With the fouling and not allowing the opposition to shoot the tying three.

In fact, If I was a coach I would extend this theory. These games where someone is up 10 or 12 with 2 minutes to go--the team that is behind then starts fouling--if they can the worst free throw shooter on the court. Then you shoot your one plus one or double bonus, then they run down and shoot a three. If you miss a couple first shots of the one and one and they run down and make a couple threes, now a 10 or 12 point lead is 6 or 4, with just 20 seconds off the clock and now it's a free for all.

I'd foul them back, if possible their worst free throw shooter whenever he touches the ball. Basically, we are up by 10 or 12 with two minutes left and we are not going to allow any threes at all after you foul us. From this point forward it's going to be each of us shooting 2 free throws on every possession. Good luck catching up.

ffish Also, in your tournament preview there are a few places where things don't add up. For example, you picked BC over Texas Tech in the first round, but you then have Georgetown beating Texas Tech in the second round. There's a similar problem at one other point (team A beats B, and X beats T in round 1, then X beats B in round 2)

Thanks for pointing out the Texas Tech mistake. Obviously, that should have been Boston College. I just went through both previews and couldn't find the second mistake you mentioned, which doesn't mean it isn't there.

Mike King: Why didn't you just say that you wished Ron Lewis missed his shot?

Oh, I see what you did there. You've identified what this column was really about: Poor, trod-upon Ohio State, once again not getting any respect. Another writer picking on poor widdle Ohio State.

Right.

Well, I guess I didn't say that because that wasn't the issue. And also because I didn't with Lewis missed his shot. I don't think I make any secret of the fact that in the Tournament I'm rooting for the underdog in every game unless the underdog is Stanford (or UCLA, which I may not have mentioned) or the favorite is Cal, which is not a problem I've been burdened with too many times. So yeah, I was rooting for Xavier in that vague way one roots for the underdog in a game in which he has no rooting interest. But why would I root against overtime in a good game?

If it were the last game of the day I'd have been rooting for him to miss the shot. Absolutely. But it was the first.

Jonathan Really? 2nd most popular tournament in America and YOU can improve on it?

In a word: Yup.

What's the first most popular, and by what measure?

Another sport he apparently knows nothing about. What sport *does* Tony Kornheiser know about? (Hint: not football)

Imagine a baseball game where there is a commercial break between every pitch. That is what the last minute of a "close" NCAA basketball game feels like. I say "close" because Kentucky was still fouling while down by double digits with less than a minute to go in their game against Kansas. And the CBS announcers couldn't figure out why the fans were booing!?!

Here's another strategy you never see but which works, or would, about 100 percent of the time with four seconds or less left. You have the lead, you have the ball - heave it as hard as you can straight up, up to the roof. Then just walk away. By the time it comes down, game over.

I have to agree with David and NCA (although I'm sure we should leave the poor animals out of it). Stop writing a 5 paragraph (or worse a 1 sentence) diatribe about how a certain aspect of a sport needs to change to fit your needs. It doesn't. It's pretty much perfect as it is. Hence, its popularity!

Who says free throws are boring? At the end of the game? With everything on the line? Sounds pretty tension-filled and exciting to me! Maybe if some of these kids were to practice, I don't know, say... their basketball skills, they would be able to MAKE A FREE THROW? It's called "free" for a reason. Maybe this is what Shaq has wrought - just add another reason to the pile of why I hate him - to be a basketball player today only requires height.

With the advent of all these NCAA pools and the rise of the event's popularity, there are the inevitable newbies who just don't "get it" but think they're instant experts who, if given the reins, really improve the sport. Really? 2nd most popular tournament in America and YOU can improve on it?

Why does there need to be non-stop action in order for you to be interested? Soccer's pretty non-stop but I find it deadly boring.

This reminds me of King's column after the SuperBowl; 2 or 3 people came to message board to wonder how racist NFL fans are for "booing" the Bears Muhsin Muhammad. It's that idiotic. And yes, girly too.

King, you asked about typical foul shots. here is a nice link that I found while writing my previous post that goes into a lot of detail about free throw percentages: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07070/768555-291.stm

In there it says that the long time season team average is 69%. Individual player averages probably do drop a bit at the end of games, but then again I also think that the better shooters get put on the line more at the end of games. Some teams succeed in fouling people who shoot foul shots badly, but it seems to me that it is the good shooting guards who end up taking most of those foul shots.

The first thought that came to mind when I read this was one-run strategies in baseball. There is a huge mound of evidence that "small ball" is, in general, a way to end up with a lot of close games that are, essentially coin flips, and a bad strategy on the whole. (There are exceptions, but they're very situational - tie game, bottom of the ninth, runners on 1st and 2nd, for instance.) Yet every year teams are constructed - intentionally - to play that way. I've always believed that's because some teams have succeeded by playing small ball, usually when they had no other choice, and so it's become received wisdom that it's a valid way to construct your team. There's also something kind of intuitively appealing about the notion that it's reasonable to trade the possibility of a big inning for an increased probability of scoring a single run.

Deciding not to foul when down a possession and with something less than a ten second difference between the game clock and the shot clock is like that. Not fouling seems like it's rational because you'll get the ball back if you play defense well and the other team isn't lucky. And, truth be told, I think it is rational if the difference between the game clock and the shot clock is long enough that you have a good chance to set up your offense if the other team doesn't score. That intuitive sense of correctness has led coaches not to analyze the situation carefully enough, and since it's now received wisdom that you don't foul if you'll have any chance to score after the other team's possession, that's what people do.

Of course, it's no surprise that coaches don't work out the logic here because it's what people do all the time. Most of us (heck, nearly all of us, and I include myself here) rely on surface rationality to make decisions all the time. It's too much trouble to dig any deeper, and if something works reasonably often, we'll keep doing it and ignore that "reasonably often" might not be as often as some other approach might work. The only funny thing is that, with so much prestige and money on the line, coaches and baseball general managers don't bother to question conventional wisdom more often than they do. But I guess Michael Lewis actually wrote the book on that.