Rest In Peace, George Foreman

George Foreman died over the weekend at the age of 76.          His career arc of Olympic heavyweight champion to professional heavyweight champion (more than once) to loveable pitchman for products ranging from portable electric grills to Meineke Mufflers to Invent Help (and probably a half-dozen more that do not come to mind now) is not matched by many other athletes or celebrities.

Rest in peace, George Foreman.

Let me present five notes I took from watching tournament games over the weekend:

1. When did the rule makers erase the traveling violation?  I would estimate a half-dozen violations were not called per game.
2. Similarly, when did the rule makers change the “three-second rule” to the “three-minute rule”?  As a former official, I sometimes look off the ball for play under the basket.  Twice this weekend, (once in Baylor/Mississippi St. and once in UConn/Oklahoma) I counted a player in the lane for 7 seconds without a whistle to be heard.
3. The best game of the weekend was Florida/UConn.
4. St. John’s/Arkansas would have been a much better game if either/both teams shot the ball well.
5. Based on the first two rounds, I think I want to see Florida/Duke in the finals because it would be a great game.

According to an AP report, there are no perfect brackets left as of Sundy night.  Here are some data:

• When Duke beat Baylor, one perfect bracket was left according to ESPN’s tracking.  That perfect bracket went under when Kentucky beat Illinois.  ESPN tracks 24.6 million brackets.
• The NCAA platform tracks 34 million brackets.  Those 34 million brackets went belly-up with the same Kentucky win over Illinois.
• The last perfect bracket submitted to Yahoo! before the tournament was busted by Michigan’s win over Texas A&M.
• CBSSports.com had a perfect bracket working until Saturday night when that bracket lost two games – – BYU/Wisconsin and Drake/Texas A&M.

While all of that is interesting, here is a paragraph from the AP report that brings a smile here in Curmudgeon Central:

“On the other end of the spectrum, ESPN reported that every pick was wrong on 30 of its brackets — a nearly impossible feat in its own right even if a contestant were trying to pick all losers.”  [Aside: Recall that ESPN tracks 24.6 million brackets.]

The 2025 tournament has not been gentle with the so-called mid-major teams.  If you count the five “power conferences” as ACC, Big-East, Big-Ten, Big-Twelve and SEC, then there are no mid-majors in the Sweet 16.  Moreover, a lot of those mid-majors exited the tournament with a double-digit loss.  This is a trend to watch because it is possible – – not nearly a certainty but certainly possible – – that the combination of NIL money plus the universal transfer portal might make the mid-major Cinderella story of past tournaments just that – – a thing of the past.

Switching gears …  While college basketball is front and center at the moment as it tries to crown a national champion and where all the games are hotly contested, the NBA finds itself in a bimodal situation.  About half the teams and players are seriously trying to get into the playoffs or to improve their seedings within the playoffs.  About a quarter of the teams are not trying as hard as they might because losing games now could get them a much better draft slot in June.  It’s not outright “tanking”, but for some teams the level of effort and focus on winning is “diminished”.

There is a fundamental difference between a team losing a lot of games because it has a deficient roster and another team that may not be playing its best players as much as they could in order to lose games and move up in the Draft.  Since I live in the DC area, the NBA team I see most frequently is the Washington Wizards; the Wiz are a bad team; they earned their 15-56 record because they are talent deficient.  If you watch the Wizards play, they play hard; they are simply not good enough to beat their opponents “on any given night”.

That is far less the case with the Sixers.  Yes, the team has had debilitating injuries this year to its best players, but watching the Sixers play recently does not give the impression that they are “going full tilt”.  Moreover, there is a double incentive for the Sixers to improve their draft position.  Not only would that give the Sixers a better shot at a good player addition but in 2025 the Sixers will lose their first-round pick to the Thunder if they draft 7^th or higher in the draft.  They can only keep their pick if they are in the “Top 6”.  Given that circumstance, the phrase “integrity of the game” looms on the horizon …

Finally, since today was about basketball, let me close with these words from James Naismith who invented the game:

“The invention of basketball was not an accident. It was developed to meet a need. Those boys simply would not play ‘Drop the Handkerchief.’”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………