Morning Wood: IT’S GO TIME

As of yesterday afternoon, my employer has blocked employee access to ESPN.com and CBS Sportsline.com. This can only mean one thing. One of the greatest times of the year has finally arrived. Spring. March to be precise. There are a few reasons why this is the best time of the year, but the older and chubbier I get, the only reason that seems to matter any more is that it’s tourney time.

A few years ago, the arrival of the NCAA tournament meant that Spring Break had just finished up and all the beautiful baby girls would be arriving back on campus with nice tans from 6 days of blacking in Cancun, Acapulco, Padre Island, Daytona Beach, or dahddy’s lake house. Because I am now 20 to 25 pounds over my fighting weight, pasty white and working a cubicle the only college aged, beautiful baby girls in sun dresses and flip flops that I see come from the innerwebs. But at least that’s all year round, bitch!

But seriously. The NCAA tournament is here. 64 teams, their schools, their alumni, their T-shirt fans, and their “I only watch basketball in March” fans have had all week to get their hopes up. They’ve bought new shirts or hats. They’ve dusted off the lucky boxers that haven’t been washed since that Sweet 16 run of ‘92. They busted out the shirt that only comes out for big games. Some students have made epic road trips to be there, blacked and painted, as their troops go into battle. The big dogs, wealthy alumni, and the rich kids still on dahddy’s credit card are catching their flights today.

The teams are ready. They play all season with this in the back of their minds. The coaches preach “one game at a time,” but the players know better. You have to beat the cupcakes at the beginning of the season to get your name mentioned on SportsCenter and get a foothold in the Top 25. You have to beat the tough non-conference teams early on to improve your “tourney resume,” especially if your conference is a joke. You have to play consistently good in conference to get a good seed in your conference tournament. If you’re a bubble team, you want to do well in your conference tournament to get in the Dance. If you’re a good team, you want to do well in your tournament to seal up that high seed. It’s all a build up to this. Yeah, you want to play one game at a time, but they’re all pieces of the greater whole. You’re playing for your Tournament Resume. You’re playing so that when a bunch of crusty, old men called the Selection Committee are staring red-eyed at the list of 300 something teams, you’re squad stands out.

Every tournament team but one ends their season with a loss. The 12 months of hard work since the buzzer of last season’s final game comes down to this.

After a few hours of staring at each of the four brackets I’ve filled out for various pools, I can’t remember a year where it seemed so easy for the Final Four to be 1 and 2 seeds. Kansas seems to have the easiest path. UNC, the #1 overall seed, seems to have a little tougher road, even if they do play 20 miles from campus this weekend and then about 2 hrs away in Charlotte next weekend. Can DJ White and Eric Gordon shock the world and take down the Tar Heels in the second round? Probably not, but one of my brackets really hopes so.

Who are the 3s or 4s or 5s that can shake things up? Stanford? Please, they’ll get tossed in the Sweet 16 by Texas. Xavier? They have a shot at taking down the d00kies, but UCLA is right there waiting. Can Clemson make some noise? If they play like they did in the first 35 minutes of the Carolina games this season, maybe, but those three heartbreaking losses might be in their collective domes. Can they recover? A lot of people picked the Pac-10 as the best conference…does that mean USC or Washington State can get it done? Pittsburgh took down d00k in the Garden earlier this season, but can they beat a hungry, one-loss Memphis?

I could write 12 more paragraphs on possible upsets. Who knows? That’s the best part. Every day of the tournament there will be at least two or three times where I’ll scream “damn it! I almost picked that!!” But so will millions of other people. That’s why the lady who picks the winners based on team colors or better cities to shop in usually wins the office pool. Bitch.

I guess the only real question that remains is, who do you have Texas beating in the championship game?

HOOK ‘EM

Tagged as: NCAA, Texas Cheerleaders