#halftime-report

#halftime-report

"Quarter-finals are never easy and we made it a bit tougher than it needed to be. Fiorentina got the belief back with the penalty. It was a very difficult game to manage to be honest."

While we talked about this year's men's tournament bracket and the unusually top-heavy crop of title contenders, we also talked about the stuff that will actually make the tournament fun to watch: the surprisingly varied styles of the teams that have been out ahead of the field all year, what a good college basketball roster looks like in this weird moment in the sport, how the transfer market actually works and why, and what has happened to the 5-12 upset.

"We try to put ourselves in situations every day in practice where we're facing adversity, where we're being pushed to our edge, and that's where you're forced to grow and feel forced to make decisions."

But getting a clear read on results isn't easy in today's fragmented media landscape. "It's becoming harder as a media buyer to figure out how to buy live sports because there are so many access points," said Alex Block, EVP of global programmatic at Jellyfish, an agency owned by The Brandtech Group.

Michigan was the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament men's basketball selection committee's bracket preview, revealed on Saturday, followed by Duke and Arizona in what the committee chair called a consensus top three. The Wolverines rank No. 1 in six of the seven metrics on the NCAA teamsheets, also leading the country in combined Quadrant 1 and 2 wins.

The most revealing thing about the Super Bowl halftime show was not Bad Bunny, Kid Rock, or even Donald Trump deciding that this was a useful place to weigh in. It was how quickly millions of people volunteered to be furious on cue, as if anger were a civic duty rather than an emotional habit that has gotten wildly out of hand.