Holy Sheet

The NCAA men's basketball tournament is just about underway this year.  It is the one time that I truly pay attention to any sort of basketball.  The conference tournaments themselves are so fun to watch because there are times when a lower seeded team goes on a run and makes some huge upsets, which could end up being the highlight of their year.  Take, for instance, Southern Illinois in the Missouri Valley Conference.  They beat the top seeded team (Wichita State, number fourteen in the country) in the quarterfinals and lost in overtime to Creighton (number twenty four in the country).  They had a great run and the only way for them to make it to the 'Big Dance' was to beat those two teams.  A bittersweet end to their season as they lost and will be playing in the NIT.

One reason that I watch the tournament is because of the bracket.  I enjoy filling one out each year and see how I do picking the teams.  I do decently most years and then there are other years when I stop checking my bracket after the second round.  That's just how it goes.  But that's it, just one bracket.  The most I have ever filled out has been two, and they were so close to each other in the teams that I picked that they ended up looking the same in the end.  My problem with the whole filling out a bracket thing is that people do way too many of them and get way to into it.  When I fill one out, it is on ESPN's website and it gets ranked along with everyone else.  Just for fun, no money involved.  But I see on there people that have five, six, or seven of them and it takes the fun out of it.  I have always thought that it was fun to put one together and go with it, but now people put together so many different brackets that they may have one bracket that is almost perfect, but the rest that they fill out could have teams scratched out from the first round all the way to the championship game, but they won't brag about that one.  They'll tell all their friends about their near perfect bracket that they filled out.

That's why I fill only one out.  I go with my gut and the numbers one time and let the bracket be.  Making more than one takes the fun out of filling the bracket out and the excitement of the upset games because there is always a chance that on one of your other brackets, you had Cinderella winning.