Michigan's men's basketball team last night won the championship of the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), essentially a consolation bracket for teams that did not get into the more prestigious National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament.

In doing so, the Wolverines repeated their NIT championship of 20 years earlier. Some of you may be wondering what is the significance of this to Michigan social psychology. The answer is that on the very evening the Wolverines defeated Notre Dame to win the 1984 NIT title, I had just arrived in Ann Arbor to visit UM as a potential graduate school. I thus watched the game on television from an Ann Arbor hotel room.

Accompanied by my mother and brother, I used my spring break from UCLA to visit four midwestern (Big Ten) universities to help me decide where to pursue graduate studies in social psychology. Although I grew up in L.A., my family has strong midwestern roots, as my mother's side of the family is from Chicago (I was actually born in the Windy City, but didn't live there very long). All the schools I visited had strong social psychology programs, and these just seemed like they'd be interesting places to go to school.

The first school I visited was Northwestern. One of the faculty there at the time, whom I met, was Geoff Fong, a recent Michigan social psych Ph. D. (a link to Geoff's current facullty webpage at the University of Waterloo is included in one of my earlier postings).

Next, we went to Indiana University in Bloomington. One of the faculty members I met there was Jim Sherman, who is still at IU. Jim is also a Michigan Ph.D. (1967). I was beginning to see a trend. I figured that if Michigan Ph.D. recipients were getting faculty positions at these nice universities, UM might be the best place to go. (I had also visited one school on the West Coast, UC Santa Barbara, and one of the professors I met there, Chuck McClintock, was also a Michigan Ph.D.)

Michigan was third on the itinerary, and we ended the trip at Ohio State. I liked all four schools I visited on the midwestern tour, but then and now Michigan seemed to be the best choice for me.

I still run into Geoff Fong and Jim Sherman at various conferences. Jim and I have really renewed our acquaintance in recent years, as he co-organized an informal sports statistics/decision-making conference in 2003 in Scottsdale, Arizona, timed to coincide with spring-training, naturally. I was fortunate enough to be invited, based presumably on the attention my hot hand website (which involves statistical analyses of sports streaks) had gotten.

For whatever reason, even growing up on the West Coast, I've had a fascination with the Big Ten for as long as I can remember (perhaps because the Pacific Ten and Big Ten winners always met in the Rose Bowl). Those of you who want to get more of a flavor for the towns, campuses, and traditions of the Big Ten (pre-Penn State) would probably enjoy the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood (available pretty cheaply over the Internet).