bukie

I'd still take Rodon if somehow available at 4, but barring that there isn't enough of a potential gap between any other pitcher and the top hitters in the draft to select a pitcher there.

Hail Szczur.

Only change I'd make is to shorten the draft from 21 rounds to whatever's reasonable. 9 positional starters + 7 pitching starters + 3 bench spots allows for 19 player rosters. 10 keepers per team means 9 rounds needed min, could go as high as, say, 12 for teams that couldn't keep close to 10.

And as usual, I'll do it and rep Illinois, who has to win about 4 games to even get on the bubble.

It's March, so it's madness time. Time for the 11th (..?!) annual mock tournament selection committee, during which we'll do a mock version of the tournament selection process. Anyone is free to participate if they are able, but please make sure you'll be able to participate regularly between Wednesday and Sunday of selection week (during the actual selection process), or at the very least be able to submit 1-3 lists of teams per day during that period. The actual committee consists of 10 members, so if we can get close to that number, the process will more closely resemble reality (rather than the combined feelings of a couple folks). To participate, by midnight (CST) Tuesday, March 11, send (PM) me 4 things: 1) Your favorite team (the team you'll "represent"). During the selection process, you will not be allowed to include this team in any lists, to maintain as much of a sense of fairness as possible. This mirrors the real committee, as a committee member may not be involved in any discussion for a team in his conference (we'd do that here, but 95% of the populace is Big Ten, so nobody would ever be able to discuss them) 2) A list of cold, hard locks for the tournament, no further discussion needed, no matter what they do in the remainder of their games. This can be any number of teams up to a max of 36 (there are 36 at-large bids this year, no more than that can be locks, right?) 3) A list of teams that deserve consideration for the tournament, besides the locks. 4) A list of your top 16 teams, in order (not including the team you represent, obv) Some good resources: Pomeroy ratings Sagarin ratings RPI Basketball State (costs money after a few page views, but tons of info) John Gasaway's Efficiency Margin Team Rankings (occasionally a bit full of their numbers, but they do have a lot of numbers)

Actually, that looks pretty fairly balanced. Not like there's one team that gets PSU, Rutgers and Northwestern twice.

This is not even close to being true. He's not even 2nd best...in his division He's probably the best point guard on his team this season.

...you mean Arizona? Or Louisville?

One last thing before I get accused of spamming, another tool I enjoy looking at is John Gasaway's EM: http://johngasaway.com/2014/02/25/tuesday-truths-this-boeheims-on-fire-edition/

Also, at this point I'm kind of rooting for an NCAA tournament where both Creighton and Wichita State are 1 seeds.

If I can get a script working, I want to do that for all the realistic at-large teams, because I like the way that shows quality wins and bad losses better than just games vs top 25/50/100, since location matters.

This is what I was referring to: Team T1W T1L T2W T2L T3W T3L Team A 7 2 4 0 14 0 Team B 6 4 9 0 8 0 Team C 6 5 5 1 11 0 Team D 5 2 6 0 14 0 Team E 3 7 6 0 10 0 Team F 5 5 9 1 8 0 Team G 2 2 4 2 17 0 Team H 10 1 4 0 12 1 Team I 8 3 5 0 11 0 Team J 5 4 5 1 13 0 Team K 2 0 8 0 19 0 Team L 9 4 6 0 7 1 Can you guess which one was Iowa?

Also, if you noticed the blind tier analysis of KP's top 12 I posted a couple pages back, Iowa sticks out like a sore thumb there almost as much as Wichita State.

Still, it's not like Ken sits down on his computer at the end of the season and tweaks his #s in a way to make the national champion the best team. 10 of the past 11 years, the national champion has ended up #1 on the list (crazy 2011 Butler/VCU tourney being the exception). Sure, it's possible for a team to "break" the rankings if they run up the score on patsies and play close games against all the better teams, but he's constantly adjusting the effect those have. All the numbers are, really, is an adjusted efficiency margin, used to predict future outcomes in games. They're really successful on the whole, but even if a team has, say, a 90% chance of victory, they'll lose out 10% of the time.

Nah, I'm pretty sure Wisconsin will still win the 2012 National Championship and Florida the 2013 National Championship. Kind of an odd thing to try to point out, since Kentucky and Louisville were #1 on KP the past two years.

Iowa and Ohio State have an amazing knack of not being able to win close games.

Tuna is legal now.

we did that already, that's how you got your team.

Very weird. That's what happens when there are no bad teams in conference and no dominant teams in conference. Thanks to MSU's injuries and Northwestern's suddenly figuring out how to play at the start of conference, no team has a game on the schedule they can't win or lose.

Good win, now just beat Iowa and MSU on the road and Michigan at home, and they're right back in the bubble talk.

You would think, but it seems like players in the past who were notorious for being fat or heavy and had a lot of power, who then went on to lose weight and get in better shape before a season, would often have lower power numbers. But then again I'm only really recalling Prince Fielder when he took on that vegetarian diet after his 2007 breakout year, lost weight, and then lost over 100 points to his SLG and OPS, so I really don't have a lot of frame of reference. There haven't been a lot of "fat" power hitters out there. Off the top of my head I can only think of David Ortiz, Mo Vaughn, Cecil Fielder... and I'm drawing a blank now. Babe Ruth Rusty Freaking Staub and Greg Luzinski were the fat power hitters I remember from my childhood. John Kruk is someone I remember from the 80s.

Where did you get the code from? I threw everything together based on the article in the link.

And if I had to rank them, I'd go A, I, B, H, L, F, D, C, K, E, J, G.

Yes...which is why it's only mostly blind, since there was only going to be one team with 0 losses.

Is nobody allowed to take a photo of Vogelbach from closer than 50 feet away?