You might have noticed that I wrote a basketball-related post last week, but I’m actually trying to separate my obsessing about sports from ... well, real stuff. So I posted this year’s bracket at Turrible, which is intended to be my online man cave. Of sorts. Anyway, don’t assume that I posted it elsewhere because, like, I’m ashamed of how bad it is. My terrible predictions had nothing to do with my decision to post it on a blog that no one reads. Nothing. Zero. Am I angry that I’m in last place in my bracket pool? Maybe a little. But my only regret is that my picks were not more bold. Except, if they had been more bold, I wouldn’t be in last place. I mean, how could I have missed St. Mary’s over Villanova? You’ll notice in my bracket notes that I even talk about how bad Villanova is playing; the words “Bad moon rising” were cut off in the scanning process under Villanova’s first round game. And yet I had them advancing into the Sweet Sixteen. I will ask the now-annual, post-second-round question: What was I thinking?
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Photo: Pete SouzaI really geek out out on glimpses of the marked-up copy of other writers, so I was pretty fascinated to see a page of a Presidential speech-in-progress. If you click through to the zoomed-in page, you’ll see that all of Obama’s notes are all copy-edits; there are no developmental “what I’m trying to say here”-style edits. Not sure what that means, but I thought it was interesting. The Flickr caption indicates that the photo was taken “in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress.” Cool.
Geek alert! I’m talking basketball. It’s March, and the madness of the season has overtaken me. Thus, I won’t be offended if you are about to click back to Twitter, or your RSS reader.
I’ll start by not wasting anyone’s time complaining about this year’s tournament pairings. That path is well-traveled.1 And well it should be! The pairings are outrageous! Kansas was punished! Kentucky, Duke, and Syracuse — they’ve all got golden tickets to Indianapolis. Right? Right?
For starters, I’m glad I’m not Kentucky
For so many reasons. Let’s look at the round two match-ups. Texas and Wake Forest have been terrible — horrible — over the past couple of months. But, they’re talented, and each could gel for just long enough to beat anyone in the country, including Kentucky. Is this unlikely? Highly. Is it more likely that Cornell will grind their way past Temple, Wisconsin and Kentucky? Perhaps. But indulge me: Texas actually matches up pretty well with Kentucky, size-wise and talent-wise. I think that it’s possible that they could get motivated (ever so briefly) to not be embarrassed by them. Am I picking Texas over Kentucky? Maybe not. Texas coach Rick Barnes is never in danger of out-gameplanning anyone. He’s never been accused of having his team ready to play, and his teams are always threatening to underperform. Let’s not forget this. Still, I wouldn’t want to be a Kentucky fan, not in this tournament, or in any lifetime. Because let me be frank: I don’t think I could face a world without reading, without literacy. I just don’t think I could do it.
Which reminds me, did you hear that Coach K was born in the year of the Ratfaced Bastard?
Eerie, right? Not sure what his astrological sign is, but I’m relatively sure that all the major media figures kiss its ass.
But Duke didn’t get an easy road, either
I know, most people say that Duke has the easiest path: a #4 seed in free-fall after its star blew out his knee (Purdue), and a #2 seed that lost six of its last ten (Villanova). I say: Thank you for noticing, world, but look at the #3 seed: Baylor. This team got punished for playing cupcakes early — Hardin Simmons? Texas Arlington? Southern? Hartford? Coach Scott Drew, c’mon. You asked for your cruddy seed. But then Baylor played a tough conference schedule, didn’t lose a game by more than 7 points, and they absolutely light it up (119 points per 100 possessions — 5th in the country). Enough about Baylor; Duke may not even get there. Louisville will give Duke everything they can handle in round 2; perhaps more. Rick Pitino v Coach K, in the second round? Fans’ brains might explode. Which coach do I hate more? Minds will boggle.
Back to the Wildcats
Kansas State. Are they good enough to reach the Final Four. Yes. Can they beat Syracuse? Quite possibly. How do you beat Syracuse? You punish the zone. And K-State has two guys who can do this — Pullen and Clemente. What about the glass? Two more guys: Wally Judge and Curtis Kelly. They can hold their own underneath. KenPom has K-State ranked 5th in the country in offensive rebounding percentage at 40%. They gather 40% of the rebounds on their offensive glass. That’s huge. And they play great defense. Did I mention I wouldn’t want to be Syracuse? I wouldn’t. Especially because a big guy might be hurt. Or, he might not be. March madness, baybee!
The team that will break my heart: Cornell
Every year I pick a team like this. They’re good. They play under control. They’ve got a system. All the ingredients are there for surprise. Subtext: They played very well against Kansas. Okay, let’s face it, they out-played Kansas for 20 – 25 minutes in the hallowed hall of Lawrence, and they came up short (barely). Texas A&M, Baylor, Colorado, Kansas State and Memphis also played very well against the Hawks, and lost. Subtext: I also have these teams doing well in the tournament. Caveat! Anyway, every year, I pick a team like this to get out of the first round, and they lay an egg. I’m looking at you, Butler team of 2008. This year’s heartbreaker is especially obvious to avoid because Temple is a good team who could easily ... force the aforementioned egg? To emerge? Anyway, Temple is a great defensive team, though you wouldn’t have been able to see any evidence of that against ... Kansas! Yes, they lost to the Jayhawks at home. By 32 points.
Did I mention that this bracket breakdown was from the point of view who has watched 34 Kansas games, and roughly 20 total other games. Caveat!
1 I will offer one suggestion: Why not just factor their media desirability into the RPI? Your team’s winning percentage x their opponent’s winning percentage x their opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage x the likelihood that your team will draw a large, rich audience to the Final Four weekend equals their seed. It’s obviously a factor in every year’s bracket. Last year, North Carolina was invited to do the Tennessee Waltz all the way to Detroit. In other words, they had it easy. In other news, the nation loves them some Tar Heels. It’s worth mentioning that advertisers tend to pay more when the Heels are playing. And of course CBS is for-profit enterprise. You get the point. We all do. It’s time to be up-front about it.
Okay, wait. One more thing. I will post something about the absurd lopsidedness of the pairings:
You want to make marginal No. 1 Duke’s road that easy? Seeding the bracket is tough, but come on. The South reeks of a committee that lost the forest for the trees, and Kentucky, Syracuse and Kansas — especially Kansas — will suffer. So much for being the overall No. 1. If we can’t reward Kansas for its excellence with something better than this, then the anti-expansion folks’ main point is officially moot. The regular season doesn’t matter.
New York’s blizzard of 1977 makes a riveting cameo appearance in “El Super,” an indie (before the term was formalized) film about the hard adjustments that immigrants make in coming to New York. The movie is great for many reasons, but the blizzard steals a few scenes as the main character — a Cuban super — walks around town. Snow is massed on cars, piled high in the streets, and pedestrians stumble through snow-walled sidewalk canyons. Quite a scene, especially in the 70s, when New York looked crumbly and decrepit.
Amidst the blizzard, the film is a melancholy document of the lives of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as they reckon with the immensity of New York City and their dismal prospects for work in the bad old days of New York. The dialogue is great, often funny, just as often poignant. Good stuff. I had to resort to extreme measures to find it, but you can buy it on VHS from Amazon. Or you can let me know, and I’ll hook you up.
Speaking of the blizzard, there’s an amazing Barney Miller episode about the blizzard? There is. Worth watching just to hear the theme song again.
There’s a lot of animated chatter among some of my favorite journalists over the redesign of their publication’s site. Last week, the Atlantic Monthly rolled out what appears to the casual reader as a slight update of the IA, along with some major changes to the way that blogs are integrated. Reader reaction was anything but casual; anger and suspicion seemed to be the most common reader emotions, shared, at least in part, by the writers. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein nails the goal of the redesign, “Seems like a bet to re-center the Web site around the Atlantic as an institution rather than leaving it as a web hosting service for a couple of bloggers.” Which seems smart, actually.
This clustercuss is the redesign. (I can’t find a picture of the “before,” but it wasn’t really too different, to the casual observer).The real problem: The redesign isn’t radical enough.
It simply shifted content around — a sure-fire bet to piss off regular readers. The redesign doesn’t address bigger problems around findability, readability, navigability, whatever you want to call a lingering sense of not being able to get around easily. It also breaks from a common blog convention: homepages that includes lengthy content for each post (UPDATE: they’ve changed this). The biggest change is that they’ve moved away from individual blogs as linear, ever-expanding solo narratives, which I think is interesting. What they’re moving toward is less clear.
According to spirited commentary by the Atlantic writers, the redesign was driven by the arcane calculus of advertising. I won’t pretend to know how online ad placement works in a place like The Atlantic, but what I do know is that someone told them to spread their fresh content around, and it’s kinda half-spread.
I am a big Atlantic reader. I subscribe to the print edition, and I regularly read three of its bloggers — Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan. I subscribe to their feeds, so I don’t go to theatlantic.com unless I want to comment on Coates’ blog, or read comments, which means I’ll head there a couple of times a week, but when I get there I’ll be deeply immersed in a thread.
To me, the true opportunity was to leverage the sprawling, smart conversations that these writers continually create — to create a sort of salon among the readers and writers. To Klein’s point above, you’d think a virtual salon would be exactly the kind of thing that would “re-center” the brand. Breaking out of the conventional blog model is a reasonable first step. Blogs are long threads, and maintaining individual threads needlessly inhibits wider-scale conversation. So they’ve taken that half-step away from threads (which are a helpful organizing principle for readers), but the salon is nowhere in sight. And this is a problem.
