Tuesday Skull Session

The Clash At Dieblerhead

Happy Tuesday everyone, and welcome to your morning Skull Session. Hopefully you've all had a pleasant couple of days pouring over adjusted offensive efficiency statistics for mid major teams from a part of the country you've never heard of in a vain attempt to read the tea leaves in an ultimately futile attempt to make some sense of a tourney defined by chaos and sheer luck, knowing that despite your best efforts, you will eventually fail to crack even the top half of the office pool.

If you think that sounds like the bitter rantings of a bracketeer scorned, well... you would be correct. I have never won any sort of March Madness pool, despite repeated attempts over the years. 2007 was a particularly bad year for me; not only did I come within one game of winning, only to watch Kansas completely choke against UCLA, but days later I had the distinct displeasure of watching Ohio State lose to Florida in a second sport's championship game in four months. Last year I tried to fill out a bracket, but I had not so much as penciled in the name of a random 12 seed that I began to experience horrible flashbacks to that day in San Jose.

My vision went red. I passed out, and woke up 6 hours later, the ghost of Bill Walton taunting me like a leering clown on acid.

March Madness. She be a cruel mistress.

This One's For The Ladies... But I Like It, Too The tourney hopes for the Ohio State women's basketball team seemed more or less dead in the water as recently as February 6th. Their record was a modest 13-9, they were 4-6 in the Big Ten, and had just lost their third game in a row. All of this, however, turned out to be a clever ruse designed to lull the rest of the Big Ten into a false sense of security, and boy howdy did it work. The Lady Bucks responded by reeling off 9 straight wins, culminating in a Big Ten tournament victory. As Jason mentioned in the forum, they were rewarded with a 4 seed and a hearty thumbs up. Even better, they'll get to begin their quest to be the team that ultimately makes people not from Connecticut or a small part of Tennessee and California care about college women's basketball in Dayton, Ohio.

Screw Spokane. Have you ever been to Canal Street? It's awesome.

Trophies For Some, Miniature American Flags For Others To no one's surprise, Jared Sullinger has been named as a Wooden Award finalist for this season, along with pretty much every dominant player in college basketball this year. What's interesting to me about this is that maybe even a month ago we would be giving serious thought to Sully taking home the award; now he's likely to be an afterthought, which might strike some as sad, but as I pointed out a few weeks ago, the Buckeyes are possibly better off without Jared being the sole concentration of the offense. With Diebler burning up the nets and Aaron Craft emerging as a possible offensive threat, OSU suddenly looks a lot deeper then some might've thought, and with their recent play they have definitely earned their overall #1 seed. Even without a crazy dominant Jared Sullinger.

Hello George The ever excellent basketball blog The Dagger (yes, it's a Yahoo blog, but unless you're some kind of sports fan vampire or witch I promise you will not melt or turn into stone if you read it) has a nice little retrospective of probably my favorite bracket-buster of all time, George Mason. That team's insane Final Four run in 2006 was the epitome of everything that March Madness should be about:

The coach hummed the theme of "Mission Impossible" to his players before the UNC game and told them that North Carolina was Superman and the green-clad Patriots were kryptonite. After falling behind 16-2 to start the game, George Mason switched to a zone defense that UNC never solved, propelling the Patriots to a 65-60 win and a trip to the Sweet 16. (Coach) Larranaga was so excited he even busted out the "Running Man'' in the locker room.

New tourney rule: after every upset, winning coach must bust out ridiculous dance moves in front of cameras. Round one starts out with the Dougie, and movies on in logical fashion from there.

Hey We're On TV Some interesting football media news: The Big 12 has signed an incredibly lucrative contract with Fox that should triple their current agreement and move them up to $60 million dollars per season. Not too bad when you factor in the fact that both Texas and Oklahoma have decided to pursue the creation of their own networks.

Honestly, to me this seems like an odd choice. I never really wanted to watch the X-Files after Mulder and Scully stopped being on regularly, and while both the X-Files and the Big 12 without their marquee stars can still bring me crazy inbred monsters and alien conspiracies on a weekly basis, it's just not the same. The Big 12 is already on thin ice, and the success or failure of how it markets itself could lead to big changes in the future.

Help. Donate. Finally, a lot of you are probably aware that I used to live in Japan, and still have quite a few friends still living there. I don't normally use this space to promote items of personal interest, but as of now roughly 10,000 people may have died, hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and billions of dollars worth of damage has been caused in one of the worst natural disasters in that country's history. My friends are safe, thank God, but there are many, many, many people who are not. If you can, please consider donating to the Red Cross here. Proceeds will go to the cleanup and relief efforts.

Thanks.