The Ransom Has Been Paid + Some Championship Games

I don't want to bury the lead, so I'll get right to it. If you have (1) Utah Valley in the Western Athletic, they have paid the $1m ransom and are safe, for today. Assuming the money clears the bank by tomorrow morning (what a wild fucking sentence to write during the conference tournament pool). They still may lose in the actual conference tournament, but we don't have to turn them ineligible, yet. That would have been some really unfortunate luck, but these weird one-off scenarios do tend to show up every 5 years or so. Research Texas Southern and Stephan F. Austin. 💰

We had a packed day of conference tournament basketball games, including some really fun championships, as well as semifinals. Starting with the first block of games, over in the Northeast Conference (1) Long Island fairly easily beat (3) Mercyhurst, giving 66.67% of our pool a win and ultimately not significantly changing the standings. Long Island does not get a picture below because they already clinched a tournament berth a few days ago. The next game to finish Tuesday evening was in the Horizon League where we saw (1) Wright State come back from being down double digits to knock off (3) Detroit Mercy. Only a handful of picks were backing Wright State, making those important points for those who made the wright pick in this conference. After 8 days the Horizon League finally has a conference tournament champion. The last game in this time slot to wrap up was over in the Coastal Athletic. In a crazy back and forth game, bonus point darling (3) Hofstra knocked off Dan Sohler's (4) Monmouth team, handing out 18 wins in our pool. 🏀

     

The second block of games was just as wild and fun. In the MAAC, after getting out to a huge lead and slowly blowing it, (3) Siena was able to hang on to beat (1) Merrimack. Bonus points awarded to those that participated in that pick. Finally, in the West Coast Conference (1) Gonzaga, in their last ever game as a member of the WAC, beat (3) Santa Clara, handing out 28 pool victories. 🏀

Click here to see the latest version of the pool standings. 🏅

Everything is up to date in the standing's sheets, with the exception of the Idaho/Eastern Washington game in the Big Sky, that game is going to end well past my bedtime. For those of you that are veterans to this pool, you will know that Wednesday will be our last round of championship games, and then we go dry Thursday and Friday, before the final weekend push. I will spend some time Wednesday morning breaking down the standings and maybe previewing the championship games.