Been thinking about this a lot today. If you reach a 95% win probability in every single game (as Duke pretty much does), you would expect to lose 1 out of every 20 of those. If you win 100% of those games, the model is not aggressive enough.

First to 21 Final Four!

Shoutout to my wife who preached 2 Palm Sunday services this morning and still gave us enough time to arrive to the game on time

I’m glad this tournament has allowed the rest of the country to truly experience the grotesque horrors of Big Ten basketball

Whose wedding do we think Shane Gillis and Peyton Manning are attending in Italy where they serve Bud Light?

Cycling thought of the day: if Remco and Primož can truly sacrifice themselves to support Lipowitz at the Tour de France, Lipowitz has a real chance of challenging Pogačar/Vingegaard. They’re like a Calipari Kentucky team that just needs to get all the personalities aligned

First to 21 Elite Eight!

St. John’s gets to 21 first, which eliminates Siena from the First to 21 Bracket, leaving @jasonkirk.fyi’s Kennesaw St. Owls as the lowest seed still alive

This is why I toured Michigan when it was below 0 with lots of snow on the ground, and the fact that I still loved it was a good sign

I love that Bentley’s goalie is Lukas Swedin from Sweden. It’s like having your last name be Amerika

genuinely one of the most incredible sights of group two action there's been for a while. all that work to have mathieu van der poel in your sights, him on the ropes and you throw it away in the final kilometre. outstanding. simply outstanding. oh to be a fly on the wall of their team buses.

Hilarious finish in the E3: 4 riders spent 60km chasing down Mathieu van der Poel, caught him with 1km to go. MVDP faked a slow-down, then did one last acceleration and the 4 chasers all looked at each other like a group project where nobody steps up to do the work.

Oh no, he has become Purdue Pete

The last 30 minutes of Purdue-Texas took 2 hours and 20 minutes

I’ve said this before, but no coach has benefitted from the shift to athleisure attire more than Sean Miller

A sublime stretch of basketball

Next in Flemish Cycling Week: The E3 Classic! Nicknamed "The Little Tour of Flanders," this race hits a lot of the same hills around Oudenaarde as the Tour of Flanders, but the E3 is "only" 129 miles, making it the perfect warmup for the much bigger race next week.

You gotta be kidding me

Thought process during March Madness Week 2: Monday: "It's nice and calm to not have basketball on all the time!" Tuesday: "I'm really looking forward to the Sweet 16 games on Thursday..." Wednesday: "Should I watch the NIT games tonight??"

Up next in cycling: Flemish Cycling Week starts tomorrow! Is Flemish Cycling Week actually 12 days long? Don't worry about it! The next week and a half will feature the 5 biggest one-day races in Flanders, all building up to the Ronde van Vlaanderen next Sunday.

Family would make an annual spring break drive from Michigan to Florida without stopping. We'd pull the 3rd row out of our Suburban and us kids would sleep in the trunk area. Longest where I've been driving was a 3-day trek from Loveland, CO to New Kensington, PA in a red minivan named Wendy

First to 21 Sweet 16! 3 Cinderellas still alive

First to 21 Sweet 16! 3 Cinderellas still alive

Watch Grid: an upset-free Friday leads to a loaded Sunday

Tyler Tanner is the player that basketball TV guys thought Aaron Craft was

I had to watch this after the Michigan game but this was electric. It takes a lot for a Pogačar win to get me fired up but this did it for me

Watch Grid: my annual complaint that there should be more Saturday and Sunday afternoon games. With only 8 games, we don’t need 3 of them to still not be done at 9:45 pm

With that, here are the teams advancing to the second round of the First to 21 bracket:

“We” in this situation means “me and all my players wearing Butler uniforms”

My strategy with picking 8-9 games is to flip my choice so many times that by the time the game comes around, I’ve forgotten who I picked

I can’t be the only one watching Hofstra and singing “Onuetu, gentille Onuetu”

The sound I just made when Kentucky hit that shot caused my wife to run downstairs and make sure I was okay

An excellent appetizer for tomorrow's second round games: Milano-Sanremo! The first of the five "monuments" and the longest one day race of the year: a 185-mile, 6+ hour drag from Milan down to the Ligurian sea and along the coast all the way to Sanremo.

Friday Watch Grid! Hopefully the stagger between games works out a little better today than it did yesterday.

Jason Benetti calling Robbie Avila a “spectacle.” There’s no one quite like him, folks

The parable of the lost sheep! Didn’t have that on my Bingo card

Many smart people correctly identified Wisconsin as the most “they could be anything” team in the tournament

Idea for CBS: on the little score graphics at the top of the screen, when a game is at halftime, show us how much time is left in halftime. Shouldn’t be very difficult considering they already show us how much time is left when the game is playing

The annual picture! This year with considerably more children’s toys in the shot

And with that, TCU becomes the first team to advance to the second round of the First to 21 tournament! That’s right, we’re bringing back this extremely stupid bit for the 12th season

Ohio State-TCU has to be the most combined wins Michigan has ever had over an NCAA tournament matchup in a season. I literally don't think it's possible to have more

Alright then, who wants to hear about the Bredene Koksijde Classic?

Here it is, the Thursday Watch Grid! I used to organize these by watchability but it's much easier to just do it by channel. Enjoy!

The peloton crosses over into Northern France tomorrow for the Grand Prix de Denain, another cobblestone sprint classic. Jasper Philipsen is skipping this one to head down to Italy, so it's a chance for Jordi Meeus to get a win after finishing 2nd today.

Best "value" pick by round, based on the expected points above average bracket (win probabilities from Kenpom, bracket data from Yahoo): Champ: Michigan Finals: Michigan Final 4: Arizona Elite Eight: Illinois Sweet 16: Nebraska 2nd Round: Santa Clara

Time to talk about the most notable sporting event happening this week... That's right! Milano-Torino! Sort of the Lafayette-Lehigh of cycling races, in that it makes you go "wait, that's the oldest one? Like older than the Tour de France?"

I'm bummed they used it as their example because mine was 100% the Jiffy factory

This is a huge relief for those of us in the "I don't think they have the guts to fire him" crowd. I was extremely skeptical of Matta from the start; the hire felt like a chance for him to hang out with his old friends at a cushy retirement gig, and for four years it was basically exactly that.

Alright friends, it's tournament week and there are no games today. That means it's time to REMEMBER SOME NCAA TOURNAMENT GUYS. I'm not talking Ali Farokhmanesh. Give me your deep DEEP cuts. Your Venky Joises. Your Sim Bhullars. Go!

Getting the East winner correct in your bracket pool should count for double