The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has been winnowed down to its so-called Sweet 16 round, and my bracket is looking decidedly sour.
I did a quick check on the CBS Sports web site to quantify the damage and found I sit in 684,657th place. Cue the video from the movie “Dumb And Dumber:” “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”
In that video, the girl had just told the Jim Carrey character there was only one chance in a million they’d end up together.
My bracket is only about two-thirds as much of a longshot.
Let us begin by accentuating the positive. I still have three of my Final Four picks alive – Alabama, Texas and Gonzaga.
The Final Four team I don’t have, the one I had winning in the semifinals over Alabama and then losing to Gonzaga in the title game, is Duke,
Inexplicably, the NCAA hired football officials for the Duke-Tennessee game, allowing the Volunteers to win an extremely physical game that saw Duke’s 7-foot center Kyle Filipowski floored twice early on fouls that were called, and not much later elbowed to the ground on a “basketball play” that saw the Tennessee rebounder open a deep cut below Filipowski’s left eye.
Too bad Tennessee’s football team couldn’t muster this level of physicality when it needed it against Georgia.
More positives. I correctly identified Purdue as the team most likely to underperform and the Boilermakers even surprised me, managing somehow to lose to Fairleigh Dickinson. Do an internet search on “Purdue” and “choke” and you will find Sports Illustrated and USA Today both taking the Boilermakers to task for needing a team Heimlich maneuver.
Kansas also lived down to my expectations, saving ailing coach Bill Self the need to recover from a heart procedure and return to the stress of coaching in the tournament.
I did not see Princeton winning twice to make the Sweet 16, nor did most sane people.
I did correctly have Furman to upset Virginia in round one, though.
My mistakes were in giving the likes of Baylor, Memphis, Marquette and Kentucky way too much credit.
In a perverse way, I also blew it on Purdue, thinking there was no way it could lose to Fairleigh Dickinson, a team that didn’t even win the Northeast Conference (the haunt of St. Francis), a conference that never before had won a round-of-64 game.
There will be more bracket disappointments for me. After seeing Gonzaga struggle to get this far, I’m not optimistic about my choice of these serial tournament disappointers to rewrite their history.
The saving grace is I lost no money on this exercise, just a bit of pride.
Sam Ross Jr's site 