I'm feeling a bit crazy... It's like some sort of... MADNESS!

Can you feel it boiling inside of you? The emergence of the crazy beast that consumes you each and every March? Are you ready for the madness? Have you filled out your brackets, scratched out some names and re-filled them out again? Do you religiously watch college hoops throughout the year, or do you casually follow teams, watch the conference tourneys and base your picks on Holmes-ian type detective (or guess) work? There’s nothing wrong with the latter, certainly I involve myself in a lot of that, after all unless you are being paid to exclusively do so, it’s hard to follow each of the three hundred or so teams that play division one hoops. Even if you can discount all but 80 of them by February, that still leaves a bunch of Albany’s, Long Beach State’s, and Eastern Kentucky’s which you will be hard pressed to watch, without a good satellite system. I mean, how much time have you really spent watching Robert’s Oral this year? What’s that honey? It’s Oral Roberts? Oh yeah, that seems less, uhmm… sordid. Still, the question remains, how many Oral Roberts’ games have you seen? Or Old Dominion? Heck, even among the power conferences, have you seen Villanova ball, or are you giving them a little extra love because of last year’s team? There’s just so much information that goes into picking a great bracket; if you work at the right place (in a corner cubicle, where your boss rarely strolls by) then you could spend eight hours a day on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday reading scouting reports, experts opinions, and game matchups before filling your bracket out tonight, but of course who has that sort of time. And lets be honest, as impressive as it is when somebody fills out a perfect bracket, there is no disputing that careful planning and smart preparation account for at most fifty percent of that. The rest? Pure, unadulterated luck. The tournament is filled with crazy last second finishes, it’s part of what makes the whole thing so amazing, we love the buzzer beaters, but any serious analytical discussion of tight games shows that the outcomes are completely random. There is no such thing as a team that’s good in tight games. There’s luck, a team which looks particularly good in tight games one season, will usually even out the next (or even within a particular season). The most important part in a good bracket is picking the winners. The crazy upsets, well they’re fun, and sometimes we legitimately believed in our choice, but more often than not it’s luck.

What’s you favorite part of the NCAA tournament? Is it selection Sunday and the lottery like process of determining who’s in, who’s playing whom, and who got shafted (either by being left out, or by a potentially rough opponent, or hostile arena)? Or is it the madness of this first weekend? Do you like the better matchups that follow in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight? Or do you just hold out for the breathtaking excitement of the Final Four? Personally, it’s the first weekend that gets me jazzed. Twelve hours of basketball for four straight days, it’s enough to make a good woman leave you, unless of course your good woman’s like mine and loves the tournament… Now, I’d feel a little better about the whole thing if the endless rain that’s suppressed smiles around Vancouver for the past month hadn’t decided to, well, end this morning. Conceivably, that could make it hard to stay inside all day and ignore our first vestiges of spring, but, fear not Hoops fans, there is that lovely little break from two until four, so unless you’re an insane, die hard, Bob Barker fan (and I couldn’t really judge you if you were), then that’s the time to get outside, refresh you batteries, soak up a little vitamin D, and get ready for the featured evening matchups. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter who you pick, or who I pick, the games just take on a life of their own. It’s not the brackets we remember in ten years’ time, it’s the magic, the glorious victories, the gut wrenching losses. The desperate expressions of teenagers, kids not yet able to buy beer experiencing something we can only dream of. Forty minutes of intense play, some of it terrible, much of it breathtaking, makes us want more. It’s why when the new year arrives, most hoops fans first thought is, only two and a half months until the madness. Now, well, now we have only 21 hours to wait? Can you survive, can you suppress the Beast that long?