Tag Archives: St. Mary’s Gaels basketball team

Picking the Field: NCAA Tournament Predictions – And Yes, I Have Gonzaga Winning it All

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Last year I wrote a terribly long essay on my NCAA “Picks to Clicks.” (In hindsight, that title is grammatically screwed up. Alas what a year of writing can do for you’re grammer skills.)

This year I won’t bore you with the reasons why Notre Dame will beat Iowa State (Notre Dame wins the game by the way) or why Louisville will beat Western Kentucky (see Sheen, Charlie: Um… Duhhh.) But I will share most of my latter tournament predictions and such. Which will all end with Gonzaga cutting down the nets in Atlanta.

These are my non-chalk picks in the first round, or the round after 60 teams get a “bye”- Continue reading →

Some Quick Hits on Reaffirming the Fact that Gonzaga is the Best Team in the State of Washington (Also Maybe the Country…)

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Washington’s big three of basketball schools, Gonzaga, the University of Washington and Washington State University, have all had a good deal of success in the past decade. Each has made it to the Sweet Sixteen while producing numerous pro players.

It should be noted that historically, and in general, UW and WSU are good programs. But this year has been a down year for them both.

  • GU has one more win (27) than UW (15) and WSU (11) combined.
  • Gonzaga’s RPI is 10th in the country, Washington is 74th and WSU chimes in with a resounding thud at 184th. Yikes.
  • The Zags BPI (or Basketball Power Index) per ESPN.com is fifth in the country. U of W comes in at 72nd, and Wazzu rounds out the group again at number 99.
  • Gonzaga has the same number of conference wins in the month of February than the Huskies do all season.
  • Gonzaga has more conference wins in the last ten days than WSU has all year. (It’s apples to oranges when you compare the WCC with the Pac 12, but the leagues are pretty even against each other by my count, with the WCC taking three scalps to the Pac 12’s four.) Continue reading →