16 boring facts about the most boring Sweet 16 ever

…and no, the fact that games are being played in Anaheim isn’t even one of ’em. 

By Andrew J. Pridgen

It’s OK to uncrumple your bracket now. Even if Middle Tennessee and Stephen F. Austin and Northern Iowa aren’t done giving you night sweats, they’ve been vanquished and in their place, a bunch of favorites, a bunch of teams used to being in the Sweet 16 and pretty much the entire ACC sans Pitt.

This tournament came out of its flat spin over the weekend. Lower seed teams won Thursday and Friday 13 times. By the end of the weekend, the tide had turned back toward the favorites as only a trio of underdogs advanced to keep dancing toward the Elite 8.

And so, before we get to the list, it should be noted that familiar faces abound. All teams in 2016’s Sweet 16 have been there before and six of 2015’s third rounders are also back, including last year’s eventual championship game contestants, Duke and Wisconsin.

Here are mostly 16 boring-ass factoids about the Sweet 16 besides, you know, Anaheim:

16) Though six of the teams that remain are from the ACC, the highest-seeded team they’ve taken down thus far is no. 7 Dayton. The rest of the Power 5 conferences combined have only eight teams remaining. That’s a big swing considering a week ago I could barely stop myself from taking the over that the Pac-12 (six teams at the onset) would win six games total—a number I thought the conference would eclipse by end-of-day Friday. Now Oregon has to win out to get there.

15) Northern Iowa became the first team in the history of college basketball to blow a 12-point lead in the final minute of a game. Texas A&M rattled off a dozen points in 44 seconds to get it to OT Sunday. For its part in the collapse, Northern Iowa had only eight turnovers the first 39 minutes and 30 seconds of regulation …and four in the last 30 seconds. It all fell apart for the Panthers faster than measured discourse at a Trump rally.

14) Stephen F. Austin, which entered Sunday with the nation’s longest winning streak at 21 games, shot 51.5 percent from the field, assisted on 19-of-29 made field goals, committed a season-low six turnovers …and still managed to lose for the first time since 2015.

13) “The tournament is crazy,” Mike Krzyzewski said Sunday. Which means it’s officially anything but crazy. For the record Coach K thinks Hagar slacks with fewer than four pleats are crazy.

12) BTW, this is Coach K’s 23rd sweet 16. Yes, he’s got more Sweet 16 appearances than every other coach combined (11) times two. Only two schools (North Carolina and Kentucky) have more Sweet 16s all time than Coach K.

11) Kentucky schools being absent from the Sweet 16 for the first time in almost a decade is sort of like when you’re out of Kettle Chips. You expect them to be there, but when they’re not, you shrug, find something else—and probably something that’s better for you.

10) Maryland in the second round went 1-of-18 from beyond the arc and still cruised past Hawaii. This proves nothing about how good the Terps are but everything about how bad the Bears were against the Warriors in the first round sans leading scorers Tyrone Wallace (hand) and Jabari Bird (back), and after their assistant coach Yann Hufnagel was fired for alleged sexual harassment just before tip-off.

9) Villanova isn’t annoyingly good as they are just annoying. Think Jim Carey in Yes Man.

8) Oregon doesn’t match up well against down-tempo teams like St. Joe’s and Duke. St. Joe’s had the formula for most of the second half Sunday with slow, measured, spittle-flecked, foul-drawing basketball. However, should Oregon and Oklahoma both advance to the Elite 8, take the over and get ready for March’s first 160+ game in Anaheim Saturday.

7) Notre Dame is terrible. They just somehow find a way to make opponents play a little worse and that makes them seem like a reasonable solution. They’re the Microsoft of this year’s tournament.

6) Thanks HBO for making sure Gonzaga made it into this year’s tourney. Now if you could just do something to make Vinyl equally watchable.

5) Wisconsin’s Bronson Koenig was 3-for-17 in 3-pointers the previous three games but hit six of 12 including two in the final 30 seconds to bury Xavier. Also, not that the Beastie Boys are looking to re-form, but Bronson Koenig is a great MC name for that genre.

4) Overheard at the Hyatt Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe Resort, Spa and Casino Sportsbook Thursday: “Boeheim’s back? Who’s he coaching for? Or is it his son?”

3) In fact, rediscovering Jim Boeheim is like finding your old Fountains of Wayne CD at the bottom of a moving box you never unpacked. You think, hmmm, I actually do remember them being good.

2) It’s in Charles Barkley’s rider that he gets all the jelly bellies from the teams that have lost from TNT’s candy bracket.

1) I still have a £3,500,000-to-one ticket written by Lloyd’s of London that there will be a Ronnie James Dio reference sometime between now and the end of the championship game. It’s the only reason I keep watching.

 

Vegas on Ice: Ace in the Five Hole?

Vegas is in the running for an NHL franchise if the league decides to expand. Can Sin City really support a sport born on the frozen rivers of Montreal?

Written by Kyle Magin

If the Tampa Bay Lightning win Lord Stanley’s Cup over the Chicago Blackhawks, there’s going to be a lot of righteous Sun Belt-bashing. A subset of lazy hockey writers and the insufferable fans who agree with them are going to say it goes against cosmic justice for a place without a real winter to win the Cup.

I hold that it’s distasteful for the birthplace of jorts and the post-meth whiskey-tango drug scene to win anything, but that’s besides my point.

A lot of the same anti-Sun Belt arguments will pop up again if, as looks slightly better than probable, Las Vegas is awarded an NHL team. The city already has a 17,500-seat arena in the works that will be ready by 2016. Placing hockey in a nice weather town isn’t some sort of moral hockey failing, but it could be a financial one.

Sin City’s squad could go one of two ways, the Nashville or Miami models, for our purposes.

Music City, like Vegas, boasted a population of hockey neophytes and some knowledgeable exiles from colder places when the Predators dropped anchor there in 1998. It’s a city centered on the entertainment industry boasting a thriving tourist scene.

Over the last two years, according to Forbes, the team turned a $1.7 million profit thanks to a dedicated fan base (98.5 percent of capacity this year) and a hockey culture the club has nurtured in Tennessee—rinks stand all over the metro area and it’s not uncommon to now see Nashville-area natives on major junior and college rosters. Fans have found that hockey season is a reasonable way to kill time between SEC campaigns.

Miami, like Vegas, is a place with 8 months of spectacular weather and a go-to vacation and debauchery destination for residents of some of America’s most populous metro areas. Unfortunately, Miami, on the other hand, hosts the moribund Florida Panthers. They play to a 66 percent capacity crowd (last in all of hockey) and lose about $16 million annually, again according to Forbes. (Losing money in the era of multi-billion dollar TV contracts—the NHL has $6.9 billion worth of them between NBC and Rogers—is perplexing.)

Unlike Nashville, a hockey culture hasn’t followed the team. Kids from one of America’s poorest cities are more likely to strap on a football helmet or baseball glove than spend thousands on rinks and ice time. You can ditto much of the above for Phoenix—the most geographically similar team to Vegas—which is perpetually in danger of losing a team just 13,000 people per night showed up to watch play.

For every Nashville or LA or Anaheim—warm-weather cities where hockey thrives—there’s a Phoenix, Miami and Carolina—where it doesn’t.

Vegas is walking a tightrope between the two paths. While hockey will need a stable, year-round population to adopt it and head to mid-week February games in Vegas, it will undoubtedly benefit from visitors who may feel left out of the live performances (anyone who’s not over 50 or gay) and club scene (anyone not under 24 and the influence of molly.) I fall into that category and contend that a night at a hockey game will be the perfect way to separate a day getting drunk at the pool from a night getting drunk on The Strip.

A home game during March Madness will be some sort of bro-tastic Nirvana, the equivalent of Going Clear for anyone in a backwards hat and khaki shorts. Neighboring California has embraced hockey to a fantastic degree with all three teams drawing more than 98 percent of capacity this year. Californians are easy to find on NHL rosters and that of nearly every feeder league. Vegas has a lot of similarities with California in terms of population makeup and is a rabid, frothing sports town without a big club to hang their hats on.

East of I-5, though, the sport struggles until one hits the Rockies. Salt Lake City couldn’t support a top- flight minor league team even after the hysteria accompanying the 2002 Olympics. Phoenix, as previously mentioned, can’t bank on its status as Death’s Waiting Room for Chicagoans to find a profit in hockey. Western cities in this part of the country often exist on an island—the divider between city and rural environments are stark.

There are no collection of 100,000-plus population cities and counties emanating from desert metropolises, the types of places that are close enough to supply a steady stream of fans (who may make their money in unrelated industries) on any given night. There are the immediate suburbs and then the towns which Stephen King based Desperation upon.

Vegas relies on one population center with effectively one industry—tourism—leading the way. Las Vegans will point to the successful effort by Bill Foley and the Maloof Brothers (formerly of the Sacramento Kings) to sell more than 10,000 season ticket deposits for a team that does not yet exist as evidence that it’s an economically-viable option.

The real feat would have been canvassing for those perspective ticket-holders seven years ago in the thick of the Great Recession, when American en masse decided they’d rather watch Bill Engvall at their local tribal casino than Frank Caliendo at the Mirage and unemployment closed in on 20 percent in Sin City.

As far as the other aspect—growing a hockey culture—we can only wait and see. The city sports a few youth leagues, a small minor league team, a club program at UNLV and a smattering of high school-aged clubs. In that respect it may be no different than San Jose or Nashville were before they landed teams.

But growing a base of local, knowledgeable hockey fans will take patience—never a virtue associated with Vegas.

Given the evidence, I’d put Vegas at slightly worse than even money to support an NHL club if they land one. Only two Sun Belt cities—Atlanta and Oakland—have failed (so far) in their quest to retain hockey after landing it. It can work, but it’s going to take someone with a big ass pile of chips and the ability to let it bleed for a long time, if necessary.

Is the NHL that someone, with a trio of warm-weather franchises already withering on the vine?