It's almost here. Finally.
I love college basketball. However, my embarrassing admission is that I don’t watch nearly enough of it as I would like to. I blame it mostly on when the college basketball regular season takes place: from November through February. For three out of those four months, I eat, sleep and breathe football. Is it right for me to ignore basketball just so I can have all of my focus on football? No, I’ll admit that it’s a little unfair. I should have enough time to focus enough on both, because let’s face it, what else do I do?
Here’s the thing though, when March starts to roll around, I get Tournament Fever just like everybody else. I print out five or six different brackets and attack each one differently until I end up with a Final Four that makes me feel comfortable (or smart). So how do I dive head first into the postseason tournament of a league that I barely watch during the regular season? I do some studying. A lot of it. So much studying that I was forced to question myself while I was in college and spending twice as much time figuring out the tournament bracket every year than I spent studying for midterms.
I cram in every semi-useful piece of knowledge that I can about the entire college basketball season. I’m talking about strength of schedules, API’s, non-conference API’s, head-to-head records, conference records, past tournament experience, conference rankings, conference tournament finishes, possible injuries to key players, important match-ups. ANYTHING that I feel can give me an edge when the opening tip-off of that first game finally rolls around.
It helps for the most part, and I actually prefer this method over following the regular season from beginning to end. At least for the purpose of being able to figure out the bracket come March. For example, my dad follows college basketball a lot more thoroughly than I do during the regular season. He’ll watch games every weekend and let’s just say that he tends to know a significant amount more than I do when the tournament begins. However, I don’t ever remember him finishing ahead of me in a tournament pool. So, I guess I kind of know what I’m doing. Don’t tell him I said that.
So, with all of that said, we fast forward to last night. I’m sitting in bed at 1 a.m. squinting at the computer screen and trying to read every article on ESPN.com with both of my brackets open in separate windows while I switched back and forth between them. I must have run through about 12 different Final Four teams before settling (maybe) on what I have right now. I must have also flipped between Purdue and Siena close to 30 times before I decided it was too much stress for an opening round game. I will most likely spend the rest of today researching my picks on Yahoo! Sports before I make another hundred changes to my bracket and I want to say that I should have a final version sometime around midnight on Wednesday.
As far as tournament pools go, I am safely squared away in one and it feels good to get that out of the way. There may be a second one, but I started that one, so I’m not banking on it to be very good. When I said in No Cure For March Madness that it has been six years since the last time I watched the NCAA Tournament without having any money on it, I had remarkably overlooked last year. Last year was the first year that I tried to start a pool by myself. I got a good amount of people to join it, but of course I was too lazy to collect the money from everybody (this is why you always let other people start tournament pools, too much work).
Needless to say (and I’m sure you could see this coming from miles away, but I swear it’s true), I won last year’s pool. Of course. The one year where I decide to start my own pool and not collect money from anyone, is the year that I win. The moral of this story is basically that I’m now a defending champion, and as a defending champion of something, I am expected to shed some light on it for the rest of the world and to share my wisdom. And any wisdom that includes why I think Baylor will make the Final Four is worth hearing (sorry, I don’t really have a reason for that pick).
If you’ve read any of my football picks columns, you obviously know better. DON’T LISTEN TO ME. But if you do decide to take my advice, remember that I won last year, and that means I’ll probably win again this year because that’s how dynasties work. So, without further adieu, here are my (slightly educated) thoughts on this year’s tournament bracket.
"I swear, this is not what it looks like."
1. I have one rule and one rule only when it comes to the NCAA Tournament, and it’s this: STAY FAR AWAY FROM WEST VIRGINIA. This rule mostly dates back to the John Beilein Era and the many, many times which they succeeded in chopping my bracket up into little pieces. However, I’m talking myself into the 2009-2010 Mountaineers because I like Bob Huggins and they made a gritty run in the Big East tourney to emerge as champs. Basically, I picked them to play Kansas in the National Championship and I’m just trying to convince myself that it’s okay for me to break my only rule.
2. Tom Izzo and the Michigan State Spartans are like my anti-Mountaineers. They carry my bracket almost every year, and they are proven tournament contenders. Don’t ever bet against Izzo in a tournament game. Unfortunately, I have MSU falling to Kansas in the Sweet 16, proving that the Midwest is going to be an absolute killer region this year, and also proving that I will probably change that pick another 20 times before Thursday even though I picked Kansas to win it all.
3. My first round upset specials look like this: 11-seed San Diego State over 6-seed Tennessee; 10-seed Georgia Tech over 7-seed Oklahoma State (watch out for Gani Lawal of GT to have a huge game); 12-seed UTEP over 5-seed Butler (two notes about this game in my next point); 11-seed Minnesota over 6-seed Xavier (Minnesota, the Big Ten tournament champions can be sneaky, just ask Purdue); 11-seed Old Dominion over 6-seed Notre Dame. Feel free to copy those. They are subject to change of course, because I only have one lower seed advancing in the first round in both the East and South regions and that seems fishy to me. Hence my internal struggle between Purdue and Siena.
4. UTEP is perhaps the most intriguing 12-seed in the tournament. Some reasons are explainable and others simply aren’t. For example, when picking a bracket, you NEED to have at least one 12-seed advancing in the first round and should have one even advancing to the Sweet 16. It’s become pretty much science at this point, that a 12-seed WILL upset a 5-seed in the first round. I’m disappointed that I could only talk myself into one of those 12-seeds in this year’s bracket because I legitimately like the 5-seeds Michigan State, Temple and Texas A&M. That leaves UTEP. Why do I like UTEP so much? According to a few sources I’ve found so far, “they have the pieces to make a run.” That sounds pretty. Also, they have a player on their team by the name of Derrick Character. If you don’t know who Derrick Character is, he is from Fanwood, NJ. He started his collegiate career at Louisville, but then was suspended for academic reasons and soon transferred to UTEP. I played against him in travel when I was 15. Is that a good enough reason to pick a 12-seed to beat Butler and Vanderbilt to advance to the Sweet 16? Yes.
5. I have not read too many flattering things about Kansas State, the number 2-seed in the West. Then again, Syracuse, the 1-seed in that region, lost its final regular season game to Louisville and then was ushered out of the Big East tourney rather early for my liking. So it’s only fitting that I end up with both KSU and ‘Cuse as the final two teams coming out of the West Region. I’ve seen a lot more of Syracuse this season than I have of the Wildcats, so I went with Syracuse to head to Indianapolis. I hope Jim Boeheim doesn’t let me down.
6. An interesting note at this point in my bracket adventures: I have a 1-seed facing a 2-seed in three out of four of the regional finals. The one region where I don’t: the South, where I have 5-seed Texas A&M going against 3-seed Baylor in a Big 12 showdown. This makes me somewhat uncomfortable, until I remember that in 2008 all four number 1-seeds made it to the Final Four.
7. Evan Turner. That’s all you need to know. He plays for Ohio State, he will likely be voted Player of the Year and I believe that he’s even better than John Wall of Kentucky. He’s that good, and he’s making me reconsider possibly pushing OSU past Kansas in the Midwest regional final. Maybe.
8. However, John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins do still scare me a little bit. I hope I don’t end up regretting leaving them out of the Final Four in favor of West Virginia, although I have a good feeling that I will.
9. Cornell is the “trendy” 12-seed upset pick over Temple. Don’t fall for it. I hate falling for those “trendy” upset picks, they rarely work out. I like Temple, they’re the Atlantic-10 champs and they’re playing good basketball right now.
10. BAYLOR IN THE FINAL FOUR??!! In a region that was practically tailor-made for Duke? I know. What am I thinking, right? We’ll see.
11. And that brings me to this point: Duke will disappoint. Mark my words. I wholeheartedly agree that they are one of the best teams in the nation this season and that this is perhaps their strongest squad in years…but — and this is an important but — Duke is notorious for choking in the tournament. Their early exits in recent years have started to look like somewhat of a trend and I don’t feel like getting hoodwinked again this year into picking Duke to reach the Final Four only to see them get booted in the Sweet 16 by Purdue, or Texas A&M (hopefully), or even Siena (it can happen, remember VCU in 2007? I do.). This is why I just can’t bring myself to trust this Duke team. Maybe they will prove me wrong.
12. If I had access to the Elias Sports Bureau at my fingertips, I would probably be able to tell you when the last time was that I picked a bracket that featured neither the Connecticut Huskies nor the North Carolina Tar Heels, and I suppose I might also be able to tell you the last time that a defending National Champion (UNC in this case) did not make the field of 64 the following season. Unfortunately I can’t, although I suppose with the proper amount of Googling I could find it. Let’s just put it into more easily relatable terms and say that seeing a tournament bracket without UNC or UConn is like reading an issue of Us Weekly without seeing any pictures of Angelina Jolie or Britney Spears. There you go.
I think 2,000 words on a bracket I’m not even 100% sure of yet, is enough for now. I’ll probably be back with another column on Friday night after the first-round is over, although I won’t make any promises. It depends on whether or not my bracket is in the trash at that point.
Somewhere in their dark, damp underground lair, the BCS committee is watching this year’s NCAA tournament unfold while they rub their hands together and cackle endlessly.
