the madness of march!

it's bracket time baby!!

growing up on uconn basketbal like I did, it is hard for me not to get a bit too excited about the tournaments this time of year. Last year nobody knew what the hell I was talking about when I brought up the notion of a friendly office bracket pool, so even though this current office is highly dysfunctional and I am actively looking for a way out, it is nice to have some fellow basketball brethern. (even if they do root for notre dame, booooo)

now I am inexplicably pretty good at this. two years ago I won the office pool, and last year I predicted the entire west region of the bracket and three of the final four correctly, which I was pretty damn proud of.

so, without further ado, here are my ncaa 2010 picks!

now, there are quite a few familiar names not included in the above layout. north carolina, arizona, ucla, indiana, and most importantly, no uconn. a variety of things brought this about, including the stint coach jim calhoun did in the hospital for health issues towards the beginning of the season. but mostly it's that the uconn men are frustratingly inconsistant year after year. unlike the power-house women. but more on them later.

so the huskies failed to make the cut for the ncaa tournament this year. but they are a no. 4 seed in the nit tournament. therefore an nit bracket needed to be filled out! obviously.

and so on to the women! I fill out a women's bracket as well as a men's bracket every year. not only because the women huskies tend to perform better than the men, and I grew up watching both pretty evenly, and it's double the bracket fun (!), but it frustrates and annoys me to no end the next to nothing coverage the ncaa women's tournament recieves from national media outlets. expecially compared to the massive amout garnered by the male counterpart. this is found across the sports spectrum and is just downright dispicable. I could go on and on about this, but this post is about brackets. and the joy gained there from. so I move on.

this year, the uconn women are kicking some serious ass. not only did they break the standing undefeated streak record (their own from a couple of seasons ago, btw), but have won this season by an average of 35 points, and every single game by a double digit spread. this team thus far has been right up there with the '01-'03 team. and they have been showing no signs of slowing down.

so obviously, the first thing I did after printing out this bracket was put them in the championship spot.

as the tournaments progress and the games are played, I will post annotated versions of these brackets, with how I am doing. most likely after each round.
as a disclaimer I would like to point out that I have not been following college basketball at all this season, with the exception of a few articles here and there about uconn when they popped up on the sports blogs. so though I did read some articles and predictions to try and get a reading on how teams were doing this season, this is alomost all guess-work.

which may actually help me out in the long run...