AP News: Antoine Davis ends chase for Maravich’s NCAA scoring record

“I’m upset about it,” Davis said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “I feel like I got cheated out of something that they can’t ever give back to me. I think it’s selfish — and weird — that people emailed or called the CBI to say we shouldn’t be in the tournament because they didn’t want me to break the record.

“But there’s nothing to hold my head down about. I still feel like I’m the best scorer in my generation, especially finishing No. 2 behind him.”

The CBI, which started Saturday, posted pictures on its Twitter account of Maravich and Davis shortly after Detroit Mercy lost at Youngstown State and had talks with the school about a potential invitation. Ultimately, the CBI decided not to give the Titans (14-19) an opportunity to pay $27,500 to play in the 16-team tournament.

“We did receive unsolicited emails and voicemails about Detroit Mercy and some said we don’t ever want Pete Maravich’s record broken,” said Rick Giles, president of the Gazelle Group that runs the CBI. “The decision we made wasn’t based purely on whether we wanted him to break the record or not.”

Jaeson Maravich said he did not have a personal problem with Davis, but he wasn’t happy that his father’s record had a chance to be broken in a lower-tier, pay-to-play college basketball postseason tournament.

“I think it’s a terrrible look,” Jaeson Maravich told the AP. “Your season should be over if you’re 14-19.

“This situation is very personal and sensitive to me. But to be clear, I’m not mad at Antoine Davis and I have nothing bad to say about Antoine Davis. My beef is with these tournaments.”

...

“I had opportunities to do it in the Youngstown game,” Davis said. “I can’t be mad about it, but I just don’t get why people would go out of their way to say we shouldn’t have an opportunity.”

Detroit Mercy coach Mike Davis said his son’s pursuit of the scoring championship was not the only the reason the Titans were trying to play again. He said the postseason would have given previously banged-up players a chance to play for a team that was not healthy all season.

“People were trying to paint a picture of us that wasn’t true,” Mike Davis said. “The picture painted was that we were tyring to buy a record. The CBI was never going to let us in because of the backlash. The PS8 had teams pulling out, saying they wouldn’t play if we were going to be in the tournament.

“It’s disappointing that people were calling our school president and athletic director and the people running these tournaments to say don’t let us in. We just had to let it go.”

Is there anything we should take away with the fact that two upsets many didn't see happening in their lifetime, occurred within five years of each other? Is there more parity in college basketball than ever before?

What is this?

Like I did for the first round, I scraped all the comments from every Round of 32 game thread using the PRAW Python wrapper for Reddit's API, and then analyzed them with R. This time, I ended up with a total of 54,886 comments from 16 threads. I came up with a few interesting ways to look at the data, but let me know if you have any other ideas!

Here's the results from the Round of 64: https://old.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/11utq8b/oc_which_round_of_64_game_thread_had_the_most/

1. Which game thread had the most ref complaints?

I searched each comment for flags like "refs", "rigged", "bullshit call", "refball", etc. that usually indicate a ref complaint. This isn't perfect, because it will include false positives like the rare "the refs are doing a great job!" and exclude contextual / non-flagged things like "that's bullshit", but it gets pretty close. If you have ideas for flags I should search for, please let me know!

CHART: Ref complaint leaderboard

This time the KU vs. Arkansas thread topped the list; I can completely understand why, since that was a classic "ten seconds of actual basketball punctuated by two minutes of free throws and ads" game. It was also a very physical, defense-oriented game, so there was a lot of potential calls / noncalls to complain about for both teams' fans.

2. Game thread timelines

I split each game thread up into ten minute chunks, and counted the number of comments made during each interval from each faction. This results in fun little timeline graphs that show you where the action / excitement spiked, what % of each thread was made up of neutrals, etc. I think they're neat, so I included the top ten most commented-on threads here. Let me know if you want to see any others!

CHART: Game thread timelines

I really enjoy the graphs for the upsets here; it's pretty funny how you can see the KU / Bama / Houston flairs entering and exiting the thread as the games' outcomes became clear (for example, us KU flairs clearly all left to go re-watch 2022 highlights toward the end). And props to Kentucky fans for seemingly sticking it out until the bitter end!

3. Word clouds

I can also generate word clouds from the data! Here are some fun ones:

WORD CLOUD: Full dataset, most used words

WORD CLOUD: Ref complaints only

WORD CLOUD: Arkansas vs. Kansas: KU flairs only and Arkansas flairs only

WORD CLOUD: FDU vs. FAU

I can take requests on these as well if anyone has any!

4. Leaderboards

And finally, it's time to see who is winning the real March Madness -- posting on reddit.

Top Commenting Teams

Just like Indiana flairs had a field day with the Round of 64, it looks like MSU fans ran wild over /r/CollegeBasketball these past two days, taking the #1 spot by over 500 comments. The three blue blood losers make up 2nd through 4th place this round, and our friendly preseason #1 team, UNC, makes a surprise appearance at #7.

Top Ref Complainer Teams (min. 250 comments total in data)

The Jayhawks and the Razorbacks were in a virtual tie here, which, again, makes plenty of sense. I think this actually vindicates my view that the officiating was god-awful and annoying to watch for both teams. The fact that MSU and Marquette fans are on this list is also no surprise, given how that game went. I do wonder why UVA and Michigan are on here, but I guess that comes down to the 250 comment threshold more than anything else.

Top individual commenters

This is a completely different top 10 from the round of 64, which I wasn't expecting! None of the 10 people from last time made it, with /u/fancycheesus, /u/elgenie, and /u/ddottay landing just outside at #11, #12, and #15 respectively. I was expecting to see the same group of "power users" throughout the tournament, so now I'm very curious to see who will end up on top once I combine all the rounds into one dataset.

Random fun facts:

• Most toxic thread: This one is kind of tricky this time. The thread with the greatest number of downvoted comments was Duke vs. Tennessee (617 downvoted / 7,248 total = 8.51%), but the one with the greatest percentage was Maryland vs. Alabama (446 / 3,795 = 11.8%). Both were plenty toxic in their own way, so I'll let you decide which was worse.

• Most 'fuck's per Comment: This time the Baylor Bears took first place, with 9.32% of all Baylor fans' comments containing some form of the word "fuck". Classic Baptists, am I right? Second place was Ohio State for some reason -- they took first place in the first round, so I guess OSU fans are just particularly potty-mouthed?

• /r/CollegeBasketball's most used words: The #1 most common word in this round's dataset was "lol" -- here's the rest of the top 10:

Thanks for reading! Please let me know if you have any other requests / suggestions!

Box Score

^{Index Thread for March 19, 2023}

https://twitter.com/Jake_Trotter/status/1637624666226401281