My Bracket Is Destroyed

It's over. My bracket is done. With wins today by West Virginia over Duke (I should have known better after last year's VCU performance) and Washington State over Notre Dame (ND looked so good on paper!), my bracket lines have seriously asphyxiated. Now, for better or worse, I can watch each game pretty much not being forced to root for the team that I've picked to win. Such as tonight, in which UCLA narrowly defeated Texas A&M. UCLA is too....good. How I loathe them. And yet they are clutch enough to make the shots when they need to

And I hate to be a very wet blanket, but I was reading today in the Times and the sports section was discussing return scenarios of USC's biggest impact players: OJ Mayo (probably not), Davon Jefferson, Taj Gibson. I hate to say it, but if two of those three leave, then USC is not looking very good next year. A big problem we had this year is our lack of post players and a legit bench. It doesn't look as if the bench problem will be solved any time soon, as only 2 - 3 commitments look to truly be impact players. As a comparison, look at our bench versus UCLA's bench. SIGH

What happened to Washington State? How were they able to stifle the Fighting Irish? I had both teams picked, but I thought that Notre Dame's reputed high-octane offense would be able to overrun WSU and that since WSU is all defense, this would only detriment anything on the other end. Instead, WSU shames Notre Dame, winning by twenty points to easily coast into the Sweet Sixteen. That's not supposed to happen! Again, reducing me to "enjoy" each game for the game itself

I spent the whole day with the telly on CBS, watching each game, although I did fall asleep on the couch during the Purdue - Butler game to wake up to Stanford's clutch OT victory. Stanford I must begrudgingly admit is pretty good, but then again, any team with two seven foot post twins would be pretty damn dominant

I saw an excellent Gatorade commercial that featured black and white profiles of college teams of various sports practicing / performing their famous clutch plays, with the words "Cinderella doesn't exist" or something like that. I think the ad was trying to say that Cinderella teams aren't a fluke and that, for that one game, the "underdog" team turned out to not be the underdog team after all. The teams featured included Boise State practicing their Statue of Liberty Play and I believe George Mason and the Final Four run, though I'm not sure on the latter

I don't know who I am cheering for now. I guess for the "better team"? Of course, there are teams that I will always cheer against, such as UCLA and Duke, but I guess Kansas would still be nice to cheer for even if they are a number one seed, as I would still like my bracket to be vindicated with correctly picking the overall tourney champion

So today was a good day for college basketball, an extremely horrendous day for my bracket. And as today was such a nice day, I think I will go out tomorrow (90 degrees weather! crazy). But there are still plenty of epic games to watch, including the two 12-13 seed meetings for Sweet Sixteen Bragging Rights

Maaaaaaaaaaaarch On!