The NIT

For one night, the NIT ruled. More people watched Kentucky get beat by Robert Morris than watched the First Four of the NCAA Tournament. But after that, everyone stopped watching, and unless you had a team, you probably stopped watching too.

Kentucky wasn't the only No. 1 seed to lose. In fact, the other three lost in the regional finals, which left a Final Four consisting of Baylor (2) vs BYU (3), and Maryland (2) vs Iowa (3).

Baylor and Iowa advanced, and they'll play for the NIT title Thursday at 9pm, on ESPN.

Florida State's Leonard Hamilton has a comical response whenever someone questions him about available scholarship numbers. "Don't count my scholarships," he says, before laying down a classic Leonard Hamilton stare. Is he joking? Is he serious? With that stare, reporters don't find out - they move on to some other topic, and Coach Hamilton doesn't have to address the situation.

And while Hamilton's 13 available scholarships are all in use at the moment, it's John Calipari - considered to be Ham's main competition in the Andrew Wiggins sweepstakes - who people keep questioning.

So, let's clear the air. Let's count the Kentucky scholarships.

1: Number of Final Four teams (Louisville) who play faster than the average NCAA tempo.

3: Combined number of seniors for Louisville, Syracuse and Michigan who play at least half their team's minutes. Wichita State has three.

4: Combined NCAA Tournament Titles for these four teams. Only Wichita State has not won previously.

4.5: Average seed for this year's Final Four teams. The historical average since going to 64 teams in 1985 has been 2.7. Only once (2008) have the top four seeds all advanced through their Regionals. In three seasons the average Final Four seed was lower than this year (2000, 2006, 2011).

Brackets are fun - not just filling them out and losing the office pool - but following the actual brackets as they play out. Some teams get lucky. Some teams get screwed. But in the end, four teams are selected because they went a combined 16-0.

Still, these things are guided by those same brackets which can settle a team's fate seemingly at random. Double digit seeds don't make the Final Four, and in the event they do it's huge news. The last four standing are overwhelmingly the teams with good offenses and defenses. All the 1s and 2s might not survive and advance four times, but a good number of them do. Even the low seeds which make the Final Four can often be described as poorly seeded, at least in the eyes of Vegas.

There is a pattern to the teams which survive the randomness, and that pattern is described by efficiency numbers. How efficient is their offense? How efficient is the defense? The better teams do in those two questions, the better chance they have of surviving, especially once they cut down the Regional Final nets and move on.

So how do these four teams match up with the teams from the past? What can we glean from the numbers?

About a year ago I began writing about a coach hardly anyone had heard of. I was trying to predict who would be the next unheard of coach to hit the big time. The candidate I identified was entering his 2nd year as a head coach, and his name was Andy Enfield. I wrote about him in May, and then again later in the summer in a piece that was picked up by the Naples Times. This gained me a few assistant coach followers on Twitter, but I don't exactly get the hits that Sports Illustrated gets, so the pieces were largely read and forgotten.

At least until March.

Now I'm back at it, combing the coaching ranks and trying to find the next unknown gem. That search is now complete, though I can guarantee you that I won't hit the lottery like I did with Enfield. A few less 3s fall against Georgetown and FGCU would have just been another 15-seed no one knew about. But that wouldn't have changed (too drastically) Enfield's career trajectory. If you can coach, people find you. And Enfield can coach.

Regardless, remember this name: Jay Spoonhour.

The Gators had a solid, but unspectacular season. Six of the fifteen presason top 25s I tracked in the Vitale Cup included the Gators in their preseason top 10, and it's likely that fewer prognosticators will be that bullish this year. UF graduates Kenny Boynton, Mike Rosario and Erik Murphy, and there's a solid chance that junior Patric Young departs early for the draft. This from a team which won 29 games but failed to win their conference tourney or to advance to the Final Four despite being given the easiest path for any non-1 seed in history.

It wasn't a bad season, just won't that won't be sung about through the ages.

Assuming Young goes pro, the Gators are bound to take a step back, right? The leftover parts that played significant minutes this year are Scottie Wilbekin, Will Yeguete, Casey Prather, and Michael Frazier. That's not a core that is going to strike fear in many opponents.

But this is where recruiting steps in, and Billy Donovan has done a masterful job building this roster.

Louisville's Kevin Ware suffered a horrendous leg injury in the first half of their Elite 8 win over Duke when he landed awkwardly on his right leg after he challenged a shot by Duke's Tyler Thornton.

He was rushed to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis and thankfully underwent a successful two hour procedure to repair his broken bone. He "had the bone reset, the would from the injury closed and a rod inserted in his right tibia."

A pair of doctors speculated that Ware might have had a stress fracture beforehand making him prone to the horrific injury he suffered Sunday evening. Reports differ on how long Ware will be out, but it sounds like it could be anywhere from three months to a year. It just goes to show how horrific that injury was if the timeframe for a recovery is so broad. 

The school says that Ware will remain in the hospital until Tuesday at least, and they are hopeful he can make the trip to Atlanta with the team. The team brought his jersey out to center court to celebrate their Final Four berth, and I am sure a lot of neutrals hope Ware can cut down a piece of the net next Monday night. I know everyone hopes he can resume his playing career.

After Louisville's Kevin Ware suffered an awful and traumatic injury in their regional final game vs Duke, classless blogs raced to gif the injury so that they could cash in on the hits. Luckily, CBS, ESPN, SB Nation and many others made the decision not to show it. It's gruesome. If you really want to see it, you can find it on the internet.

Sports Illustrated - Pete Thamel to be precise - took a different path. With Ware still on the floor, with his teammates, coaches, opposing players and much of the crowd in tears, Thamel took the opportunity to try and draw hits to a story he wrote two years ago about recruiting violations surrounding Ware.

Typically in my Douchebags of Twitter features I point out all of the idiots on Twitter and the horrible things they tweet to student athletes. Today, however, it's the rational minds of Twitter showing Thamel the universal respect they have for his journalism.

Michigan is scoring at will agains what is arguably a top-3 defense in the Florida Gators.