CBB '24 - Week 4 Card & Leaderboard: Put On Your Red Shoes And Dance
In the public markets the Johnnies had steamed all the way up to 3.5-point favorites. In our game they were 1 point dogs. You all found the Commissioner's mismatch. The Commish-match, if you will. And you won 9,600 Winnings.
Put On Your Red Shoes And Dance
1. Five of top seven coincidentally go all-in on St. John's and win; Hirsehnson widens lead
2. Fairy-Tale Takedown: Child dismemberment is "merciful" in Hans Christian Anderson's The Red Shoes
3. Week 4 Card: ShotQualityBets take us through Friday night in Madison, plus the A-10 makes its Robn debut
1. Robn Oddsmaking Takedown: The Red Storm
This is what the house getting buried looks like. Good thing Robn isn't really "a house" and that you're all competing amongst yourselves.
The majority-side in each of our six largest markets won, including massive majority side and highest-picked market, St. John's. They feasted on a Villanova team who, as contestant Christian Odjakjian pointed out, is dealing with some personnel synergy issues, and won by 20.
In the public markets the Johnnies had steamed all the way up to 3.5-point favorites. In our game they were 1 point dogs. You all found the Commissioner's mismatch. The Commish-match, if you will.
Could I simply list the names of the top four contestants on our leaderboard who each saw St. John's as a clear favorite in the game, and be done with it? I could. After all, we gave out 9,130 winnings from the game, the second most of any game this season.
But we at Robn reward grit, determination, the guy in the middle of the pack trying to pull off something extraordinary.
Peer on down to the 19th spot, there.
Collin Sherwin, Tampa's finest and a relatively new friend of program, has managed to place in the top 20 despite only firing two cards.
We recently learned that his absence on the last four is due to a recent hospitalization. While we understand it's not life threatening, a nonetheless serious illness cannot keep this man out of our top ranks.
Joe Lunardi currently has him projected on the 3-seed line in our own tournament, assuming Sherwin cleared medically to play.
Reports indicate he was last seen with a feeble finger, gesturing limply toward his out-of-reach phone and muttering to the wet nurse, "must... submit.... the card..."
Get well soon, Collin.
BYU-Houston provided a fantastic Tuesday night game, with the Cougars nearly mounting a major comeback to vanquish the Cougars. But in the end, the Cougars held on to come away with the victory, and so it was a great night to be a Cougar.
Instead of shouting out all of you happiness hedge-rs who won more than 3,000 collectively on Houston, we continue to applaud those who spelunk into the EXTRAs markets.
Darrell "9.9" Mitchell and Tim Merck both clairvoyantly foresaw that L.J. Cryer would indeed hit four threes for plus winnings, and the Houston guard got there on basically back-to-back possessions in the second half that quieted the Marriott Crowd. Well done.
Also deserving of recognition were the only two contestants to get down on our Johni Broome five-pack market (points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals combined) which I think is a market type that Robn invented.
Johni had to get over 30, and all he did was get 45, posting a 25, 14, 1, 5, 0 line.
Eric "How Can This Man Possibly Be" Single and A.G. Burnett flocked to it and prospered.
2. Fairy-Tale Takedown: The Red Shoes
The .gif of the twitchy Echternach dancers last Monday only came through on the web post, and not as intended in the email embed, so you all only saw a small caption line of text reading "flossy" with no corresponding visual. I'm re-posting it here via traditional link. The Flossy Dancing We Promised.
We wrote how the Echternach procession in Luxembourg (itself a metaphor for an arguably still-too-generous interpretation of how NCAA Basketball is flagging in 2024) owes its origins in part to the alleged **involuntary dancing** suffered by thousands in the 14th Century - a condition known as St. Vitus' dance.
What's that? You'd like to hear more weird shit about dancing uncontrollably? Then this next segment is for you. Introducing part two of Fairy-Tale Takedown: Hans Christian Andersen's Red Shoes.
This masterwork of dark terror is something designed to teach children a moral code while easing them off to sleep. Instead it makes one want to be put to sleep, third-hand. Permanently.
We open on a girl from a family so poor that she cannot afford shoes. By the second sentence we're into oddly specific detail about her sore instep. One day, she sees a princess wearing red shoes and then wants those same shoes herself.
In Hans' world, desire is no excuse not to avoid temptation. But this is a story of covetousness, and soon the girl starts acting quite a bit like her namesake, Karen (seriously).
An old woman, who we later find out is stone blind, rides by in her carriage and picks out the Karen point blank and says from several yards away, "that's the girl for me, I'll take care of her." This includes buying the Karen an outfit for her confirmation, but not being able to tell from point blank range that the shoes she's buying her are ... red. The color of lips and sin. A highly inappropriate shade in which to commit to the church.
But the Karen goes through with it because she insists on it, because, again, she's a Karen, and doesn't pay attention at confirmation (very bad) when the pastor is talking about very serious things. She's just feeling herself the whole time, including when she walks out of church afterward. There, an old man tells her he likes what she's wearing, and just gagging for further compliments, she does a little dance to enrapture him.
Then all hell breaks loose. Her feet keep dancing, and they send her on autopilot. She does laps around the church. I like to imagine a jig but the dances are never defined – Hans wouldn't besmirch himself with such unseemly detail.
Security finally corrals her and gets the Karen back in her car to go home with her old blind guardian, but even in a seated position the Karen is just flailing around, legs like those inflatable car salesman tubes, and she roundhouses the old broad out cold with her leg in the back of the car.
Karen is out of control. She's now been dancing for continuous days. Context clues suggest that multiple 24-hour periods of the stanky leg have been performed, the dougie, the cha-cha slide, a macarena was attempted, and she is racking up mileage, too, moving all over the land.
God sends down his top angel to taunt her, telling her to dance from door to door until her skin shrivels up like a skeleton. The angel treats her as if she is a cheap tart. Days later, still, she dances, feet bloodied, to the executioner's house (?). You know, your local executioner.
“Come out, come out!" Karen said. "I cannot come in, for I must dance.”
And the executioner said: “I don’t suppose you know who I am. I strike off the heads of the wicked, and I notice that my axe is tingling to do so.”
Your kid is supposed to be half asleep by now and instead they're wide awake, disgusted, and missing the phallic innuendo of the executioner's tingling axe.
“Don’t cut off my head!” said Karen, “for then I could not repent of my sin. But cut off my feet with the red shoes.”
Honestly, this is the first part of the story that's made sense. Get rid of 'em. Too much hassle.
She feels better and goes back to church to begin life anew, but her shoes dance before her on the church's front steps, like if all of West Side Story were a one-man performance from the ankles down, and they prevent her from going in.
Eventually she gets back to church when God's angel teleports her entire house into the chapel itself, and she exclaims how "merciful" her whole recent ordeal with the shoes and getting axed has just been.
And, surely, Hans had been sipping some of his special juice when he uncorked this last part, but instantly her heart physically explodes, and she dies right there in the pew.
Upon expiration, the feet do a little tap-tap over in the corner.
We need a 21st Century version of this but where the girl is a perennial NCAA tournament team, and no one at any time is greeted by dismembered parts of their body.
3. Week 4 Card: Sparty, Rock Chalk and the Nation's Longest Win Streak, All On The Road
Our friends at ShotQuality have some interesting game breakdowns from an advanced analytics perspective.
Their game previews come out more than 24 hours before tip times, so Friday night's Michigan State - Wisconsin matchup is listed in all its glory.
The disparity that really sticks out is how well Wisconsin defends Rim-and-3 Rate versus how Michigan State performs at it.
Rim-and-3 Rate is the rate at which a team gets a shot at the rim (drive to the basket or layup) or a three point attempt.
Even though both teams are efficient on both sides of the ball, the Spartans might have to maintain their offensive efficiency with more mid-range game than they'd like to, since Wisconsin has a higher rate of running teams off the three and preventing shots at the rim.
In the background of all this is a recent offensive efficiency drop off from Sparty.
Per EvanMiya, Michigan State's offensive efficiency has dropped off a chilly blue cliff since conference play heated up.
This could have the makings of a frustrating evening for Michigan State.
Our EXTRA markets for the game feature a battle of each team's AJs: Hoggard (at least 19 pts/reb/ast) and Storr (at least 16 pts).
It's also worth noting that while SQ lists the game at -3 like us, they project the total at 134.5, while Robn's total sits at 137.5.
Maybe take a sprinkle...
Meanwhile, Kansas dares to try to win in Ames, the Flyers 13-game win streak is put to the test in the A-10 at Richmond, and Arizona limps into Eugene after losing to Oregon State.
It's all on....
