For sports fans, this is one of the best times of the year. The NCAA men's division 1 basketball championship tournament starts this afternoon (technically, it started Tuesday night with the play-in game between Florida A&M & Lehigh). The national championship game will be played Monday, April 5 - which is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season! (Again, technically, the season actually opens on March 30 for the Yankees & Devil Rays, who are playing two regular season games in Japan.) So, one of my favorite events traditionally ends on the day my favorite sport begins. Nice way to close out the winter.
Anyway, I'll deal with baseball in a week or two. With regard to college basketball: I went to a Division 3 school (tiny Hamilton College, in upstate New York), so I have no alma mater to cheer for in the so-called Big Dance. For various reasons I root for mighty Duke University, and also for not-quite-so-mighty Princeton (where I went to grad school). I didn't fill out a bracket sheet this year, but here are my picks from each region (which the NCAA is inexplicably identifying this year not by the geographic location of the region but rather by the city in which the regional semifinals and finals are behing held):
East Rutherford: Oklahoma State (could also be Pittsburgh or Wisconsin; don't give St. Joseph's too much of a shot here, as they just aren't physical enough to hang with the tough guys).
St. Louis: Kentucky. This is by far the easiest region.
Atlanta: Duke. I always pick Duke, both because they usually have at least a good shot, and also because if I picked against them, I would feel I had to root against them and I never do that. This is by far the toughest region, and the Blue Devils have not played well the last 3 weeks. But the tournament is always undiscovered country, and no coach in the world is better than Coach K at getting a team to forget the immediate past and play as if there were no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everyone's 0-0 today.
Phoenix: UConn. If Emeka Okafor is healthy and can keep playing, I think UConn will win the whole thing. Stanford is the #1 seed here, but Okafor is by far the best player in the country (with all due respect to St. Joe's Jameer Nelson). He can carry the Huskies to the title.
How does picking UConn to win the championship square with my previous statement about always picking Duke? Hey, you gotta be realistic. I won't be rooting for UConn, but I think (alas) they're going to do it. If Okafor's back spasms don't keep him from playing, or playing his best.
Anyway, that's why they play the games. :::sings::: The ball is up...
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Tom Beck
my LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/tomfodw/
"I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never thought I'd see the last." - Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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