Posts Tagged With: UPenn

We Root For These Teams To Lose Next Week

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If these teams lose, Penn gets a better seed and a better chance of winning its first round game: #1 Yale - Gotta make the NCAA's first, two combined Yale losses or Penn wins will do it. Davidson/Appalachian State - most likely competing for one bid between them Holy Cross Vermont Butler Memphis Southern Illinois/Creighton/Mo State, by any team in the MVC that's not in Nevada UNLV/Air Force BYU Xavier/UMass to any team in the A-10 that's not in Winthrop VCU/Drexel/Old Dominion Gonzaga/Santa Clara

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February Madness – Penn Basketball’s NCAA Tourney Chances (Or, Oh God, I Hope They Give Us Washington State And Not Memphis)

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Penn is in control of its own destiny after a Yale loss last week to Cornell and a victory last night over Cornell. Five games left - at Harvard and Dartmouth, home to Brown and Yale, and at Princeton. In all likelihood the title will come down to Penn vs. Yale at the Palestra. A win there means we can lose any other game and still have 2 losses against Yale and Cornell's 3. A loss likely spells a playoff against Yale for the Ivy League title. I will be rooting for every single possible upset over the next few weeks besides my dear old Penn. I hope Winthrop goes down in its conference tourney, I hope Appalachian State loses, I hope Nevada, Gonzaga, and Holy Cross, lose, I hope Boston U wins the CAA tourney and Iona wins the MAAC tournament. The more upsets in the one-bid conferences, the more at-larges get eaten up and the more teams get seeded below Penn, giving us a better shot at winning against our first round opponent. In Penn's range, here are teams I'd love to play and teams I'd hate: Memphis: I have better chances of getting action on a Monday than Penn has of beating Memphis. The same can be said for Kansas, who beat a not-terrible Nebraska by 53. Texas A&M: Big, strong, athletic, we're screwed. Butler: Butler is a very good team that for the large part will beat inferior opposition. Even if they did lose to Illinois-Chicago, who we beat. Clemson: I would not be that happy about playing Clemson. A very athletic quick team that will expose our lack of defense and frontcourt. However they have struggled lately. Washington State: A team that plays grinding defense and runs the clock 35 seconds a possession. Sounds familiar, except these guys can win every now and then. We can beat Wazzu, especially if it is a low scoring game. Air Force: I am dancing inside if we land Air Force. They will underperform in the NCAA Tournament. Duke: Duke sucks, plus they rejected my application last April. I am also dancing inside if we get to play Duke. Ibby Jaaber will rip Greg Paulus for 10 steals. Paulus will never be able to show his face again.

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Random Steve Donohue Sighting Last Night

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Last night I went out with my dad after Penn beat Cornell. At New Deck Tavern I saw Steve Donohue, the Cornell head coach and former assistant to Fran Dunphy, out with Vince Curran, Brian Seltzer and some other Penn guys. I guess he was not taking the bus back with the team to Cornell; either way that's interesting. Mark Zoller was also there, having dinner with his dad.

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On A (Somewhat) Related Note…

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Ivy League

Athletic directors in the Ivy League are meeting to discuss the possibility of a postseason tournament. This is a terrible idea. Might as well make the results of the league season null. One-bid leagues should want to send their best team to the NCAA Tournament. The best team is the one that demonstrates consistent mastery against its opponents (e.g. the LEAGUE champion), not one that rides the hot hand of chance for three games, gets a 16 seed, and loses by 30 to Florida. The problem, however, boils down to money, money, money - a conference tournament generates revenue for its member schools, and that's hard to ignore. Unlike the BCS, where a postseason tournament would help determine the best team among football teams that have not necessarily played each other, the Ivy League is a competition where each team has played every other team twice and the best team is well-defined. If we have to have a tournament, and I get the feeling the lure of money may be too strong to resist, hopefully Ivy ADs will have the sense to model it after the West Coast Conference, where the league winner has to win fewer games than the other competing teams.

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Fake Your Space – Digital Candygrams

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Need some good-looking, fake friends? They're available for 99 cents at FakeYourSpace.com I've finally found a good use for my Wall - get some attractive male models to post cool things to it. Or, better yet, a good use for my friends' walls!! Want to make your friend appear like he's into men? Confuse the hell out of him? This website is perfect. This reminds me of those Candygrams you could send anonymously for a dollar back in middle school.

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Undergraduate Research

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I wrote my Econ 1 professor today and asked her if there were any professors looking for research assistants. She said that professors rarely take undergraduate assistants. Fair enough. Which led me to the idea of having undergraduates form teams based on appealing ideas, and do their own research, maybe led by one or two full-time advising staff. You'd need to set up a large amount of infrastructure to accomplish this, but it has a lot of potential - it works like this: Students submit ideas, other students express an interest in developing the idea, and you form a research team. The adviser is exactly that - to advise on complex economic issues and provide guidance in producing tangible results. This would be useful, I think.

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Harvard Ends Early Admissions: Overbearing Parents Everywhere Freak Out

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Sometimes someone does something so obvious, so smart, but so out-of-character that it takes you aback. Today, reading that Harvard decided to end its early admissions program, I enjoyed one of those moments. Early admissions benefits borderline students because many schools have higher admit rates for students willing to apply early (Penn famously admits half of its class early decision - around 1200 students out of 3500. Regular decision candidates compete for a further 2400 admits, but against a pool of around 18,000 candidates). Students like it because they think they have better chances of admission, and also because they can be finished with the college search by mid-December. Schools like early admission because it lets them increase their yield rates and pick students specially interested in the school. However, this unfairly benefits marginal students who've made up their minds at the expense of better qualified students in the regular pool that haven't decided on a college. Furthermore, as the Harvard admissions officers noted, lower-income students could not compare financial aid packages if they committed to a school early. By making everyone apply regular decision, everyone is judged against the same standard. This is bad news for parents eager to do anything to get their kids to an Ivy, but good news for bright lower-income students who deserve to go to the best schools. Early admissions increase the odds that a wealthy marginal child will get admitted. I think Penn should end its early decision program and judge everyone in the applicant pool against the same standard. Penn admits half its class early, partly to keep its yield rate high, and partly to reward students who are committed to Penn. The admissions department must recognize that its reasons for wanting to keep the yield rate high - to attract more applicants in coming years, and to maintain a high ranking in US News & World Report studies - are flawed. Penn's admissions goal should be to attract the nation's (and increasingly, the world's) best and brightest students to campus, in all races, genders, and income levels. It has taken a step toward this by switching to the Common Application, which decreases the time-cost to lower-income students who want to apply to Penn. It could take a step further by reducing the influence of the SAT, a test which has proven racist and coachable, and by ending its early admissions program.

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