Calling All Nerds: Let's Play VHL March Madness!

[Gustav 6,599]

 

Just when you thought I was done writing, here we are. Let's all have some fun with this.

 

 

Before a couple months ago, I hadn't expected to get into college basketball. I'd never followed basketball on any level before, and despite having a team in a competitive conference to root for over the last few years, I'd never been more than just a casual fan. After all, as long as I've had them on my radar, my team always starts the year ranked somewhere around #20 and then very quickly drops off into irrelevance.

 

Something I did enjoy quite a bit over the last few years was filling out the bracket at work. It gave me teams to root for so I could get my bragging rights in. Plus, by this point in the season, the hockey teams I like are generally completely wiped out of playoff contention, baseball season hasn't started yet, and my favorite sport of all in football is done for almost the next 6 months. I can get really into basketball for these few weeks at the end of March, and this year it's been more than ever now that I've actually followed the back half of the season. For those wondering, my real-life bracket has Florida beating Alabama in the championship (and I've learned over the last couple days that SEC bias is as much of a thing in the basketball rankings as it is in football, unfortunately for many of my picks). 

 

So, because I'm in the middle of nerding out over the championship bracket, I thought I'd write up something fun for the VHL and invite you to play along. For those unfamiliar, the college basketball championship bracket works as follows:

• 68 teams are selected to compete, with a preliminary round of the "First Four" games eliminating 4 teams right off the bat.
• After that point, it's a 64-team, single-elimination playoff. Four quadrants are created, with teams ranked 1-16 within those. Ideally, teams selected to be at the same rank (i.e. two 7-seeds from different quadrants) should be as equal in skill as possible.
• Submitting a bracket (at least, under the points system in my group) awards points for correctly predicting the winner of each of the following: 10 for the first round, 20 for the second round, 40 for the third round (or Sweet 16), 80 for the fourth (Elite Eight), 160 for the fifth (Final Four), and finally 320 for predicting the national champion. You have to fill out the whole thing before the tournament starts, which is why predicting wins becomes worth more points as it moves on--it's more impressive to guess a winner five rounds out, and those later rounds matter more anyway.

 

I am not asking you to fill out a college basketball bracket. Instead, what I've done is the following:

• I've sorted the list of all current players by TPA and assigned rankings to them (the top 4 are all #1 in each quadrant, for example, and the next 4 are all #2s, and so on).
• I'm going to be releasing a series of articles that puts these players up against each other based on their placement in the bracket and assigns a winner for each round. I'll work all of this out on my own terms behind the scenes over the course of this week.
• The metric for assigning a winner will be my own personal opinion of who has had the most distinguished VHL career between the two players in a given matchup. Much like in college basketball, we have a general idea of who's good and who's not (TPA), but the actual results will matter when it comes to the matchups. 

 

To give you an example of my thought process, I've gone ahead and assigned winners of the First Four to my bracket. In real life, two games are played to decide two of the four 11 seeds, and two others are played to decide two of the four 16 seeds (why it's not just all of the 16s or something, I don't know). Doing the same here, I have:

• Leif Reingaard defeats Gustav Mattias for a 16 seed: Reingaard has recorded more points than Gustav despite playing on defense. Additionally, Gustav is essentially inactive and has done little more than fill roster room for LA over the past few seasons.
• Eric White Jr defeats Ryan Artyomov for an 11 seed: This one was tough for me because I'm comparing a skater to a goaler and both have been at least decent over the course of their careers. To me, it's not like Artyomov hasn't played well, but so has White, and White has won a Cup in both the VHL and the VHLM (as well as in the E!). 
• Red Panda defeats Wally Lose for an 11 seed: This one was pretty easy because both play the same position, and Panda has played longer and simply done more. 
• Conference Prince-de-Galles defeats Brandon Petan Jr for a 16 seed: This one was also pretty easy because Petan only came up to the VHL last year and Conference has been up for a long time. Longevity and career totals aren't always going to be the answer, but big differences like we have in this case are going to make other considerations irrelevant.

 

 

I'd like to challenge you to play along with me, actually. If you'd like to participate, go make a copy of THIS SPREADSHEET, fill out the entire bracket, label it with your name somewhere, send it to me by this time next week, and I'll keep you in the loop about your scores in each round as I write. Put as much time analyzing stats or as little time picking names you like as you want--we're just here to have fun.

 

Even if no one takes me up on my offer, I'll write the articles anyway because I think it's a cool idea. The winner gets nothing, except maybe if enough of us like this, I'll make sure to keep a record of it and mention you as the first one ever to do it next season.

[Spartan 4,734]

9 minutes ago, Gustav said:

Red Panda defeats Wally Lose for an 11 seed: This one was pretty easy because both play the same position

They do? Isn't panda a G and Lose a F

[Gustav 6,599]

1 minute ago, Spartan said:

They do? Isn't panda a G and Lose a F

 

I'm stupid and I think I just blanked out on this. I definitely looked at both player pages, and thankfully I think that means my reasoning holds otherwise.

[Spartan 4,734]

10 minutes ago, Gustav said:

Conference Prince-de-Galles defeats Brandon Petan Jr for a 16 seed: This one was also pretty easy because Petan only came up to the VHL last year and Conference has been up for a long time. Longevity and career totals aren't always going to be the answer, but big differences like we have in this case are going to make other considerations irrelevant.

Also isn't this going to significantly skew in older players' favor? Like we should be able to acknowledge that a max earning second year player should be better than a pension clicker when both careers play out. Obviously we can't properly predict every max earning rookie that far, so there's caution needed, but I'd pretty confidently put Petan over CPG.

[Gustav 6,599]

1 minute ago, Spartan said:

Also isn't this going to significantly skew in older players' favor? Like we should be able to acknowledge that a max earning second year player should be better than a pension clicker when both careers play out. Obviously we can't properly predict every max earning rookie that far, so there's caution needed, but I'd pretty confidently put Petan over CPG.

 

Yes but I don't have a problem with that. First off, there's room for flexibility in it (someone who's had a few awesome performances over 5 seasons could beat someone who's been OK for 7 and has higher totals, for example). But also it's just a matter of how you want to define a winner--I chose to do it one way and there are other ways to do it that would also be valid. 

[LucyXpher 1,996]

I love this, filling it out now...

wish this could be a fantasy zone event once per year for a few tpe... no idea how it would be scored, but even just for fun, it's a great idea! 

Edited Saturday at 03:49 AM by LucyXpher

[sadie 1,056]

48 minutes ago, Gustav said:

Conference Prince-de-Galles defeats Brandon Petan Jr for a 16 seed:

Hey I made it , better than my college team did this year fr.

I enjoy this idea and it'll be fun for me to dive into looking at a bunch of different players' careers!

[rory 2,006]

No !~ :3

[dstevensonjr 546]

Can we retroactively do this for a season ago? Asking for a friend.

[jacobcarson877 2,633]

I did not get the result I expected, but that's the power of the bracket!