Fab 5 Await Winner Of Celtics Legends Cowens vs. Parish

 

The month after perhaps the most exciting team in college basketball history, the Fab 5, reunited at a Michigan game ...

Our tournament of the final teams to play their first game kicks of with a game featuring the Hall of Fame centers for the Boston Celtics from 1970 to 1994. All great teams can be pulled up for free here.

After his last year with this Florida State team, Dave Cowens arrived in Boston and was Rookie of the Year and within 3 years the NBA MVP to kickoff a decade of dominance as the Celtics Center en route to a couple of NBA titles. When he transitioned to coaching the Celtics decided the may as well pick up another Hall of Fame Center.

A few years earlier 7-foot-1 Robert Parish put Centenary  of Louisiana on the basketball map. He played for Golden State for the last few years Cowens was the Celtics Center, then took over for a dominant career from 1980 to 1994.

Note that both teams have a -11 rating, meaning calculating their cards we estimate on average each would be about 11 points worse than the "average" great team in the game (keep in mind the "average" team in the game is an Elite 8 team ranked about 5th in the country). 

While the Centenary vs. Florida State looks dead even to us, the winner will be a double digit underdog against the Fab 5. Michigan's +7 rating means we calculate their cards to average about 7 points better than the average "great" team which means we believe they are actually one of the 20 best teams of all the teams in our game from 1943 to present.

This makes Michigan's rating 18 better than whoever wins the first game, but that is per 100 possessions. An actual game is about 2-3rds that long, so we'd peg Michigan as a 12-point favorite in the second game. Line March Madness, the dice can certainly yield upsets that big of Parish or Cowens get hot - for example Terry Cummings and Mark Aguirre were hot in DePaul's upset of Kareem's UCLA team that was a double digit favorite.

The winner of that will be a big underdog. All are at least required to watch the 30 second promo if not the entire Fab 5 documentary on ESPN.