A Life Reset

Here it is NCAA tournament time. Everyone around the nation has filled out or is rapidly filling out their 2009 NCAA Tournament bracket. This is probably the fourth year now that I participated in filling one out and each year, I get a little better in my selections.

This year, I think I am well prepared. I have never watch as much college hoops as I have done this year. Plenty of Wake Forest and ACC games to be sure, but I was game for any decent game from Big East, Big 10, Pac 10, some Mid-majors like Southern and so on. Standout stars on teams are familiar to me now. I know the style of play of several top teams: who plays pressure offense, who plays zone versus one on one defense.

So after the picks and the rankings and the assignments to the regionals, I look at the teams and …. I picked the conventional choices. Many professional bracketologists as they call themselves are giving the Final Four to Louisville, Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and either UConn or Memphis. No one is going out on a limb and picking a team to come up from even the 5th seed to 10th seed to get close to the Final Four. Part of the reason is the sheer amount of talent on those teams and dominance they have shown throughout the year. Another reason is the diminishing presence of the mid-major conferences i.e. any conference not of the big six(ACC, Big East,Big 10, Big 12, PAC-10, SEC). It is when there are a higher number of these mid-major teams that are not their conference champions that upsets are more likely to happen. But it is also a fact that the talent is also increasingly concentrated in the Power 6 conferences making it difficult for a team like Davidson and its reliance on one star, Stephen Curry, to make a breakthrough in the Tournament.

So looking at my choices for the picks, I stayed with the consensus picks for the most of my picks. I do not really see any team breaking out from the lower half of the seeding to make it through. What accounts for upsets is a team like Michigan, seeded 10th beating 7th Clemson. I do not really consider that to be much of an upset because I have seen Clemson played plenty of times this year, and right now they are on the downward slope on momentum. There is one exception, though, I am picking Mississippi State (13th) to beat Washington (4th). PAC-10 teams have been horrid this year and Mississippi State is on a roll lately, winning the SEC championship. I think they have one more good game in them before losing Purdue.

My one real break with the consensus is picking Wake Forest over Louisville. Probably not a safe bet. Louisville plays a solid zone defence that Wake Forest has problems all season long. Still, I have to go with the hometown team at least that far before losing to Kansas in the Elite 8 round.

Eventually, my Final Four ended up being pretty much like last year’s with North Carolina, Memphis, Kansas and instead of UCLA, I have Duke being the fourth. Despite the talk of the success of the Big East conference this year, none of them will get out of the Elite 8 round.

That’s one bracket.

Like many other people now, especially with the ease you can construct a bracket on the various sport web sites, I like to build some insurance in case my choices were not quite right. Now, I am not so extreme that I start building 20-30 brackets to cover various scenario possibilities. I am of the mind that you should should make some choices and stick with them. Actually do some research and make real judgment calls rather than random selection. Still, I like the option to have a variation or two.

So I built two more brackets that are about 80 % in common with my first one. In one of them, I pick Louisville going to the Final Four rather than Kansas, keeping everything else relatively the same. The other, I have Wake Forest in the Final Four.

In all three brackets, I have North Carolina coming out on top.

Like everyone else.

Including the President.

If North Carolina goes down in the second round, millions of brackets are going to be busted including my own. But that is part of the excitement of creating brackets, just to account for what may happen, that even if your own bracket got busted, it is because some team out of no where has made a great run at the expense of a more highly rated team.

If I have to lay odd on my success on each round, I would say if I get 27 out of 32 in the first round, 13 out of 16 in the second round 6 out of 8 in the third round, and 3 out 4 for the fourth round or something like that.

Finally, there is one bracket, that I tend to do now which is something I call my crazy bracket. I pick one team to win it all based on at least serious criteria like a #1 seed but pick different winners at all other rounds. Sometimes, it is my best performing bracket or sometimes it will be like last year when that bracket got absolutely slaughtered before the third round as highly ranked teams nearly always prevailed.

So for the “crazy bracket”, I have picked Pittsburgh to win it but then pick things like having all 12th ranked teams win their 5th ranked opponents in the first round.

So now it begins for two intense weekends of wall to wall basketball. Not planning to do much but watch plenty of basketball but keeping a good eye on my brackets.

Sample Bracket (Wake goes to Final Four): NCAA Tournament Bracket