Gonna be doing a lot of high-level views tonight, guys. Lower-level views are in our future, but we’re a high-level crew right now.
Basketball!
The brackets are out, both the NIT and the NCAA Tournament start tomorrow, and we’re excited. Stu had a big NIT preview out earlier today, I had a medium NCAAT preview out later today, we’ll share our own brackets tomorrow. Plenty of content to come on that.
For those of you who follow our bracketology and/or those wondering how the bracketology went…it wasn’t great! We expected to miss two teams on the NCAAT/NIT cut line. We missed four. We expected to miss one or two on the lower NIT cut line. We missed three. Our seedings weren’t terribly far off, but the ones we missed biggest were in-or-out decisions, and those are the ones we most want to hit.
The good thing here is that the selection process has been pretty stable now (using NET and using quadrants) for three seasons, at least for the NCAA Tournament, which is our priority. So we have more good data to dig into over the offseason. One bad thing is that the NIT format can evidently change without warning. They no longer seed the visiting teams in the first round? It’s all geographic? I like that, and getting a plot twist like that is hilarious so we don’t mind it, but it was a surprise.
Iowa State vs. LSU
More to come on ISU’s draw, but if you’re going to drop to an eleven-seed, facing a team who just fired their coach isn’t the worst thing in the world. Should be one of the ugliest games of basketball imaginable. Turnovers all over the place. Izaiah Brockington vs. Tari Eason will be a whole lot of fun, though. Game is Friday evening in Milwaukee, which is a good draw geographically.
Coaching Changes
We’re into the offseason now for some teams, and even for those that aren’t (LSU, Florida), coaching changes are happening. Immediate thoughts on the medium ones (nothing huge has happened just yet), plus a smaller one that jumped out:
Bruce Weber
Not the biggest story, but one of the sadder ones. At least, Weber’s comments were sad. This being college basketball, I’d take everything with a grain of salt, but it’s believable that Weber felt he was doing things the right way and competing against cheaters, and it’s also fairly believable that was quite seriously the case. Wonder what he’ll do from here, and whether full-on retirement is on the table. He could make some good money in media, I’d think.
Will Wade
If LSU were better, Will Wade would still be coaching them, but because they don’t have much of a shot at making a deep run, he’s done. At least, that’s the simplest read of the timing of the firing. It seems like LSU wants the NCAA to think it didn’t know how serious of rules Wade would be alleged to have broken, and while it didn’t know what the NCAA would put on the notice of allegations, it had to know the scope of what had happened, right? So what really happened here wasn’t LSU taking cheating seriously. It was LSU rather brazenly playing the game. I have no quarrel with that, but it’s a pretty rough commentary on the NCAA. Why have rules if this is their effect?
Mike White/Tom Crean
The Mike White thing (leaving Florida to coach Georgia, if you missed it) was shocking when the news broke and also makes perfect sense. Georgia would love to be where White had Florida in stasis, making the tournament most years but never being great. Florida does not want to be there anymore. Everybody’s happy. Tom Crean goes back to TV, where he’ll also do better! Well, maybe Crean’ll take a different job. Lot opening up.
Cuonzo Martin
No surprise here, but felt it should be mentioned. Mizzou has been good before. And recently.
Frank Martin
I was a bit surprised by this, especially since South Carolina seemed to play pretty well down the stretch, or at least get some good results. I don’t have a great read on Martin as a coach or as a guy, so it’s hard to have much of a take. I will say, I would not want to take a job in the SEC right now. Or would I? The reality is that Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee all seem rather stable and good, and Texas A&M seems poised to potentially be in a similar boat soon. Can you draft off of that? Or does it hold you down? Will think on that. Opinions always welcome.
Dan Muller
This was the one that jumped out to me. Remember Muller? Had Illinois State pretty good there for a while. Just couldn’t keep it going. Would love to have that explained to me by someone who follows the Missouri Valley. How does it stop going well, exactly? I know it can happen, but it’d be nice to have a good description of the meat of it.
The Lockout’s Over!
Did this happen before we last did notes? I feel like it was later. Either way, it’s over, we’re all excited, this is great. Free agency and the trade market are each busy, with the highlights seeming to be (apologies if I leave one out but then again you can find this elsewhere and you’re reading this so we’re in it together)…
- Matt Olson traded to Atlanta for a package including Cristian Pache
- Eugenio Suárez and Jesse Winker traded to the Mariners
- Josh Donaldson traded from the Twins to the Yankees for Gio Urshela and Gary Sánchez
- Chris Bassitt traded to the Mets
- Sonny Gray traded to the Twins
- Carlos Rodón to the Giants
- Clayton Kershaw staying with the Dodgers
- Yusei Kikuchi to the Blue Jays
- Jakob Junis to the Giants
- Nelson Cruz to the Nationals
- Adam Ottavino to the Mets
- Joe Kelly to the White Sox
Again, apologies if I’m missing anything. The takeaway seems to be that the A’s and Reds are selling hard, that the Twins are trying to do a little reset, and that the Giants are trying to become the place to get the most out of pitchers (if they get the most out of Rodón, he will win the Cy Young).
For the Cubs’ part, they signed Andrelton Simmons and added Robel García and Jesse Chavez back on minor league deals. All good, low-risk moves. Plenty to come, I’d guess, either in quantity or size.
Bets, NASCAR
Had our fourth bad week in NASCAR results, first bad week in how close we were to winning. Not terribly concerned about those. More concerning is that our college basketball conference tournament futures did so poorly. That was unusual, and bodes badly for the NIT and NCAA Tournament. We’ll stick with it, but we’re wary.
For those wondering, the gameplan if we’re still in negative average ROI territory when basketball ends is to just do MLB futures for baseball season, at least until we’re very confident we’ve rebuilt an adequate cushion of expected profitability. We may keep the auto-racing going alongside it, especially if we get models finished for NASCAR and F1 and IndyCar, but we’ll at the very least do MLB futures, since those have been our bread and butter. In other words, the bets aren’t going away, but we’ll scale them back if we don’t have a successful track record or a new model we’re trying out that can justify them.
Not Worried About Davante Adams
They’ll work it out.
***
Not watching anything tonight. There’ll be plenty to watch starting again tomorrow evening. Like so many of you, I love this time of year, and I’m really honored you’re choosing to spend even slivers of it with us. So thank you for that.
