee, to know that severe weather can disrupt voting. As for the foreseeability of election-day "bomb threats"... well, um, New York City had an election scheduled for September 11, 2001. 'Nuff said.

I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem, but the piecemeal system we have now is no good. It invites abuse by candidates and judicial activism by judges, and it will seriously erode whatever public confidence remains in our election system if it continues unchecked.

P.S. Oh, and I'm sick and tired of "ballot shortages." For heaven's sake, print three or four times as many ballots as you think you'll need. At this point, there's no reason for anyone ever to be "surprised" by high turnout. Heck, why not simply print any many ballots as there are registered voters? Surely ink and paper aren't that expensive these days, and the additional costs would be well worth it, IMHO, to avoid this constant drumbeat of "WE RAN OUT OF BALLOTS!!!" nonsense.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Sen. Hillary Clinton wins the Texas primary, CNN projects; Texas caucus results yet to come.

Fox: Hillary wins Texas primary

By Brendan Loy

Hillary: "battleground states" include AZ, AR, CA, NY, NJ, MA, OK, TN, RI

By Brendan Loy

I know I'm a broken record on this point, but I am absolutely mystified at how Hillary can count solid red states (Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee) and solid blue states (California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island) -- two of which are her home states -- as among her triumphant "battleground state" victories, yet none of Obama's victories "count." How absolutely bizarre and ridiculous. Is she seriously contending that Obama would lose New York in November, or that she, Hillary, can win Oklahoma? Good grief. What a maddeningly, transparently bogus argument!

The thing is, I actually think recent events, including tonight's results, have opened up some legitimate lines of attack for the Clinton spinmeisters. They need to stick with those, and stop with this indefensible, self-serving nonsense about which states "count."

Ugh.

By Brendan Loy

Why must Hillary constantly talk about how her campaign proves to "little girls" that "anything is possible" -- thus repeatedly and explicitly injecting the gender card into the campaign -- while Obama never (that I've seen, anyway) feels the need to talk about how his candidacy proves to little black kids that "anything is possible"? His message of hope and change is universal, whereas hers seems so often to be gender-specific.

Of course, I fully support the gender equality message that she's advancing, particularly now that I myself am the father of a little girl. But I don't appreciate her constantly using that message for such blatantly self-interested reasons. I don't have to support Hillary Clinton in order to prove to my daughter that "anything is possible," thank you very much.

Identity politics sucks. Can we please decide this nomination based on issues, not genitalia or skin color?

Gov. Strickland: "Let us go to Michigan and Florida!"

By Brendan Loy

Ohio's governor and prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Ted Strickland came dangerously close to a Howard Dean moment just now, warming up the crowd for Hillary's victory speech in Columbus, as he listed the states that Hillary will now continue to "fight" in -- concluding, to loud cheers and applause, "And let us go to Michigan and Florida!"

Fox News's Brit Hume and Bill Kristol then proceeded to talk at length about a possible credentials/rules fight at the convention over those states' disputed delegate slates from the January primaries, but IMHO, they missed the point entirely. Strickland's comments appeared to pretty straightforwardly confirm Hillary's pivot to a new strategy on Michigan and Florida: pressing for a re-vote instead of (indefensibly) demanding that the earlier null-and-void primaries be honored.

This strategic shift, predicted several weeks ago by blogger FlyOnTheWall, is exactly what Team Clinton should be doing, and although Hillary might well win those states again, I would support a re-vote, as I explained yesterday and elaborated earlier today. If you're going to count those states, re-votes (actually the first real votes, since the previous primaries were intrinsically meaningless) are the way to do it.

On the other hand, Hillary herself just asserted in her victory speech that "we've won Florida... [and] Michigan." Hmm.

UPDATE: Here are Governor Strickland's comments, followed by an entertaining Fox News roundtable discussion of the issue:

Ron Paul wins!

By Brendan Loy

No, John McCain's lone remaining challenger didn't win any states tonight. But he did win the primary in his district to keep in House seat. Results here.

There's no word yet on Kucinich.

UPDATE: Looks like Kucinich won, too.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

CNN projects that Hillary Clinton will win the Ohio Democratic primary.

Fox: Hillary wins Ohio

By Brendan Loy

Brit Hume: "As you can see, the margin is now almost 200,000 votes. There are a lot of votes still out there, we concede, but Hillary Clinton wins Ohio, and wins it, possibly -- for all we know, she may win it comfortably."

Wolf Blitzer, Wolf Blitzer

By Brendan Loy

As I noted below, Wolf Blitzer was in full self-caricature mode when he announced that John McCain had clinched the GOP nomination: the rambling run-on sentences, the senseless repetition of people's names and other random words, the redundant recitation of the same facts over and over again, the odd choices of verbal emphasis, the constant talk about everything being "important" and "historic," the endless self-referential comments, the unnecessary references to "right now," "standing by," etc., etc.

I patched together a video of the carnage:

Fox > CNN?

By Brendan Loy

I've been mostly watching CNN throughout this primary season, and when I've occasionally flipped over to Fox News, I've found its coverage to be neither significantly better nor significantly worse than CNN's. But just now, flipping over to Fox, I find that they're interviewing one of their "decision desk" guys, who is actually explaining what the numbers mean, what to expect, what to watch for, etc. The analysis is much more helpful than CNN's flashy touch-screen map coupled with John King's relatively inane and obvious pseudo-analysis.

Clinton, Obama battle behind the scenes

By Brendan Loy

While the vote-counting in Ohio and Texas continues apace, a pair of pitched behind-the-scenes battles are also raging between the Clinton and Ohio camps. One involves superdelegates:

A behind-the-scenes battle broke out late Tuesday over superdelegates who had secretly committed to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), with Clinton campaign officials scrambling to “freeze” them before they announced support for him.

The battle reflects the trench warfare that both campaigns expect if the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination stretches on to the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.

The second battle involves the still-ongoing Texas caucuses:

In an extraordinary Clinton conference call -- in which the campaign alleged irregularities in the Texas caucuses -- the top lawyer for the Obama campaign (Bob Bauer) jumped on the call during the Q&A session to rebut the Clinton camp's charges.

The Clinton campaign alleged (among other things) that Obama supporters were confiscating precinct chairman manuals at the caucuses, as well as locking out Clinton supporters from the precincts.

"What is happening tonight is an outrage," said Clinton Texas state director Ace Smith. "It's really disturbing and it's really undemocratic what is going on."

More here.

Regardless of whether the accusations of irregularities are correct, it sounds like absolute chaos at the caucuses, per CNN's reporting.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

CNN projects: Clinton wins Rhode Island; Obama takes Vermont; Texas, Ohio still too close to call.

Interesting development on Fox News election coverage

By Jay Johnson

Maybe Steve Jobs has already gone apoplectic. (Maybe appleplectic?)

Karl Rove is rockin' a MacBook Air on Fox News.

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: Jim Hu has a photo, taken with an iPhone no less:

Hillary wins Rhode Island

By Brendan Loy

So says Fox and MSNBC.

No word yet from Wolf Blitzer, Wolf Blitzer.

UPDATE: CNN, CNN also calls Rhode Island for Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton.

The streak is over!

Huck-a-bye-bye

By Brendan Loy

Huckabee drops out.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Campaign manager: Mike Huckabee will drop out of GOP race.

Wolf Blitzer at his best

By Brendan Loy

"CNN projects John McCain wins the Republican presidential nomination. What a historic night for John McCain, given where he was only a few months ago. So many people had written off his candidacy, they thought he was virtually dead in the water, but John McCain never gave up, and John McCain, John McCain tonight in Texas, and earlier winning in Vermont, earlier winning in Ohio, and John McCain will now have enough delegates, 1,191, that's what you need to capture the Republican nomination, and he has managed to do it. What a night for John McCain."

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

CNN projects John McCain will win the Texas GOP primary, giving him enough delegates to clinch nomination.

CNN projects McCain wins GOP nomination

By Brendan Loy

Texas puts him over the top.

The new firewall: Michigan and Florida?

By Brendan Loy

Team Clinton appears to be pivoting on its Michigan/Florida argument from the indefensible "just count the delegates" line to a far more respectable "hold new primaries" line. Good.

P.S. FlyOnTheWall predicted this several weeks ago.

Huckabee to drop out tomorrow?

By Brendan Loy

Hotline:

A Huckabee senior aide tells NBC/National Journal that Mike Huckabee tonight will congratulate John McCain and will be in touch with the McCain campaign tomorrow from Little Rock to coordinate a concession.

"The handwriting is on the wall," the aide said, and indicated that was the plan whether or not McCain officially reaches 1,191 delegates tonight.

The aide said that Huckabee wants to have contact with McCain tomorrow in Little Rock before deciding what next to do.

(Hat tip: TPM.)

UPDATE: CNN says Huck will bow out Thursday.

Kucinich & Paul

By Brendan Loy

Ron Paul has a very early lead in his primary fight to keep his House seat in Texas.

No results yet from Dennis Kucinich's district in Ohio, but they'll be posted here when they're available.

I've heard of high turnout...

By Brendan Loy

...but this is ridiculous! With 1 percent of the Texas precincts reporting, it's Obama 437,875, Clinton 306,092.

Damn -- those must be some big precincts. Either that, or Joe Kennedy lives, because if 1% of the vote equals 743,967 votes cast, that would mean a grand total of 74 million Democrats went to the polls in Texas, a 580% turnout. :)

UPDATE: I gather from the Texas Secretary of State that some counties have reported all of their "early votes" as a single "precinct." That would explain the oddly huge numbers.

Heh.

By Brendan Loy

Michael Crowley:

In the last couple of hours I've gotten allegedly reliable Ohio exit poll information showing

a) Narrow Obama lead

b) Narrow Hillary lead

c) Hillary blowout

d) Tie

I think from now on political journalists should turn off their BlackBerries from 5-8pm on election nights and, like, go do ESL tutoring or some other charitable work instead.

Further evidence of Crowley's point: Major Garrett says the Obama camp is optimistic about their Ohio prospects "for the first time today," while others talk about an "Obama freefall." Huh?

No Ohio results until 9:00 PM?

By Brendan Loy

Apparently there will be no real numbers from Ohio until 9:00 PM EST:

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has ordered all 88 counties to hold results until after voting concludes in Sandusky County at 9 p.m. The county ran short of ballots, and Brunner went to court to keep the polls open in that county for an extra hour and a half.

And Sen. Barack Obama's campaign is seeking a court order to extend voting hours in Cuyahoga County, where bad weather hindered the ability of some voters to get to the polls.

UPDATE: On the other hand, here are some numbers. I guess some county missed the memo?

Anyway, with a fraction of a percent of the precincts reporting, Hillary leads, 56% to 42% (2,029 votes to 1,526). If no more results come out until 9:00 PM, that 14-point Clinton margin will be on CNN's crawl for quite a while.

P.S. CNN's exit-poll numbers from Ohio suggest a 51% to 48% lead for Clinton. (But, as Ben Smith notes, the exit-poll numbers "sometimes change as the night goes on and pollsters adjust for reality." And as Jonathan Chait points out, a three-point margin is "close enough that the result could easily be off.")

UPDATE 2: Some Cuyahoga County (i.e., Cleveland-area) polling places will indeed stay open late.

Wouldn't it be funny...

By Brendan Loy

...if, with Clinton in Ohio and Obama in Texas tonight for their respective "victory parties," Obama wins Ohio and Clinton wins Texas? Seems possible, based on the early exit-poll numbers.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

CNN projects that John McCain will win the Republican primary in Ohio; Clinton, Obama in competitive race.

YEARRRRHH!!! Obama takes Vermont

By Brendan Loy

Make it 12 in a row for Barack Obama, who has been declared the winner in Howard Dean's home state of Vermont. (Hollerin' Howard, you may recall, won Vermont's primary in 2004 despite having already dropped out of the race.)

Based on the leaked exit poll numbers, it sounds like that'll be the last Democratic primary tonight that the media will be able to "call" right as the polls close.

Exit-poll "second wave" more Obama-friendly: TX, OH, RI deadlocked?

By Brendan Loy

Contrary to earlier reports showing Hillary Clinton "exceeding expectations," the latest exit-poll data -- the so-called "second wave" -- shows Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island all looking like dead heats, "the latter two of which would be pretty substantial surprises," in a good way, from Obama's perspective. Specifically, according to Jim Geraghty:

This is interesting. One of my sources has gotten two sets of exit poll results. It's unclear whether this is different pollsters or, I suspect, different times of day.

For the first set, Obama is up by 2 percent in Ohio, Hillary is up by 2 percent in Texas, Hillary is up by 3 percent in Rhode Island and Obama is up by a 2 to 1 margin in Vermont.

The second set is similarly close - Hillary up by 2 percent in Ohio, the two Democrats tied in Texas, Obama ahead by 2 percent in Rhode Island and a similar 2 to 1 margin in Vermont.

Meanwhile, Right Pundits says, "CLINTON INTERNALS FOR OHIO . . . Clinton 49 Obama 46, Clinton expects to gain about 8 delegates overall."

Sounds like we won't be hearing any early media "calls," except for Vermont, tonight.

P.S. More numbers here: VT - Obama 67-33; OH - Obama 51-49; TX - Obama 51-49; RI - tied 49-49.

Also here: the same as above, except 50-49 Obama in TX.

On the other hand, Matthew Yslesias is "hearing big Hispanic turnout in Texas (good for Clinton) and a huge Clinton edge among late-deciders (obviously good for Clinton)."

Hillary "exceeding expectations" in unweighted exit-poll "first wave"

By Brendan Loy

Via Right Pundits:

2.41pm - It really does appear that Hillary is exceeding expectations in the early data. As we always caution, take first waves as they are meant to be, which is a pile of data that has not been properly normalized for known demographics. More in a minute. ...

3.50 EST - Turnout is much higher than any previous primary, but turnout is LOWER than all the pundits were predicting. Most pundits and those in the know thought turnout would exceed 3 million, some even suggesting it would be closer to 3.5 million. Absent a huge surge this evening, the predictions seem to be off. Young African American turnout is 1/3 lower than expected, maybe they’ll show up in the final wave [of exit poll data]?? ...

4.30 EST - Mood in Obama camp shifting to subdued. They are lowering expectations this afternoon and talking about the next contests like Hillary did in past days. Obama: “We closed the gap, but you know whether it’s going to be enough to actually win is going to depend on turnout. We know there’s not going to be a huge shift in delegates one way or another — just given the math. Which means that either way we will go to Mississippi or Wyoming next week.”

Take it for what, if anything, it's worth. As always, remember the Seven-Hour Presidency of John Kerry.

P.S. Early Ohio data, when available, will be here.

Ye Olde Super Tuesday open thread

By Brendan Loy

On this "original" Super Tuesday ("Super Tuesday Classic," perhaps? Nah, I think I prefer "Ye Olde Super Tuesday"), I'm going to do the same thing I did on "Super Duper Tuesday" last month: I'll keep an "open thread" on top of the homepage all night, so y'all can comment in one place and not have the conversation scroll rapidly down the page as new CNN alerts and other posts appear. Of course, you're free to comment on other posts as well.

Anyway, new posts will appear below.

Required reading for horse-race junkies

By Brendan Loy

Three must-read posts from The New Republic's blogs on tonight's Ye Olde Super Tuesday contests:

• Jonathan Chait's "The Number to Watch on Tuesday Night" 
• Noam Scheiber's "Where Today Will Leave Us"
• Michael Crowley's "The Day After"

Seriously, read 'em.

Also, something else to watch tonight: as MSNBC's First Read points out, two Congressmen you may have heard of -- Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Ron Paul (R-TX) -- face potentially tough primary challenges to keep their House seats. Their districts are Ohio's 10th and Texas's 14th.

Popping the quiff in Texas

By Brendan Loy

Today's big vote in Texas is something of a quantum physics puzzle. The citizens of the Lone Star State will soon pop the quiff and learn whether or not they count!

If Clinton wins, Texas is another big, important state that proves Hillary's mass appeal and electability. If Obama wins, Texas is another meaningless, illegitimate, caucus-tainted sinkhole that's "not in the electoral calculation for the Democratic nominee" anyway. It's Idaho writ large, if you will -- so who really cares about it? Ohio and Rhode Island are the states that matter! :)

(At the moment, of course, in accordance with the paradox of Schrödinger's cat, Texas both counts and doesn't count.)

Anyway, Josh Marshall sums up where things stand:

If the polls bear out, we seem set for a result that will lead to minor or major crowing from the Clinton camp, with a victory in Ohio seeming very likely and at a least a primary popular vote victory in Texas looking like a distinct possibility. The Obama camp will counter, and they'll be right, that judged by the standards of a few weeks ago, these results only amount to Clinton holding on by the skin of her teeth. But the expectations game isn't 'fair'. It's what it is, they're expectations. And there's simply no denying that such an aura of victory has grown up around Obama that losing one or both of these big states (at least the popular vote in Texas, which, remember, also has a caucus that seems likely to bag a lot of delegates for Obama) will be perceived as a very real turnaround.

And yet, look at the delegate counts, or what they seem likely to be. We've run the numbers, and even assuming a very big night for Clinton, she seems unlikely to make more than a small dent in Obama's lead of roughly 150 pledged delegates. Indeed, she could actually do quite well on the popular vote side and end up falling behind a bit further on pledged delegates.

The upshot is that the Clinton campaign may come out of tonight with a major shot in the arm and a round of good press and yet still be in no more realistic a position to win the nomination based on the stubborn tally of delegates.

Sounds about right. But let's wait and see what the voters decide.

It's Longhorn-Buckeye Tuesday!

By Brendan Loy

...or, to be more precise, Longhorn-Buckeye-Catamount-Ram Tuesday!

Really, though, all eyes are on Texas, the land of the Longhorns (and Aggies and Red Raiders and Bears, oh my!). I think we can pretty much assume that Hillary will win icy Ohio and Rhode Island, and Obama will win Vermont. The big question mark, and the state that will determine the day's "winner," is Texas.

And to think, everybody thought Teaxs was giving up its influence on the primary season by sticking with Ye Olde Super Tuesday instead of moving to Super Duper Tuesday like all the cool kids did. Quoth the AP:

AUSTIN — The failure of state legislation to switch the 2008 Texas primary to Feb. 5 from March 4 likely means the presidential primary contest will be decided in other states, some of which bumped up elections to have more clout in choosing the major parties’ nominees.

“There is no doubt that Texas is going to be less relevant and may be irrelevant,” said George Edwards, a political science professor at Texas A&M University.

Hahaha! Oh waiter, one order of crow for Professor Edwards! ;)

Anyway, Halperin has the scoop on tonight's poll-closing times. In EST, they are: Vermont: 7pm. Ohio: 7:30pm. Texas: 8pm, western counties at 9pm (caucuses to follow). Rhode Island: 9pm.

Clinton will be in Columbus, Ohio tonight. Obama will be in San Antonio, Texas. Will they both get to have victory parties? It's possible, although it seems all the late movement is in Hillary's direction, so she may get to declare victory in both states. We shall see.

Eco-nuts prime suspects in ironic home fires

By David K.

The eco-terrorist whack-jobs of the Earth Liberation Front are the likely culprits behind an arson attack which burned down three homes and damaged a fourth in a suburb of Seattle earlier this morning. Whoever set the fires left behind graffiti with the initials ELF which slammed the houses, built as part of the Street of Dreams last year. The multi-million dollar homes were certified green homes, one of them achieving the highest possible rating. All the homes included recycled materials in their construction, water conservation, and other green techniques. Fortunately none of the homes were as yet occupied and no one was harmed.

The eco-morons from the ELF have been responsible for other such attacks in the Pacific Northwest, including setting fire to a horticulture lab at the University of Washington in 2001.

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

"They keep moving the goal posts, but at some point you run out of field." --Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, on the latest Clinton spin.

If Hillary wins narrow, meaningless popular-vote victories in Ohio and Texas tomorrow ("meaningless" because she'll gain very little, if any, ground in the delegate race), and if Team Billary manages to successfully hoodwink the media into painting it as another Clinton "comeback" (as happened on Super Tuesday), I may just jump out the window.

Relatedly, the Clinton camp is now -- incredibly -- touting Hillary's home states of New York and Arkansas on its list of "states that matter." What's particularly telling is that between five and seven of the nine listed states would be expected to be utterly uncompetitive (in one direction or the other) in November, so it's difficult to understand why anyone would premise an electability argument on them. (My full rebuttal to this nonsense is here.)

Will Hillary march forth?

By Brendan Loy

The New York Times's election blog explains the stakes of tomorrow's big vote:

[F]our primary contests on Tuesday could extinguish Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hope of overtaking Senator Barack Obama. ...

Yet the hinge could still swing either way. If Mrs. Clinton carries the behemoths of Ohio and Texas — despite her opponent’s momentum and financial advantage — Mr. Obama may rue this week as both an end and a beginning.

Specifically, Tuesday could be the end of his coronation as Democratic standard-bearer and the beginning of a wrenching springtime struggle. With Clinton victories on Tuesday, neither political realities nor “delegate math” would preclude it.

As an explanation of that last line, the Times goes on to note that "[u]nless Mrs. Clinton quits, either candidate will need votes from the so-called superdelegates." Although that's technically true, it should be noted that there's a huge difference between needing a handful of superdelegates to shore up a clear pledged-delegate majority, versus needing a large majority of superdelegates to overturn a clear pledged-delegate majority. For instance, if Obama continues winning delegates at his current pace, he'd finish with a lead of 1,718 to 1,498. Out of the 820 superdelegates and Edwards delegates*, Obama would need just 306 (37.3%) while Clinton would need 526 (64.1%). How she could possibly convince nearly two-thirds of the unpledged delegates to buck the popular will is beyond me. So I think the "delegate math" is still a major problem for her.

Nevertheless, the Times is right in the big picture: if Obama doesn't land a knockout blow tomorrow, or at least a punch that starts a slow bleed which would get Hillary out of the race within 3-10 days, then this race is going to continue well into the spring. There's nothing on the calendar (with the exception of various low-profile delegate selection events that won't generate any momentum) between next Tuesday (Mississippi) and April 22 (Pennsylvania), so if Hillary isn't out of the race by, say, next Thursday, I can't see what would convince her to get out before late April.

(Hat tip, sorta, on the headline, to C. Stephen Ludlow.)

*This assumes that Edwards gets his 14 Iowa delegates, which is unlikely, as I explained here. But since the fate of those delegates remains uncertain, it makes sense to count them in the non-Clinton/Obama category for now.

P.S. Interesting aside: tomorrow is the original "Super Tuesday." The reason such phrases as "Super Duper Tuesday" arose to describe February 5 was to differentiate it from the true "Super Tuesday," March 4. But as more and more states moved their primaries to February 5, people simply stopped using the "Super Tuesday" label to describe March 4 and started applying it, sans "Duper," to February 5 instead. Yet here we are, on the eve of the original Super Tuesday, and it's more "super" than ever: the entire Democratic race hangs in the balance.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Ecuador's president has ordered troops to the border with Colombia, following a similar move by Venezuela

War in South America?

By Brendan Loy

The Colombia-Venezuela War of 2008? Oh, great.

UPDATE: Make that the Colombia-Venezuela-Ecuador War of 2008. More here, here and here.

Zags, Irish win; Trojans lose

By Brendan Loy

I'd be remiss in my basketball-blogging duties if I didn't point out that Gonzaga beat St. Mary's yesterday to take the WCC lead and probably wrap up an NCAA at-large bid, if they need it. As long as the Zags beat 6-7 Santa Clara tomorrow night, they'll win yet another regular-season conference title.

Also, Notre Dame eked out a win over DePaul. Joe Lunardi currently projects the Irish as a #4 seed, Gonzaga as a #6, and USC as a #7. (But that was before 'SC lost to Arizona State yesterday.)

A re-vote in Florida?

By Brendan Loy

If Florida hadn't moved its primary, it would be a crucial part of Hillary Clinton's "firewall" strategy right now; the Sunshine State was originally scheduled to vote next Tuesday, March 11. Instead, the state is part of Hillary's cynical "throw out the rules" strategy. But could it become a legitimate firewall again, assuming Hillary survives Tuesday? Maybe. Talk of a Florida re-vote picked up steam this weekend after Republican governor Charlie Crist said the state would pay for a new primary. (Crist, a prominent McCain supporter, would doubtless love to play a role in prolonging the Dems' fight.)

From what I understand, the Democratic National Committee edict that stripped Florida and Michigan of their delegates specifically encouraged those states to reschedule their primaries, holding re-votes if necessary. So I'm inclined to think that a new primary or caucus in either Michigan or Florida would be legit and -- unlike Hillary's just-count-the-delegates gambit -- would not constitute "changing the rules in the middle of the game" (since the "rules" specifically allowed for this). As I see it, the Florida and Michigan primaries became illegitimate and irrelevant the moment the DNC stripped them of their delegates, so this wouldn't really be a "do-over"; it would be the first valid opportunity for those states' residents to cast votes in this primary fight. So regardless of whether Clinton or Obama would be favored, I'd be inclined to support this.

Sunsphere

By Brendan Loy

We went up to the Sunsphere's observation deck for the first time. Pretty cool.

D'oh!

By Brendan Loy

Driving past UT with Shannon -- we didn't realize the Kentucky game just got out. We may be on Cumberland for a while. Oh well, at least the Vols won, so it's happy traffic. :)

Baby in the Smokies

By Brendan Loy

Shannon's visiting us this weekend, and today we drove out to the Smokies. Here we are in Cades Cove with a sleepy Loyette:

Shannon, incidentally, sat next to Lady Vols star Nicky Anosike's 6-foot-10 brother, Ifesinachi (a.k.a. "E"), on her flight into Knoxville on Thursday. (He had requested to change seats because he couldn't fit well in his original seat near the back of the plane, and being next to 5-foot-3 Shannon worked well.) She said he was a really nice, friendly guy, and they had a nice time chatting on the flight. Their flight ended up making the news, in the lede of the AP article about Tennessee's senior-night win over Florida on Thursday:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Nicky Anosike's family arrived just after halftime to see her play in her final home game at Tennessee on Thursday night.

By then she and the third-ranked Lady Vols had already taken care of business.

"They are always late. I expected that, and I was prepared for it," she joked after her family's flight from New York was delayed.

Heh.

Anyway, back to today's trip to the Smokies... I also got a couple of nice photos of deer:

Live from New York, it's... Hillary

By Brendan Loy

Hillary Clinton will appear on Saturday Night Live tonight. She's also doing the Daily Show on Monday. I wonder what the strategic thinking here is. Maybe a last-ditch effort to "show off her human side" before Tuesday?

Hillary's plan to delay the inevitable

By Brendan Loy

Here's a plausible-sounding explanation of Hillary Clinton's bizarre-seeming lawsuit strategy in Texas:

There is method to the Clinton campaign's mad preemptive sword rattling over the Texas primary/caucus. They want to delay and disrupt the reporting of the delegate count. They hope that if they win the popular vote, they can avoid, at least for one news cycle, news reports that even if they do so they will very likely lose the delegate fight in Texas and fall further behind Obama in the national delegate contest. ...

The Clinton campaign strategy is to justify taking the fight beyond Texas even if they fall further behind Obama in the national delegate count. To do that, they must cast doubt over the fate of the 67 delegates that will be chosen at the caucus level. ... [For Clinton to] remain viable, the results of the caucus in Texas must be thrown into doubt. Almost any legal challenge will do. The Clinton narrative can be maintained-- but only if their falling further behind in delegates is not reported or is at the least cast into doubt for a news cycle, or two or three news cycles.

This strikes me as an interesting, but ultimately quixotic, strategy. It took the media several news cycles to realize that Obama had emerged from Super Tuesday as the clear front-runner, but realize it they eventually did. Hillary might be able to obfuscate the electoral "facts on the ground" for a while, but ultimately, she can't maintain her campaign's viability purely through smoke and mirrors. If she falls further behind in the delegate count on Tuesday, that'll become clear soon enough, and it will become increasingly ridiculous to pretend she can rally. Unless she, like Huckabee, intends on "majoring in miracles," the mathematical reality has to become a factor at some point, doesn't it? Without large delegate margins in the big states on Tuesday, there is simply no realistic way she can get anywhere near Obama's pledged-delegate total by the end of this thing, barring a total sea change in the dynamics of the race (e.g., Mississippi and North Carolina suddenly becoming Clinton country). That's going to become the storyline eventually, whether on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday.

Also, let's not forget that the two races immediately after Tuesday are the Wyoming caucuses (March 8) and the Mississippi primary (March 11). Neither of those are Clinton-friendly at all. So even if she manages to successfully delay the media's recognition of a March 4 failure, the most likely result is simply a slow bleed -- much like what happened after Super Tuesday, actually, when the media slowly woke up to Hillary's dire straights, helped along by one loss after another in the week that followed. Anyway, I could see the post-Teaxs/Ohio news cycles going something like this:

TUESDAY NIGHT - Inconclusive results, but clearly not a Hillary sweep on her "firewall" day.
WEDNESDAY - Texas caucuses still in doubt, but it looks likely Obama will maintain or increase his delegate lead overall. Rumblings of possible mass superdelegate movement to Obama begin.
THURSDAY - It's now increasingly clear that Obama's Tuesday performance boosted his delegate lead. A bunch of superdelegates join his side.
FRIDAY - More superdelegates and other endorsements for Obama. Pressure mounts on Hillary to bow out. She vows to fight on. MSM analysts increasingly roll their eyes at this.
SATURDAY, MARCH 8 - Obama wins by a landslide in the Wyoming cacuses.
SUNDAY, MARCH 9 - Updated delegate count shows nomination increasingly out of reach for Hillary; primary in Obama-friendly Mississippi looms. Media tone now unabashedly that of a coronation.
MONDAY, MARCH 10 - Last-ditch flailing by Clinton camp, amid more defections and a sense of impending doom.
TUESDAY, MARCH 11 - Obama rolls in Mississippi, gives what looks for all the world like the nominee-presumptive's "I just clinched victory" speech. MSM on-air analysts now openly saying Hillary cannot win, treating her basically like Huckabee.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12 - Hillary finally drops out.