If you follow the Bracket Ratings below you get another Michigan State over Virginia tournament game, but this is the one bracket that is so balanced we are going to risk being called crazy by going against our numbers on Butler, Seton Hall, and Syracuse.
Oregon destroyed Utah 88-57 in the Pac-12 Championship for their 8th straight win, while Cincinnati sweated a tournament bid after a 65-foot jump shot was banked in against them. But if the Bearcats can win a tough one against St. Joseph’s they could shock the Ducks.
The top NBA talent is packed into the East (Kentucky vs. UNC) and the South (potential Kansas vs. Maryland or Cal). Kansas has been better, is hotter now, has more experienced guards – but Maryland can erase it all with one huge upset.
As prep for our March Madness predictions, we lay out the basics for the 85 teams with even a faint hope of being one of the 68 selected Sunday. This sheet gives each team’s Sagarin rating, a plus or minus for whether they finished the season hot or cold, and the Value Add of any key players who are injured for returning from injury based on Don’s Best report.
I made the difficult decision to board a plane to Miami for the GOP presidential debate rather than to New York for the Big East tournament.
The Breitbart Sports All-American 2013, 2014 and 2015 teams proved prophetic in March Madness brackets, and the 2016 edition announced below starts with the heated debate over whether Buddy Hield or Denzel Valentine rates as the National Player of the Year.
Another 19 teams were eliminated from March Madness by 10 p.m. Saturday (see updated status of all teams here). But Yale joined Austin Peay as the first two teams officially in the tournament with their first Ivy League title since 1962 despite both Yale and Austin Peay missing a key player.
A small crowd in Nashville yelling “Let’s go Peay” will watch one of the worst teams in basketball qualify for March Madness Saturday evening, while two of the best teams will need to win Saturday and then two more times in front of huge crowds in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to likewise get invited as the Summit League Champion to the second biggest sporting event in America behind the Super Bowl.
The emergence of Duke’s Grayson Allen in the Value Add Top 5 in a month in which he tripped two opponents provides another example of why The New York Post quoted Blue Devils point guard Jay Williams as saying, “No other black player from any other school is hated as much as a white player from Duke. None.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has won $16 million in contributions via unverified credit-contributions from people claiming to be unemployed — and he now needs to put his money where his mouth is on campaign finance reform.
College basketball mirrored the presidential campaign most of this season, with established big money programs being shocked repeatedly in a year of parity.
Since the NBA started play in 1950, 11 of 14 teams with an 80 percent winning percentage won the NBA title. This season should mark the first time multiple teams enter the playoffs with that mark, arguably making this the toughest NBA title in history.
Sunday Anthony Davis became the first player to score 50 points in a game before turning 23 years old — just four years after playing the greatest season out of 52,129 player seasons in the all-time Value Add database. Sports Illustrated said Shaquille O’Neal is the only player in the last 30 years to match the performance.
Charges by a girlfriend that he threw a cell phone and kicked her forced James Thompson IV to settle for prep school instead of South Carolina. And despite his unbelievable play at Eastern Michigan, Thompson could become first freshman ever to finish in the Value Add Basketball top 10 and not make the NBA.
It has been 15 years since a team compiled fewer passing yards in a Super Bowl — and 41 years since a team had fewer passing yards and won the Super Bowl. But in a defensive struggle, Peyton Manning avoided the miscues of his adversary that led to the difference in the game.
Freshman are terrible basketball players. They commit stupid turnovers, take dumb shots, and fail to rotate on defense.
Arguably the most important player in the history of basketball died over the weekend.
No. 1 ranked Buddy Hield outscored No. 2 ranked Ben Simmons 32-14 to lead No. 1 Oklahoma to a last-second 77-75 road win at LSU.
The top Iowa duo emerged one week before the first presidential votes are cast there, and it isn’t Cruz-Trump or Sanders-Clinton.
The simple three-step predictor correctly picked the Denver Broncos upset and the Carolina Panthers win to improve to 12-4 (75% correct) in Conference Championships and Super Bowls since 2009. And it projects a clear winner in the Super Bowl.
If you are one of 541,064 boys high school players, this is probably your last level of competitive play.
Two point guards dished out seven assists each and took one step closer to joining the all-time Big East greats and getting their team into March Madness Tuesday with monster games and big wins over ranked teams.
A common indicator stronger than quarterback rating or defensive points allowed suggests two teams have an edge in the conference championship games Sunday.
The MEAC All-Conference team would be the weakest of the 32 All-Conference teams, but the sum of their players at www.valueaddbasketball.com still projects as a 92-70 winner against the likes of Tennessee Tech and Illinois State ranked in the middle of the team ratings at www.kenpom.com.
In an almost unheard of turn of events, more Americans watched the college basketball national title game than the college football national championship, as the ratings disaster continued for ESPN.
LSU’s Ben Simmons would be the runaway No. 1 if March Madness seeded the top 68 players instead of teams.
College football subjected viewers to six blowouts New Year’s Day—and once again zero games between the two conferences that play head and shoulders above the others.
The SEC battered four Bowl opponents, going 4-1 with an average score of 39-18 to return to the dominance of the past decade, leaving the Pac-12 as the only other conference with a chance to catch the SEC by the end of bowl season
Newly created Value Add 3.0 Basketball now creates the equivalent of a Sagarin Projection Rating for all 4000 basketball players to enable quick projections on final scores in light of basketball players being injured or returning. DonBest updates injury status on all teams here.
The Patriots wanted to kick the ball south to have the wind at their back the entire period. To do that, Matthew Slater had to simply point south and say, “We want to go that way,” and at that point the Jets would have most likely chosen to receive the ball and would have had to battle the wind while going right to left on your TV screen.
A glance at the top 50 basketball players according to www.valueaddbasketball.com shows the typical trend—the best NBA prospects are sophomores and freshman, but the best college players are seniors.
Fox Sports gamble on the Big Ten Network and the basketball-only Big East continues to score victories over the ESPN-dominated SEC and ACC.
The new Value Add Basketball rankings give two dozen Big East players high marks, and the top service used by coaches shows the conference surging near the top just two years after Fox Sports made it a lynch pin in it’s challenge to ESPN.
The top-ranked Value Add player in the country signed with USC six months after USA Today splashed a picture of USC Song Girls welcoming coach Andy Enfield as their new head basketball coach accompanied by these words: “Andy Enfield’s model wife, Amanda Marcum was there. As were the USC Song Girls. If ever there was a single image that could help USC recruit star high school basketball players, this is it.”
Duke and Oregon are about 20 points better than opening day opponents Siena and Jackson State according to www.kenpom.com, but they are the two teams that could be hurt by up to 10 points a game by injuries. The table below shows the 50 best players on the bench for opening day, and how many points they are typically worth to their team based on www.valueaddbasketball.com.
The NCAA tournament ends in four months and 21 days. The regular season starts now.
Four All-Americans give the Big Ten the toughest All-Conference team, led by Melo Trimble who hopes to lead Maryland to a Big Ten and national title. Most of the talent is concentrated in the 10 preseason All-Conference teams listed below, but All-Americans Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker of Wichita State lead the “best of the rest” from the other 23 conferences.
Breitbart Sports recently named its first preseason All-American team, with Kris Dunn of Providence the runaway Player of the Year.
Breitbart Sports releases Value Add projections today to a college basketball backdrop of an over-the-top sex scandal at Louisville, the NCAA banning gambling sites from advertising, and Chris Mullins preparing to coach his first St. John’s game after losing his
Steve Spurrier’s first words to me were: “Well, I know the boys at Clemson are shaking in their boots after watching that display!” Everyone within earshot burst out laughing, imagining the Duke defense, that had just lost 49-28 to the University of Virginia, against No. 7 Clemson the next week.
