Princeton's reward last night was an eight seed in the NCAA Tournament. Really?
An astonished TigerBlog writes:
Ironically, during the men's selection show, the committee chair used the term "eye test" a bunch of times in talking about seedings. Princeton's women's biggest strength was the "eye test," but it appears not to have been used here.From an ESPN column:
And before the establishment protests begin, Princeton didn't play a soft schedule. It tried to appease the committee. It played Charlotte, Drexel, Duquesne, Georgetown, Michigan and Pittsburgh, among others, quality teams that weren't quite as good this season as they are most seasons. It played them on the road -- it played anyone on the road. Princeton picked up 19 of its 30 wins away from home, 15 of them in true road games and four at neutral sites.
It played just four home games it wasn't obligated to play by conference affiliation.
Guess how many SEC teams played 15 true road games? If you guessed none, congratulations.
Same for the Pac-12. And the ACC. And the Big Ten.Green Alert Take: It always annoys me that the NCAA doesn't discount, at least to some extent, the conference season when factoring in strength of schedule. The plain truth is that the power conference schools are rewarded for playing against conference foes even thought they have to play those schools. Princeton, meanwhile, was punished for playing conference foes. The Tigers didn't choose to play Ivy League teams that weren't very strong. What is Princeton supposed to do? Leave the Ancient Eight and join the SEC just to get a higher seed?
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Five consecutive Ivy League basketball championships has National Review posting a story under the headline, How Harvard Became Kentucky on the Charles. From the story:And it isn't just basketball: Harvard football has won or shared five of the last eight Ivy League championships, up from a modest one or two per decade over the league's first half-century (since 1956). In 1977, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the momentous Bakke affirmative-action case, the distinguished lawyer Archibald Cox found time to joke about how bad Harvard's football team was. But now the Crimson dominate the league in the only two sports that most people care about. What happened?One of the arguments NR makes is that while the Academic Index certainly had an impact on Harvard it had more of an impact on the rest of the Ivies . . .
". . . because when there were no academic constraints at all, there was basically no limit on how many unqualified students the bottom-feeders could admit, kids that Harvard's admissions office would laugh out loud at."Green Alert Take: If I played football at Dartmouth or one of the other Ivies not named HYP in the '70s I might be tempted to write a letter to the editor about being painted with that brush.
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Check out Colgate's first three football games next fall:Sept. 5 at NavyOuch.
Sept. 12 New Hampshire
Sept. 19 Yale
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The measuring stick in our yard had gotten down to 16 inches of standing snow a couple of days ago. It's back up to 21 inches this morning. OK, I surrender.
