Cornell and the NCAA

Our coach just sent me, personally, (and every other Cornellian, personally) an email, praising our fine spirit for the reason we got to the Sweet Sixteen.

I know we were called the underdog, the Cinderella, the long shot, the feel-good story of the Sweet Sixteen. Well, we may have been all those things. But first and foremost, we were, and of course still are, Cornellians. And that is what made us great on and off the court--it was that Big Red spirit and work ethic that got us to the Sweet Sixteen.

While wearing my mischievous Puck hat, I whisper to whoever is sitting near me in the back of the auditorium if it is that same Big Red spirit that keeps us out the Sweet Sixteen every other year?

The Onion, meanwhile, ascribes our success to our standing and just calls us names. Hurtful names like:

mid-major semi-upper-lower-middle-mid teams
minor mid-sub-major Cornell
high-scoring para-mid-semi-diminished-sub-mid-major Cornell

"Kentucky is a major-major-major-major basketball school, no two ways about it," Cornell senior Jon Jaques wrote on his blog Wednesday. "We may be a low-mid-upper-mid-downer-middle-mid-micro-submacro school from upstate New York, but we've never let it hold us back. When the Big Dance is over, I wouldn't be surprised to see people calling Cornell a mid-upper-parallel-medial, or even a para-demi-duo-double major. I think we've proved something to the world."

The better Onion post, however, explains why we won mathematically:

Cornell's basketball team had on Wednesday squandered most of its underdog goodwill by using every opportunity to explain that, given a finite set of possible outcomes and a sufficient period of time, the sheer quantity of opportunities available to accomplish an improbable outcome makes its achievement likely if not almost certain. "It'd be foolish to ascribe any of the properties of a pan-dimensional function space to the NCAA Tournament," said Cornell center Jeff Foote, who has averaged 14 points per game in the first two rounds. ...