Tourney Time

The NCAA tournament is in full swing and of course my brackets are all duds. Believe it or not, Tournament time is pretty popular in our household. Despite her usual complete indifference to sports, even Mrs. fills out brackets and gets into the spirit (at least a much spirit as she can muster for a sporting event). Little known fact: Mrs.’ second ever entry on this blog was about the NCAA tournament. I’ve copied it in its entirety below:

Dear Kentucky

Thank you for losing your game tonight and thus ruining any chance I had for winning the only sporting event that I can get into aside from the Olympics.

Now that blog entry was due, at least in part, to the fact that we started the blog during March Madness. And the line “the only sporting event that I can get into aside from the Olympics” should be taken with a grain of salt, because by getting into a sporting event, Mrs. doesn’t actually mean watching any of the games. What she means is that her competitive streak comes out and she’ll organize her family’s pool, occasionally check to see where she is in the standings, send e-mails taunting others if she’s ahead of them, and then start e-mail chains that eventually morph into e-mails that have nothing at all to do with college basketball.

Me? Well, my “favorite” things about the tournament are:

1) Watching very little college basketball throughout the season, and still spending hours analyzing my picks as if that will somehow help. Mrs. spent 5 minutes (maybe less) on her picks and our brackets are in similar shape.

2) The David over Goliath upsets. I mean, who didn’t like seeing Duke lose to Lehigh?

3) Being legitimately surprised when a 12 seed I picked loses to the 5 seed. I mean, the 5 seed should win, but it still amazes me that my complete hunch didn’t pan out.

4) Trying to come to grips with the fact that there's no way to predict what will happen. My upset picks were complete guesses. If I win it will be because I was lucky, not smart.

5) Rooting against Duke.

Through my tried and true formula (which clearly doesn’t work) of picking a winner based on how many legitimate NBA players I think they have, I went with Kentucky (the #1 overall seed – way to go out on a limb, me) to win it all this year. Mrs. (who’s obviously been burned by Kentucky) opted to hitch her wagon to Kansas. She almost had a scare tonight as Purdue took the Jayhawks down to the wire. Well, she didn’t have a scare because she was watching the news, but the Jayhawks really had to sweat it out. If Kansas does lose though, prepare for another blog post from Mrs. Assuming of course someone informs her that they lost . . . and she remembers that she picked them to win . . . and she hasn’t lost interest in the whole tournament thing already . . .