Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Bracketology 102 - the second weekend

It's all come down to this. There is no Cinderella story out of nowhere. There is no Giant killer. There is no sleeper. There is no tourney surprise. For the first time in like ever it's all going according to plan. Sure in the downstream there were a few tweaks here and there, a sliver of hope to make the games interesting, a couple of 12 seeds doing nobody any good, but in the end...all the #1 seeds made it to the Final Four. Which means other than the Georgetown fiasco, I'm doing pretty damn good in my brackets.

Nobody will be playing above their game, and all the crazy scenarios that breeds. What we'll be getting is evenly matched basketball. All of these are conference champs, on hot win streaks, and have been leading the way since they laced'em up in that first practice with Midnight Madness.

So who else thinks none of the games is gonna be any good?

Yeah, I said it. None of the games will be good after 15 minutes. Whoever is leading at halftime can go on and start chanting "We want (fill in the blank here)!" because it won't be a game after that. These aren't scrappy fighters here - flyweights or lightweights trying for any advantage...this the super heavyweight decision, every move calculated. And once we figure out which one Rocky is you can go ahead and write the other guy off. I don't expect lay downs, but I'm not looking for a run in the last five minutes to bring a team back for a last second "oh my god did you see that" Sportscenter moment. Won't happen. Not a chance.

The rest of the pool still in contention has Mr. Hansbrough and the rest of the Tarheels cutting down nets on Monday. I went with Kansas. In one of them pools I went with Kansas. Whatever. Memphis and UCLA have their backs against the wall, as most of their teams will be NBA bound as soon as the agents can race down onto the court after the final whistle. So they'll be ready to play for certain. But in the end, everybody will swinging and as I said, I feel a dominance showing up with 5 mins or so left to play in the first half. In all three games. Call it a hunch.

Somewhere that NCAA exec who runs the basketball wing is calling up the the exec at CBS and reminding him how lucky he his. Look at what we gave you. Come Tuesday I'm betting that CBS exec will be calling back to see if that schmuck can explain what happened.

So that's the call from down in here. No details, no stats and analysis, just a feeling. And that's all I got.

Barkeep - an Hawaiian Punch...in a shot glass.

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