The Big Dance

For the most part the college basketball season has been reduced to a three-week national obsession known as the NCAA Tournament. Over the last couple of days there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen copies of the tournament bracket left around the office or on a copy machine. To some it’s like reading a foreign-language newspaper while to others it’s a document they have given more thought to than work itself, spending time filling in the lines with the winners of 63 games between today and April 4th. They’ll test their expertise against friends and co-workers for a few bucks or enter one of the many free national contests. This my friends is the true meaning of “March Madness.”

Now that the field has been reduced to 64 teams the real Tournament begins with 16 first round games today and another 16 Friday at different sites around the country. For the first time every game will be shown in its entirety on live TV but you’ll have to work a bit to find out just where as the games will air on CBS, TBS, TNT, and truTV. You better check out your channel lineup early so you know what numbers to enter when the games tip off, which they do beginning at 12:15 this afternoon when West Virginia faces Clemson.

What’s made the tournament such great theatre over the years is early-round upsets and often the key to winning a bracket pool is picking those upsets. However at the end you will usually find familiar faces battling for the National Championship which was won by Duke last year. The Blue Devils are one of the four regional top seeds, along with Kansas, Pittsburgh and Ohio State and picking those teams, like President Obama did will probably guarantee you a couple in the Final Four the first weekend of April. I could make a case for all of them winning the tournament and in most of my pools I have taken Kansas, although I think they could get beaten by Louisville along the way. Ohio State might get knocked off by Syracuse, Duke has to watch out for Connecticut and Pitt can’t overlook Kansas State. As for teams who might surprise….watch out for Washington, Memphis, Gonzaga and Michigan State. Actually the biggest surprise would me winning a pool…Hampton has a better chance of knocking off Duke.