A treat for any fan of March Madness—and college basketball in general.
The doyen of college basketball prognostication tells all.
“When I talk to school groups,” writes ESPN analyst Lunardi, “I like to tell them that when I was their age I was the nerd who was too small to play. Coaches would hand me a clipboard to keep track of some stats.” Years later, bracketology—a term that made it into the Oxford English Dictionary—had become a highly followed form of basketball divination. Drawing up brackets is an elusive art, and it takes a lot of explaining. Suffice it to say that it requires constantly refreshing team statistics as the season progresses in order to predict the makeup of the NCAA playoffs. (Lunardi advocates expanding the field to 72 teams.) There’s money to be made in such learned guesswork. As Lunardi notes, when he published the predecessor volume to the current form of bracketing, “the first 500 copies we sold went to an address in Las Vegas.” Now it’s a matter of complex calculus done by computers augmented by the author’s unique intelligence, as he ponders, for example, what a squad might look like if 70% of its offense returns for another year of play. “What is a reasonable aggregate improvement based on the ages of the returning players?” he asks. “That depends.” Knowing the variables is an art based on a formidable body of data, one that involves studying “the transactions in college basketball from all available sources” and then piecing together the likely playing field. Lunardi admits that he guesses wrong a couple of times per season, and he can’t always foretell the future, but there’s an impressive science to the enterprise that will enthrall fans of Moneyball and other number-oriented sports books. In the foreword, Gonzaga head coach Mark Few rightly praises the author for a “breadth of knowledge” that “is beyond reproach.”
A treat for any fan of March Madness—and college basketball in general.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62937-881-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Triumph Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
