So, that happened. For the first time in recent memory, the first day of March Madness lived up to the hype, excitement, anticipation and overall cultural significance that the NCAA tournament has reached. According to ESPN, only 56 people out of more than 4 million entries picked all 16 games correctly yesterday. Mike and Yahoo! are safe from having to pay one of you people $1 million, as Clay ("Derwin Webb") leads the CardChronicle bracket challenge picking 14 games correctly.
How great of a day was yesterday? SEVEN games were decided by 3 or fewer points, including three games that went to OT, one of which was double overtime! There is literally no way today's games could top yesterdays....right?
The biggest story for our little corner of the world was the poor performance by our Big East brethren. Notre Dame, Marquette and Georgetown went down (maybe not the best idea to make the Catholic schools play the day after St. Patrick's Day?) and Nova barely survived in OT against a 15 seed with the help of some, shall we say, Big East-level officiating. Put another way, those refs sucked and Robert Morris should get a sponsors exemption in the next three tourneys after the way they lost yesterday.*
So now we wait. And wait. And wait. With a 9:55 PM (and likely after 10 PM) tip-off, we are the last game of the night. I don't think yesterday's Big East results should worry us - in fact, they hopefully serve as a wake-up call to the team that you have to bring it, no matter what conference you played in, because this is March.
Early games tip-off at 12:15 as WVU tries to right the Big East ship. Minnesota/Xavier and Cornell/Temple should be close games.
Nothing better in sports, folks. Enjoy it.
For those at work, link to watch games online is here:
*Yes, hothot made that joke at least once on Twitter and in the blog, but I think it needed to be said here too.