Seth Davis of SI Becomes a Stock Analyst

Of sorts, of course. It's tough enough for those of us who listen to Mike & Mike in the Morning on ESPN Radio to listen to Dickie V's "stock up, stock down" reports every now and then (I think that Dickie V. and Bill Walton are the only on-air guests that, from their behavior, you can guess the hosts would like to hurry along), but now the more polished Mr. Davis gets into the act.

Of course, we're not talking about whether to short pharmaceutical stocks or to go long on diversified oil drilling companies, we're talking about major college basketball. Among the obvious dumps (which, Davis rightly points out, should have been "sold' long ago) is Stanford. How the Cardinal could have been on some pre-season Top 25 lists is beyond me, and they were. It didn't make sense then, because absent Josh Childress they don't have an impact player who can take over a game, and, no, Chris Hernandez was not and is not that guy. Until the Cardinal get some better players, they'll be at the bottom of the Pac-10, Trent Johnson or no Trent Johnson (and he did very well at Nevada, so the guess here is that he'll get some players).

Read the whole thing, as there are still so many buys that it's really hard to fathom which teams will fill out the Final Four. My guess right now is that there are eight ACC teams potentially worthy of a post-season invite, and, further, that if the ACC gets seven teams invited to the tournament, they'll have a good chance (depending, of course, on whether they're evenly spread in the brackets) of having at least two and potentially three teams in the Final Four, a la the Big East in 1985 with Villanova (the unlikely squad that won it all, an 8th seed), St. John's (with Chris Mullin) and Georgetown (with Patrick Ewing). Wouldn't that be something?

Read the whole thing and see if you agree with Seth Davis.