Madness Update I

25-7 for the first round of the tournament; not as good as I would have liked, but my bracket still looks pretty healthy over the long haul, since all of my sweet sixteen teams are still in the dance...so far. Missed BOTH BC over the Red Raiders and the Hoosiers over Gonzaga, proving I suppose that it is always a mistake to go with Bobby Knight instead of the Indiana basketball tradition. Also missed three out of four 8-9 match-ups (mostly because I just went with my gut instead of doing ten minutes worth of homework), but I did have Winthrop over Notre Dame (which really was a no-brainer, if you stopped for just a second to think about it). Thought Duke would at least make it into the second round (who didn't?), and that Long Beach State would run circles around Tennessee: who would ever have dreamed that the MALE Vols could give up 86 points, and still come up with 121 themselves to blow the Forty-Niners out of the gym? And the worst thing was I didn't see a minute of the game, because I was stuck in a church meeting that night instead!

Also missed seeing the Ducks victory last night, more because of CBS than anything I did wrong. OK, so maybe it was important to some people to see the news about the snowstorm that they could have watched with their own two eyes if they'd simply looked out the window. But it reminds me of the bad old days when the Columbia Broadcasting System used to broadcast the early rounds of the NBA play-offs after midnight on a tape delay, rather than interrupting their "prime time" line-up. Sound's like it was a pretty exciting game too, although apparently things weren't nearly as close as the final score made it sound. And now I find myself rooting for Xavier over Ohio State (even though I have it exactly the other way in my bracket), simply because of the human interest aspect. That's just the sort of thing my former wife would have done. Which is why she loves tournament time too....

Postgame Postscript: Well, that couldn't have been much better from my perspective if I'd scripted it: a fantastic effort by the Musketeers, a last-second shot to put the game into overtime, and finally a Buckeye victory to keep my bracket intact. Sorry Xavier -- you guys played great and really deserved to move on. And yes, I also felt that Oden's fifth foul at the end was a little harder than it needed to be. But if I were a referee, I would have had a hard time calling "intentional" at that point in the game too; better to let the players settle things on the floor. Which they did....