March Madness Grips Shore
Let the madness begin.
Many who don’t know a thing about college basketball will spend the next couple of weeks debating the merits of the Cavaliers, Wildcats, Jayhawks, Blue Devils and Tar Heels. That is if those teams are still around.
The NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament gets into full swing today with 16 first-round games around the country and another 16 on Friday. Millions of people around the country have or will submit their brackets in one of more pools and knowledge of college basketball likely only gives you a slight advantage over someone who picks teams based on their nickname.
I annually make a mockery of myself when it comes to this, even though I know that the Lipscomb Bisons out of Nashville, Tennessee have no chance to beat the defending national champion North Carolina Tar Heels. Or do they because the one thing that is guaranteed in this tournament is that there will be upsets, likely in the first round.
The key to winning your office bracket pool is picking the right upset which I rarely do. With that said watch out for teams like Murray State, Charleston, South Dakota State and San Diego State..all capable of pulling off an upset or two.
So here’s how it works. The 64 teams that begin play today are broken into four regions with the creative names of South, West, East and Midwest (sounds like good names for Kardashian children). The 16 teams in each of those regions are seeded based on how good they are. The top seeds are Virginia, Xavier, Villanova and Kansas.
They would be considered the best going into the tournament and given a good chance of advancing to the final four in San Antonio later this month.
Teams like Georgia State, Texas Southern, LIU-Brooklyn and Penn are given little chance of even winning a game.
Anyway we have a bracket contest at Townsquare Media in which I selected Villanova, Michigan State, Virginia and North Carolina as my final four with Nova to win it all. No real surprises there and in truth I have little confidence as in other bracket pools I have picked Duke, Michigan, Kentucky and Florida as teams getting to the final four.
The only thing I know for sure is I won’t win anything.