2010: the year I didn’t finish my brackets
Posted on 21. Mar, 2010 at 8:58 am by Meerkat in Basketball, NCAA Basketball
Most sports fans don’t follow NCAA basketball until mid-February, when the withdraw of football needs to be replaced with another sports viewing pleasure. Deep into conference play, NCAA hoops is in its prime regular season push during the 2nd month of the new year. Teams are fighting for the top conference spot and have begun the rematch games. This is what the weary-eyed football fan needs to relieve the pain.
Mid-February, when everyone else is just tuning in, I usually have a good feel for the top 25 by then. Trying to watch games during November & December isn’t easy, especially with NCAA football gearing towards bowl season and NFL squads locking up playoff spots, I watch what I can.
Early season tournaments like the Maui Invitational are great to watch because you get those unique match-ups much like the 1st round of the NCAA. The last 2 months of the year is also the time when mid-majors scramble to play big conference teams in order to boost their schedule strength and NCAA invitation resume. Gonzaga is a great example. The Zags load up tough non-conference games early so the committee can’t say they didn’t play anyone. Also, if they happen to need that at-large bid because they lost in the conference tournament, a big non-conference road win will please the committee (Zags @ Illinois).
Watching these Nov-Dec games gives you a feel of which teams could be good come March. Especially the smaller schools that upset, or come close to upsetting, the bigger ones (Cornell @ Kansas). But it sometimes can be misleading if some teams are waiting for transfers that don’t become eligible for play until the new year. Or the transfers can play, but just haven’t gelled completely with their new team (Wes Johnson, Syracuse).
So after another season of watching games from November to Championship Week, I thought, like years past, that I had a solid grasp on most of the the teams in the tournament. Until I began filling out the brackets.
So I advanced the #1 & #2 seeds on to round two, easy. But the rest of the games I might as well have just flipped a coin. Yeah, I had a feel for the teams, but parity across the nation simply leveled the playing field, so to speak. Jay Bilas, aka Lord Bilas, had said several times this season that “this is the weakest tournament field that I can remember”. Which, in my mind, translates to: zero power teams that can steamroll to the final four and fewer cupcakes to be steamrolled over.
So after a lot of head scratching and triple-guessing, I finished the first round. It was painful. The 2nd round would be worse. I saw very losable games in the 2nd round for top teams Syracuse, Duke, Villanova, and Kentucky. Ugh. What do I do? Do I go all willy-nilly and advance a bunch of mid-majors? Or do I play conservative and stay with chalk? I leaned towards the conservative side and moved on 1 seeds. But the rest of the picks, I had ZERO confidence in. A mixed bag of mid-majors and questionable big conference squads.
At this point I thought, why am I doing this? When you have little confidence that the top seeds are gonna bulldoze thru the early rounds, it makes the bracket-filling experience feel like you’re picking numbers for the weekend’s Powerball lottery. Normally, every year I would always feel I had the slightest advantage over all the other bracket-fillers because of the ridiculous amount of games I had watched. But it seems those days are over.
Most people have always felt that the NCAA tournament was a crap-shoot, mostly because they don’t watch games or at least, very few. But when somebody like me begins to think that way as well, it’s a different story. With the nationwide talent level much higher and star players only staying one season, the NCAA field has become almost leveled. Which means the NCAA tournament will be even more exciting because the small schools CAN play with the big ones. Thursday’s crazy first round was certainly proof. And then backed up on Saturday with Kansas getting thumped by Northern Iowa and St. Mary’s rubbing out Villanova (and yes, Nova was a weak #2). Anything is possible now. Maybe next year we’ll hear all the experts say “Which mid-majors will make a push PAST the Sweet 16?”, instead of “Which mid-majors are good upset picks?”.
2010 may mark the year I stop filling out brackets.
With no brackets to constantly check and no teams to root for (just because I picked them), it was a nice change just watching the games like I did for the previous 4 months of the NCAA hoops season … for sheer enjoyment. No need to rip up any pool if my tournament winner gets ousted before the final four. No need to constantly hover over the laptop checking scores. No need to find out who’s in the lead in the group standings. No need to get disgruntled when the overall group winner turns out to be somebody’s 7 yr-old kid. Now I know the gamblers reading this are shaking their heads … this does not compute in their brains. And I understand. For me, wagers are not needed to enjoy NCAA basketball, that’s evident enough in me watching all those games nobody else really watches.
It’s a new era for me.
Maybe.
Let me see how far I get with next year’s brackets before I quit for good.
3d
21. Mar, 2010
Interesting, lots of good points that I agree w/. The overall talent of teams seems more spread out than ever w/ mid majors making an at large bid not s surprising anymore. Ironically this was the first tournament in 6 years to not have all 1 seeds in the sweet 16, we recently saw the first all 1 seeded final four, and (pure memory guess) only one of the last 6 champs has been a non 1 seed. Speaks to the randomness of who wins this time of year.