I posted on March 20th about SI's poor two-round showing in their NCAA men's tournament predictions. They didn't improve over rounds three and four. To date:
Round 1 - 22/32 correct (D/D+)
Round 2 - 8/16 correct (F)
Round 3 - 2/8 correct (F)
Round 4 - 2/4 correct (F)
Round 5 - 2/2 teams still playing
Round 6 - 1/1 team still playing
I'll have to figure out how to weight these various percentages - giving a higher proportion for the final round and working backwards - before issuing them a final grade for the tournament. That will be out after the last game is played next week.
On a related note, we recently got the latest issue of SI in the mailbox. Most of it was devoted to baseball. The men's tournament got a nice section. Amazingly, it would be hard to tell the women were even having a tournament from the articles. They did rate one of the three opening two-page photo spreads. So that's something. And there was a side bar on Pat Summitt (who, at the time the issue had gone to press, was tied with Dean Smith for career wins) that had a cool photo of her playing back in the seventies - love those knee pads!!.
But, based on the past two weeks worth of coverage, someone not familiar with women's college basketball would not even know who the top seeds in each regional were, let alone anything about most of the other 60 teams. Sigh. I really think they should change the name of the magazine to something like, "Pre Title IX Sports" Illustrated. When you don't even pretend to cover the most important yearly event in women's college sports you're definitely part of the problem.
