Tourney Time!

Normally this is where I talk about the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament (i.e. March Madness) and how this tournament, especially the first four days, is one of the true highlights of the sports calendar. I still think that's true. The next few days will offer random team match-ups and hopefully a slew of upsets and buzzer beaters. But this year I'm actually a little bit down about the whole deal.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that for the last ten years I was the guy in the office who organized the office pool. On Monday morning I'd send out the email and print off some brackets. Then I'd dutifully collect $2 from all the participants (not so big that it hurts, big enough that the final prize is worthwhile) and hang on to copies of their sheets. On Friday and Sunday nights I'd tally up everyone's points so I could send out updates. All wonderful stuff.
Of course this year I'm at home. I thought about having Relia pick out teams and pushing the FP Gal to play. Maybe I could figure some way for DF to make some picks and draw up brackets for the cats as well. While I'm at it, I could loan them all $2 and see who wins. I have a feeling that this would someday be held against me during sanity hearings.
The other reason is that the NCAA screwed up this year. Oh, I have no beef with teams that were selected or where they were placed. They screwed up by adding three more teams, some of them 8 and 12 seeds. The old set up was that there was one early game between two 16s. It didn't matter who won because no one expected that team to win any other games.
Not so this year. 12 seeded teams win about one in four times and 8 seeds go about 50/50. That means that you couldn't pick out a tournament of 64 teams until late last night, about 12 hours before the whole shebang starts. I can't imagine how tough this is for the office bracket guy to manage.

Anyway, I'm still hoping for good games!