March Madness

Back in my basketball playing days, I remember one of my coaches suggesting to us that we should watch college basketball instead of the NBA. He told us that we would learn more about fundamentals if we watched the college game. Hoping to pick up a few things to improve my game, I sought out college games, quickly discovering a game Thursday night on TSN and the traditional weekend games on CBS.

Whether or not I benefitted from watching these games is up for debate, but I quickly warmed up to the college game. Being too young to fully understand that these guys were playing for pride or the love of the game or a chance to play in the NBA, I couldn't quite figure out what was different but I knew there was something. Now I do understand, and with the NBA becoming more and more of a circus populated by overpaid babies it's certainly more appealing and was for many years.

For a long time, I always made a point to watch the tournament, even if I hadn't watched any games. Unfortunately in recent years, I've been unable or unwilling to watch it. Having watched only a handful of games over the past three or four years, I couldn't justify spending four whole days watching the tournament. What's the point? I have no idea who's good, who's bad, and really in the end, Wake Forest is going to choke anyway, assuming they made the tournament in the first place.

Having watched a number of crazy moments in this years tournament, I wish I had.

This year I had little choice but to fill out a bracket for the first time since ... I dunno, probably high school ... because of my friends at school. If I'm going to fill out one, I might as well fill out another with my friends from high school who invite me every year. All of a sudden I had a vested interest in the tournament and couldn't help but watch as much of it as I could.

The tournament this year has been one of the more memorable tournaments for me. Watching the coach of Virginia Commonwealth will his team to the final four has been something else. Sitting on the edge of my seat and watching UCLA and Florida match each other basket for basket for 38 minutes is something I could have continued to do all day. And the feeling of satisfaction as the Richmond Spiders won their first two games as I predicted was pretty nice.

For the first time ever, no number one seeds made it to the Final Four. Out of the 5.9 million brackets registered on the CBS sports website, two have the Final Four correct. That's 0.0000339%. Unreal.

You can say what you want about the college game, what makes it great is that on any given day, any team can beat any other. It's unpredictable. If this year's tournament has reiterated anything, it's that. All these years removed, I still love basketball, even though I hate the NBA. Seems like a reasonable compromise to me. I don't plan on missing March Madness anymore.

And in the off chance the college game isn't enough, Charles Barkley making a complete ass of himself on national television ain't a bad reason to watch either.

-matt