For the second year in a row, Cornell Men’s Basketball is in the NCAA March Madness tournament. They released seeds yesterday, and our #14 seed Big Red will face #3 Mizzou. In Boise, Idaho! Definitely wishing the guys best of luck, and you can count on me watching the game on Friday.
Like many others who try speed up the drolls of March, I’ve decided to try my hand at filling out a bracket. In the mean time, I’ve come across a few bumps along the road:
1. Is filling a bracket randomly just as successful as a “well-researched” bracket? Alex is insistent that his bracket–with hours of research–is near perfection. While I might pick winners based on funniest mascot (Western Kentucky’s Big Red Blob, who can resist?), Alex spends hours poring over reports, video, commentary, all to see which team plays a better 1-3-1 zone defense. What does that even mean?
2. The Cinderella stories, the potential upsets: As far as I understand, no one has been able to fill out a perfect bracket. There are upsets, teams who had no chance in the first round, but show up in the Sweet 16. Could Cornell be that Cinderella team? I put Cornell through to the second round, simply because if they lost, it would be expected, but if they won, you’d be that un-school-spirited Cornellian who didn’t believe in your own team. Tsk, tsk, shame on you.
3. Where are some of these schools? It was a geography lesson for me, looking up the schools such as Robert Morris (Moon Township, PA) and Xavier (Cincinatti, OH). Some I hadn’t even heard before (Virginia Commonwealth, Morgan State?). I picked some based purely on the fact that if their names are so unfamiliar, it wasn’t random that these teams made the playoffs; they have to have some decent skill.
Things should be interesting in the next few weeks. Bring it on, Alex.
