Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
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Now, I hope that all the Niagara fans and all the Florida A&M fans will chat together amiably here. I don't want to have to police things.
Yes, today is the day of the game that gives one of the little guys a chance to say that they won an NCAA tournament game. Of course it's sort of like when the NHL expanded in 1967 and put all the expansion teams in one division and then one of them would automatically make the Stanley Cup Final.
What do I know about Niagara? Well, for starters, it's a Catholic university in Niagara Falls, New York. The basketball team lost six of its first seven games because of several players were missing because of suspsensions. But the team rallied to finish 22-11 and beat Siena to win the MAAC.
What do I know about Florida A&M. I know that the A&M stands for "Agricultural & Mechanical." (The "A&M" in Texas A&M and Texas A&M Corpus Christi doesn't stand for anything anymore.) FAMU, as the school also styles itself, won the MEAC with a 21-13 record and beat Delaware State in the final. The Rattlers are probably best known for their marching band, The Marching "100", which actually has over 360 people in it. It's performed at Super Bowls and also was the official U.S. representative to the parade that the French held celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
The best damn band in the land?
And now you can enter the Griddle's contest since you know who Kansas is going to play.
Purple teams rule, but
Calvin Murphy is 60
Bring the snake serum
Anyway, here's hoping for Final Four run by both Niagara and Virginia this year. Then the "Viagra" final will have a built-in corporate sponsor.
Texas (5)
Virginia (4)
Tennessee (4)
But I'm too lazy to actually do the research.
California has 23 schools playing DI basketball.
New York has more, but a lot of them are fairly small schools and frankly, I lost count.
Bob, I'd pick a [] in your contest, but with the Orange out, I'm just not into the whole thing. It kills my whole []-picking strategy, which has always been to somehow have Syracuse win it all.
Note that I sadly did not enter a Tourney pool in 2003.
The most egregious omission was not Syracuse anyway, it was Drexel.
If you've ever seen the "Marching 100" perform, you'd be impressed. Those guys (women included) can play. I won't be able to see the basketball game, but I imagine that a smaller version of the band will be in Dayton tonight.
The same database just lists 22 CA institutions, but it doesn't reflect UC Davis which moved up this year.
States that have schools in DI that were shut out of the NCAA tournament:
Alabama
Colorado
Delaware
Hawai'i
Iowa
Idaho
Louisiana (with 13 different schools!)
Maine
Minnesota (which has just one school surprisingly)
Missouri
Montana
New Hampshire
North Dakota
South Dakota
Vermont
West Virginia
Wyoming
Alaska doesn't have any Division I teams.
And La Salle calls its teams the "Explorers" even though the school isn't named for an explorer.
...and I can vouch that "Paths to Glory" is a fascinating book that, for me at least, changed the way I look at the way baseball teams are built. So go enter the contest!!
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