11 teams from the Big East? That sounds like a great idea. Maybe next year they can take 12 . . .

As a serious question, though, what would be the best way to quantify the Big East’s flame-out? Overall tourney record doesn’t quite do it. You’d need some way of expressing it that took into account the record in games in which Big East teams were higher seeds and records in which they were lower seeds. Thoughts?

Hope all the sharp objects are hidden in the Matus house. Hoya saxa.

Galley Friend A.W. calls attention to Deadspin’s Captain Lou Albano essay. It’s well worth your time. I had to read a bunch of wrestling books a few months ago when I was writing about Linda McMahon and until then I hadn’t realized how big a deal the Lou Albana/Cyndi Lauper Rock’n’Wrestling gimmick was for the industry. As a kid, I had always thought that it was a goof, but it turned out to be the big solid-fuel booster for the WWF’s ascent during the ’80s.

Key point:

But Albano’s appearance on MTV is the moment modernity at last entered the petrified WWF. And rather than evict Albano for crossing the line, Vincent K. McMahon, who had recently taken over the company from his father, embraced the crossover appeal it provided. It would prove to be a savvy business decision, but it would also bring to wrestling what modernity brings to every precinct it touches: a culture that values ratings over tradition and histrionics over history, a culture in which everything is disposable, a culture of … whatever.

On Sunday I saw my first, and probably last, 20 minutes of college basketball for the season. And for the second year in a row, I won’t be entering an NCAA pool. I don’t miss the actual basketball, but I do miss the comforting presence of some of the announcers.

NCAA announcers are a very specific taste. Some people love (like me) Gus Johnson. Others (rightly) think he’s an excitable blowhard. (Typical Johnson call: “And West Virginia cuts the deficit to 22 with 5 minutes to play! HERE COME THE MOUNTAINEERS!!!!!!”)

My own top five teams would probably go something like this:

1) Verne Lundquist/Bill Raftery

2) Kevin Harlan/Dan Bonner

3) Gus Johnson/Len Elmore

4) Ian Eagle/Jim Sparnakle

5) Jim Nance/Clark Kellogg

I’ll take any of these pairs is light-years over anyone else working in the field. They’re all charming and none of them has the arrogance of Billy Packer or the insipidity of Dick Vitale. Raftery, in particular, has a special place in my heart. For me, it doesn’t get any better than a Raftery call that goes something like, “Ooo–a little dipsy-do! A little . . . nickle-dimer!” Those are the sounds of March.

Update: In the comments we have a video compilation of Gus Johnson’s best calls. It’s great. But Raftery steals the show at the 2:40 mark with the following call: Adam Morrison hits a 3 off the glass with 2.7 seconds left to put Gonzaga up by 2. Here’s Raftery:

“Look at the clock . . . and when you’re sleepless in Seattle, why not get, a little . . . kiss? Gus! Oh! Nature! Onions!”

This is a dada-esque masterpiece of a call.

Johnson, however, answers in the next clip with: “My name’s Al Harrington–and I make BUCKETS!” Followed a minute later by a “WHOO!” that would make Ric Flair proud.

I missed it last week, but Drew Mcweeny has a very elegant and sensible takedown of the entire fanboy worldview of the movie industry. Worth your time.

Samuelson thinks that maybe food prices were the cause of the recent political instability in the Middle East.

An old, white guy writing for a dead-tree medium would think that, wouldn’t he? Dude doesn’t even have a Twitter account. If stuff like commodities prices or ideology or ethno-religious tensions caused revolutions, then how come there weren’t any before Web 2.0 hit?

So it seems that Twitter and Facebook were key to junking the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt:

Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

Who knew?

If you can’t give social media for a credit during a revolution, just give it credit afterwards. No one will notice.

I suspect I’m going to be really disappointed by the two follow-up books because in her bio, author Suzanne Collins describes herself as continuing “to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age.”

Uh, Mrs. Collins, you just made a mint writing a series that’s half Battle Royale and half The Running Man, with a dash of Twilight thrown in for flavor.

I’m not criticizing–I really enjoyed The Hunger Games. But still . . .

Two buddies sent quasi-related items concerning market valuations of tech companies. Let’s take them in order.

First, Galley Friend P.G. sends this note, after seeing that Netflix’s stock tumbled 6 percent on news that Facebook has reached a deal with (correction: Warner Bros, not Time-Warner) to start streaming movies. Netflix’s real problem, however, isn’t that Facebook has any idea what it’s doing when it comes to securing rights for, or enabling distribution of, filmed entertainment. It’s that Goldman Sachs–Goldman Sachs!–has proclaimed that Facebook “could become a credible threat as its video business evolves.”

That’s fine, except, as P.G. observes, of course Goldman would say that–they just stuck their neck out to pump up Facebook’s valuation by 500 percent over 18 months!

Meanwhile, Galley Friend A.W. points out that Twitter’s valuation has jumped by 100 percent since last December. Why?

The catalyst for Twitter’s soaring valuation wasn’t the revenue model, but Goldman Sachs’s move in January to invest $500 million of its own money, along with $1 billion from wealthy European individuals, into Facebook. That deal valued Facebook at $50 billion, although the company now has a valuation of more than $65 billion in the private market. What about profits? Please don’t ask.

“I think the investment in Facebook got everyone else saying, we want to do this as well. There is a little bit of follow the leader going on,” says Jeffrey L. Dearth, partner with the New York-based media investment bank DeSilva+Phillips.

As A.W. puts it, we’ve seen this movie before. From a July 1997 Financial Times story:

Chuck Prince on Monday dismissed fears that the music was about to stop for the cheap credit-fuelled buy-out boom, saying Citigroup was “still dancing”.

The Citigroup chief executive told the Financial Times that the party would end at some point but there was so much liquidity it would not be disrupted by the turmoil in the US subprime mortgage market.

He denied that Citigroup, one of the biggest providers of finance to private equity deals, was pulling back.

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,” he said in an interview with the FT in Japan.

The next internet crash is going to be awesome.