March Madness

Well March has arrived and it's time for that crazy event known as the NCAA Basketball Tournament- affectionately nicknamed March Madness. In truth the craziness starts this week with the Conference Tournaments. This week always wreaks havoc on the tournament field-as teams given new life raise there game for 3 or 4 days and suddenly find themselves in the Big Dance. I always enjoy this week because upsets in several of the mid-major conference result in some of the big boys losing there bids (you will find that I bear no great love of the so-called BCS conferences). There are certain mid-major teams that really need not worry about there conference tournaments they have bid's locked up (Xavier in the Atlantic 10, Creighton in the Missouri Valley,Davidson in the Southern Conference,Butler in the Horizon league, Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference) and yet in each of these conferences there are solid contenders that could win the automatic bid. Equally enjoyable are the conference tournaments in which the teams know that only one of them will advance to the NCAA's and beginning this week they are starting over with 0-0 records. Think about that - teams like North-Carolina Greensboro (5-24), Detroit (7-22) and Marist (9-22) are only 3 or 4 games away from going to the big dance.