Monday’s Bowl Championship Series title game is attracting a significant amount of attention from fans and the news media. Google searches for the terms “BCS Championship Game” and “BCS Title Game” are on pace to be about twice as high as they were last year. Senior executives at ESPN, which will televise the game, are openly speculating that the contest could challenge ratings records — perhaps matching the mark set in 2006, when the game between Texas and U.S.C. attracted a 21.7 Nielsen rating. There are reasons for television executives to be excited. Notre Dame ranks as the fourth-most popular football program in the country, and Alabama as the eighth, according to an analysis I conducted in 2011. And the...
Matt Slocum/Associated Press Georgetown is among the Big East’s seven nonfootball members that could thrive in a new conference. A variety of reports suggest that the seven Big East schools that do not compete in high-level football may split off to form their own basketball-centric athletic conference. Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Marquette, Providence, Seton Hall and DePaul share a history of relatively successful men’s basketball programs, along with a heritage as Roman Catholic colleges. They have more in common with one another than they do with the other members of the Big East, which has diluted its basketball brand in its effort to remain intact as an elite football conference. A conference composed of these seven teams, along with select...
Maryland accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten Conference on Monday. Rutgers did the same on Tuesday, expanding the conference’s roster to 14 teams and its footprint to the East Coast.The new additions would bolster the Big Ten’s reputation for strong academics. Both universities are members of the Association of American Universities, as are all current Big Ten institutions, with the exception of Nebraska.Their athletic heritages are mixed, however. The Rutgers football team has finished the season ranked in the Associated Press top 25 once in the last 35 years, although it is currently ranked No. 21.Maryland’s football team has finished the season as a ranked team eight times in the same period. Its basketball team has had more...
The long march of the Republican nomination hasn’t been very friendly to those political writers who were hoping to enjoy March Madness. But I did dust off the FiveThirtyEight N.C.A.A. forecasting model, which is back with a fresh set of projections for this year’s men’s field. You can find those forecasts here. The FiveThirtyEight tournament forecasts are probabilistic, and come to an objective estimate about the odds of each team advancing to each stage of the tournament. It is up to you to figure out how to use that information to fill out your bracket. It isn’t necessarily the case that you should always go with the FiveThirtyEight favorite. Many bracket competitions give bonus points for picking upsets or lower...
Somehow, my N.C.A.A. tournament bracket still ranks in the 76th percentile nationwide, a result which it owes to having performed very strongly in the first couple of rounds. It’s all downhill from here, however, since the bracket had all four No. 1 seeds advancing to the Final Four in Houston — something that, after Kansas’ […]
