Basketball

Did you see the Kentucky/Wichita State game?  Quite a fine bit of work.  Exciting to the very end.  But I was put off by the self-serving comments by Kentucky coach John Calipari (a man I loathe).  He said, according to the Times, "We all know this was an Elite Eight game.  The winner of this game should have gone to the Final Four."

Which is a load of crap.  If it was an Elite Eight game it wouldn't have been played yet.  Calipari also suggested it was one of the greatest college games ever.  This is also crap.  It was just a good game.  Plus, as everybody knows, there's a formula for measuring greatness in this situation:

G=1/P

G being Greatness; P being position within the given tournament.  So in this case P equals 32, and the value of G is one thirty-second.  Had it happened in the finals, the value of P would be one half.  Which would have made it a great game.  This, parenthetically, would also have been the value of Virginia's 1986 win in the ACC finals over North Carolina.  The famous Kentucky/Duke game with Christian Laetner (a man I also loathe) scored 1/8, which is complicated because that was a great game.  But we can't get side-tracked.

There are exceptions, of course.  Elvin Hayes' Houston team stopping UCLA's record winning streak certainly bubbles up.  The time I almost played two on two with Wally Walker, Mark Iavaroni and Billy Langloh jumps to mind as well ... and that game never actually happened.

Me?

I'm still atwitter about Virginia vs. Memphis.  I'll give you this ...


Now that was a great game.   Certainly as great as Kentucky/Wichita State.

Actually, just so we're clear, the formula is slightly more complicated than G=1/P, but I try to keep things simple on TYOMP because I know you people have math anxiety.  The complete formula is G=(1/P)DxL.

D being point differential; L being the number of lead changes in the game.

But that shit is what we call advanced sabermetrics and there's no call for it here.