March Madness

The brackets are out. 65 Teams are in, many others are out. March Madness is all set. For the next month or so, college basketball fans are in heaven. We have 48 games this weekend. 12 games next weekend and 3 games the week after that. It is the best playoff system any sport has ever used, college or pro. 65 teams fighting for a right to make it to the round of 32, sweet 16, elite 8, final 4 and then the national championship. Major league baseball, the national basketball association, and the national football league, along with any other sport may have interesting and intriguing playoffs, but none can COMPARE to the end of the college basketball season. It is pure chaos, with one crazy upset after another.

It is an awesome time of the year, and thus my dilemma. I go to a D3 school, Washington University in St. Louis. A school that plays teams like Carnegie Mellon and Emory, it sucks. I do get to watch my team play in a March tournament, but its in arenas like ours, small and cramped full of students with 4.0's and trust funds. Its stupid, annoying and a waste of my time. Thus I have lost almost all interest in this March Madness bullshit. I, unlike almost all of my friends, do not have a team that can make the tourny. I have the University of Maryland, but really, I couldn't care less about Gary Williams and the Terps. If they make it, great I have a team to kind of root for. If they don't, I really wouldn't really care.

I wish more than anything that I had chosen a sports school. A D1 school with good athletics so I could get wasted and go make a fool of myself at the game. Instead, I get to go to a great academic school, and while that has many perks in itself, like a decent job when I graduate, it also has its pitfalls, like no sports. In the end, life sucks during March Madness for me. I wish I could have a team like North Carolina, or a team like Vanderbilt to root for. Schools I could have gone to had I thought about this when I applied to schools back in 2005. So this will be my one and only March Madness post. I will continue to post articles on football and in the next few weeks articles on baseball as that season begins in late March. JT and Shenanigans will probably post an article after article about this, and good for them as they have a team to root for in North Carolina. I, however, do not.