Wednesday, February 29, 2012

March Madness, Bonus Edition

Since February has an extra day this year, what better time to start our contest?

The entries are in, and it looks like we have 97 entries this year (give or take). No idea yet how many are paying entries, but that's 15 more than last year, proving the contest still has legs after 23 years.

To put in context how long we've been playing the pool, our Pre-NCAA Contest is older than every player who will appear in this year's tournament -- except Florida State's Bernard James, who rumor has it served in the U.S. armed forces in the Spanish-American War.

The Horizon League began this year's first conference tournament last night. It was a bad night for Chicago, as Loyola, CHI and Illinois-Chicago both lost, along with Green Bay (formerly Wisconsin-Green Bay, as opposed to the Packers). None of our savvy entrants were tricked into picking any of those teams, however, so we're all still tied for first place.

In regular season action, Michigan State, Florida, Xavier, and UConn all lost last night. Joe Lunardi says that puts Xavier on the outside, looking in, much to the probable chagrin of the 79 of us who picked the Musketeers. He says UConn (now 7-10 in conference and guaranteed to have an under .500 conference record) is still in, but the 73 of us who picked the defending national champions at-large have to be at least a little nervous.

Perhaps last night's most important game however, happened in Missoula, Montana, where the Montana Grizzlies beat Weber State to clinch home court advantage in the Big Sky tournament. And that's big. Or at least Big Sky.

So, here we go. Sit back and enjoy the best month of the year.

2 comments:

GAM said...

Big South Tournament started on Monday actually. Correcting a blog entry should be worth a point, right?

DK said...

To answer your observations in order:

Yes, the Big South started Monday. My bad.

No.