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They're open until 8 now and provide free delivery. They're also family-owned by locals; Drew is a Michigan alum. Also: 10% off if you mention MGoBlog. I suggest mentioning MGoBlog by sidling up to someone there and whispering it at almost sub-vocal levels. Let's make it weird. This is a good way to keep a sponsor.

POY/COY. Congratulations to Naz Hillmon, the Big Ten's women's basketball player of the year. Hillmon averaged 25 and 11 while shooting 65% from the floor. That'll do. Congratulations are also in order for Juwan Howard, the Sporting News MBB coach of the year.

Yes I will link a retrospective of Trey Burke stealing the ball from Keith Appling. This is a thing I will do:

“As soon as we turned the ball over, I started thinking of ways to get the ball back, like, ‘we’ve gotta get the ball back, or they’re gonna hold for the last shot,’ ” Burke told the Daily in a phone interview this week. “My mind automatically went to getting the steal.”

Matched up against Keith Appling, the Spartans’ star guard, Burke knew what to look for. Appling dribbled the ball up past half-court and turned his head towards Michigan State coach Tom Izzo. As Appling asked for a play call, his right hand was exposed. Despite the Spartans being in the double-bonus, Burke went for the steal.

“I had gotten it on a few other guards that year, but Keith Appling usually wouldn’t leave the ball there,” Burke said. “He usually would spin with the ball in the right hand, with his outside hand, so you can’t get it.”

It's Duncan Robinson content Tuesday. First, a preview of his interview with one half of Men In Blazers cites one DFW:

Inspired by the words of David Foster Wallace, Duncan Robinson explains to Rog how he acts as a "conscious participant" in his own life, on and off the court.

The @MiamiHEAT player joins us this WEDNESDAY. @D_Bo20 is proper @ManCityUS. Airs 3:30 pm ET on NBCSN @NBCSportsSoccer. pic.twitter.com/BEFhsaZLoq

— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) March 8, 2021

I was initially surprised by this and then created a mental list of athletes most likely to cite David Foster Wallace. "Guy who went to Williams" for a year topped it.

Second, how Robinson went from the G-League to an NBA record-setter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tOjr9OJxQI

He also tops the most unlikely pro star list.

[After THE JUMP: in which the common sense of the hockey committee is relied upon]

I submit this is Weird. Home court advantage did not budge as much as you'd think:

The regular season is over and to copy a phrase from my friend M. Twain, the demise of home court advantage was greatly exaggerated. Home teams won 57.5% of conference games, with an average margin of 2.45. This beats the previous lows set in '17 (59.0%, 2.79), but not by much!

— Ken Pomeroy (@kenpomeroy) March 8, 2021

Environmental factors clearly play a role. Kenpom's home court advantage leaderboard has an "altitude" column for a reason:

Nine of the top ten teams in altitude have above-average HCAs despite not having the kind of attendance you'd expect moves needles. On average they rank 62nd, and we should really drop the Big Sky teams out since 9 of their 11 teams are 26th or higher in elevation.

Anyone who's gone skiing in the Rockies knows why elevation is an advantage, but I wonder if subtler environmental factors have an impact as well.

Nate Oats in a nutshell

One dollar for Matt Norlander. Or whoever wrote this headline:

Ball & Oats: How Alabama became an SEC powerhouse overnight on its way to possibly changing college basketball

That's a dive into Nate Oats, who has to be the most analytics-inflected coach in America:

Last season, Oats' first with Bama, the Tide led all teams among the Major Seven conferences in percentage of 3-pointers attempted vs. percentage of 2-pointers attempted with 49% of its shots coming from beyond the arc. But it was barely a winning strategy on its own. Alabama finished 16-15 thanks to a suboptimal defense (114th at KenPom) amounting to a middling inaugural season.

Oats and his staff overhauled their defensive accountability in the offseason, improving from a sub-100 unit to top-three. (This is outrageous.) But they also held steadfast in their belief that the 3-point shot could be their meal ticket. A season after 3-pointers accounted for nearly half of its total attempted shots last season, Bama has turned to launching from distance again, with 47.4% of its shots from 3 powering the program's best offense in nearly two decades. Once again, it's a pace well ahead of the rest of the teams in the power conference hierarchy.

Oats's teams play fast and shoot almost exclusively at the rim or from deep. Oates himself is one of he bluntest coaches in the country:

"Modern basketball, you're not catching a ball and putting it on your hip and staring at the defense for five seconds before you do anything. That's not how basketball's played anymore," Oats said. "But I'm sure dad, uncle, grandpa, professional skills trainer, you're gonna do all this mid-range, triple threat, all this old-fashioned garbage."

Oats is a fascinating counterfactual for Michigan basketball since he hails from the state and was a hot name just a couple months before John Beilein left for the Cavaliers. During Michigan's coaching search someone told me that if Michigan really pressed for him they could probably get him—though that would have involved paying a steep buyout for a guy who just moved jobs. Michigan instead went with Juwan Howard, which is going okay.

Anyway, fascinating article in which Oats sits down with his team and does the points-per-possession math to convince them that midrange jumpers are poison.

The gates open, temporarily. The one-time transfer got shelved as a permanent rule change but it sounds like they're going to do it this year anyway:

While the actual legislative proposal status is still TBD, this waiver — for the upcoming year only — will at least allow those to transfer and be eligible right away without having to worry.

— Bryan Fischer (@BryanDFischer) March 8, 2021

This is taking a defacto truth and making it an actual one—some 90% of people were getting waivers the past couple years—but removing even the slight possibility you'll have to sit out is going to take up-transfers from a relatively rare way to patch roster holes to a full-on second recruiting pathway. I have my reservations about what this will do to the frequency of March Madness upsets, but this train is a way to get good PR for the NCAA without spending any money so it will happen.

Probably in? There's been absolutely no guidance from the NCAA about how the hockey tournament will be selected and seeded, but College Hockey News's wild guess is that Michigan is a lock:

Just looking at things practically, there's probably 10 teams that are very safe: North Dakota, St. Cloud State, Minnesota-Duluth, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Boston College, Massachusetts, Quinnipiac, Minnesota State.

Here's the thing — without an objective system, there's going to be a lot pressure on the Committee members to take similar amount of teams from each conference. This will not be a mandate so much as human nature.

There are 16 slots in the tournament and six conferences (B10, NCHC, WCHA, ECAC, HE, AH). One of those conferences, Atlantic Hockey, is historically a one-bid conference and will almost certainly get one bid again. A second, the ECAC, is currently operating with four teams since the Ivy League sat this season out. They are unlikely to get multiple bids and definitely won't get three. So that's 13 or 14 slots to distribute between four conferences. It is close to inconceivable the Big Ten won't get three of those and Michigan is clearly #3 in the Big Ten pecking order.

I'm not putting it completely beyond the powers that be in hockey to completely screw this up since this is a new frontier in making the worst possible tournament, but even I have to think that some of the wilder things out there cannot be true:

The Pairwise has Canisius in line for a #1 seed... https://t.co/g88mdHPN1y

— Chris Dilks (@ChrisDilks) February 16, 2021

For one, "strength of schedule" does not exist this year since there is limited or no interconnectivity between conferences. This is why the Pairwise is useless to begin with. "Pairwise will be used" can only mean it will be used to rank teams within conferences. Probably.

A demand for college basketball pairwise. Jesse Newell suggests that the basketball committee should go the way of the dodo:

I’m ready to do away with the NCAA Tournament selection committee, which is a group that means well but is tasked with an impossible assignment each year.

The NCAA, in actuality, is making a mountain out of a molehill when selecting its teams. It has created Team Sheets and NET and Quadrants and endless “scrubbing” sessions when, in fact, all are completely unnecessary for the actual task of putting the most deserving at-large programs into the field each year.

There’s a simpler way to do this, and one that would have far-reaching benefits —perhaps the greatest of which being that it would allow all teams to know exactly where they stand in terms of securing an NCAA bid. …

Every team will know, in the moment, where they are and what they potentially need to do to get into the field as an at-large.

Say, for instance, you are Belmont. As of Monday, you rank 41st in WAB, which would be in line for the first 11 seed.

All of a sudden, there’s clarity with your situation. Win your next four games — which would add a combined 0.11, 0.03, 0.21 and 0.25 to your WAB total — and you’re all but assured to be in regardless of what happens in the conference tournament. Slip up somewhere, and you can re-evaluate from there, knowing that a WAB ranking in the upper-40s or low-50s won’t be guaranteed to make it based on other conference tournament results.

This is less wacky than it seems. WAB is a lot like what the committee does except there aren't cliffs for "quadrants" and home/road stuff is respected. The consensus one seeds are 1-4 in WAB; a WAB top sixteen looks like this, with seed changes from the current Bracket Matrix bolded:

1. Gonzaga
2. Illinois
3. Michigan
4. Baylor
5. Alabama
6. Iowa
7. Ohio State
8. Arkansas (3 –> 2)
9. Purdue (4 –> 3)
10. Kansas
11. Oklahoma State (4 –> 3)
12. Villanova
13. Clemson (6 –> 4)
14. West Virginia (3 –> 4)
15. USC (5 –> 4)
16. BYU (7 –> 4)

Houston is gets flung down from a consensus two seed to a 5.

The above is close enough to the actual projected seeding that going to WAB would not be a seismic change at the top of the bracket. Only three teams in the top 16 of WAB or the current bracket matrix move more than one seed line.

At the bottom things wouldn't be entirely different but there would be some big outliers. Oklahoma, currently a 6 in the Bracket Matrix but 47th in WAB, would be at risk of getting booted from the tournament entirely.

The usual. More 2021 NHL draft rankings from Scott Wheeler include a quote from Bill Muckalt on Kent Johnson:

Wolverines associate head coach Bill Muckalt on Johnson: “Kent is uber skilled. It’s hard for me to give an honest assessment of the other players but I would have a hard time believing there’s anybody more skilled offensively than Kent Johnson in this draft. The shit he does offensively, you only see it once every four or five years. But he’s physically the least mature of our freshman as far as our strength and he’s playing against guys some nights that are seven-to-eight years older, so it makes it difficult on him. But he does highlight reel stuff. Where (Matt) Beniers has this motor that is just 200 feet, Kent is more artistic and creative, and more high-risk. But he’s going to be like a (Elias) Pettersson or a (Patrick) Kane.”

If I had to pick one guy to get back next year it would be Johnson, who has the best chance of blowing up into a slam-dunk Hobey winner. (Unless there is a guy from Harvard who happens to be a senior and scores 23 points.)

Michigan guys on Wheeler's list: #1 Owen Power, #2 Kent Johnson, #4 Luke Hughes, #5 Matt Beniers, #27 Dylan Duke, #32 Matt Samoskevich.

Etc.: Pete Sampson on Louis Nix. RIP. Chris Peters's listing of top college hockey rookies is naturally heavy on Michigan players. A Clint Dempsey story. A good tweet. Everyone hates Bo Borowski. Will Tschetter profiled. It was only a matter of time before Ann Arbor politics got to the dried pig fetus stage.