Round 1

After criticizing Tubby Smith yesterday for not putting the ball in the hands of his best players, he went and played Joe Crawford 36 minutes, played Ramel Bradley 33 minutes, and played Randolph Morris as much as his late foul trouble would allow. The result? A big win against a team a lot of people expected to advance past Kentucky. Will he do it again against Kansas, or will he be playing Lukasz Orbzut and Perry Stevenson a combined 25 minutes and simply beg Kansas to blow him out?

Let's look at the results of our contest after round 1.

Scott: 294 points, 10 players remaining
Me: 293 points, 10 players remaining
Jason: 281 points, 7 players remaining
Poseur: 270 points, 9 players remaining
Daniel: 247 points, 6 players remaining

Those "players remaining" stats should reflect that everyone picked Kevin Durant and Acie Law, meaning those guys will have no ultimate impact on this game. Therefore, you should go ahead and subtract 2 from everybody's number.

Daniel had a tough round, and he needs his remaining players to go far in order to get back into it. In particular, he needs for Zabian Dowdell to blow up, because that's the only player he has that Jason does not.

Scott appears to be in the driver's seat at least for now. He's one point ahead of me, and we have a whopping 8 players remaining in common. The only differences are that he has Joakim Noah and Nick Fazekas of Nevada while I have Brandon Rush and Jason Dudley of Boston College. Everyone else will be a wash between me and Scott.

I thought I was sitting pretty when Illinois was beating Virginia Tech by 13. If Illinois hadn't forgotten how to play basketball, I'd be sitting with 11 player remaining, and everyone other than Scott would be down another player. It would be basically a two-man race at that point, and I'd have the upper hand by having the extra player. But alas, Virginia Tech forgot that the object of the game was to score points, and as a result Poseur is still very much in it, though he will be playing from behind.

The tourney itself has been fairly exciting despite the distinct lack of upsets. The dreaded 5-12 matchup produced exactly 0 wins for the 12 seed, and only two double-digit seeds actually won. I'm not going to do the research, but that has to be some kind of a record. Yeah, it's not as good as past years, but maybe VCU and Winthrop can make things exciting for another round or two before we get down to the very best teams.