Crumpled Notebook

One day I promise I will stop blogging about basketball. Probably not until April 7th or there abouts, but I will stop someday soon.  Anyway…

Every year I join up with some people I know to make an ESPN Tournament Challenge group. We fill out our brackets and do all that stuff. We’ve been doing this for like, what 8 years now? Something like that. I’ve actually only met one of the folks in this group (Josh in Connecticut), but we all were friends from the FRIENDS Message Boards back in the day. That’s another story though.

So, Lisa, one of our group members, created a “control group” for this year. Basically what she did was selected all the top seeds to win in each game. 1 over 16, 8 over 9, 2 over 3. You get the idea. She did that for every single game. So far, she’s beating everyone in our group. In fact, she’s in the 81 percentile of all the ESPN brackets, which isn’t too bad. Of course, her Final Four are all one seeds. I assume from there she maybe picked the higher one seed for each match-up. North Carolina, being the overall one seed, she picked as the Champion.

What I find even more interesting though is that in the South Region (Memphis, Texas, Pitt, Stanford, Kentucky, etc…) the ONLY game that hasn’t been won by the higher seed was the Michigan St/ Pittsburgh game! It will be interesting to see if Memphis beats Texas tonight and keeps that pattern going.

If you saw my brackets you’d know I had Pitt in the Final Four, and everywhere but ESPN, in the Championship Game. So, of course, the only higher seed to lose in that region is going to be Pitt.

Okay, so here’s the deal. I don’t like the idea of all the top seeds (except Pitt) winning. So today, when Texas and Memphis play, we need to cheer hard against Memphis. It doesn’t matter for my bracket, it’s all about the underdog, right? And Memphis is NOT the underdog, despite what Calapari wants you to believe. They still got that 1 by their name. Unless they are overrated (ahem), then they are not the underdog.

I promise, me wanting Memphis to lose has nothing to do with the fact that I can’t stand them or their coach…heh.