I'm going maaaaaad!!!!

For March Madness! This is one of my favorite times of the year!!! I love college basketball and can remember watching March Madness as far back as I can actually remember....maybe since I was 7 or 8 years old?

Today I watched the conference finals of the Big Ten, ACC, and SEC. I made predictions for the outcome of each game, and if the results are any indication of my ability to properly pick winning teams in my tournament bracket, I'm in for a rough time. I thought Ohio State would beat Purdue (didn't happen), Tennessee would beat Mississippi State (didn't happen), and that Duke would beat Florida State (ding! ding! ding! We have a winner!)

After all of the conference games I watched the "Selection Sunday" hoopla on CBS, and was very disappointed when my Saint Mary's Gaels were left out of the tournament this year. With a 26-6 record, an Olympian on the team who scored 20 points against Team USA in the last Olympics (Patty Mills from Australia), and a second place finish in the WCC, I thought for sure they'd get in as a 12 or 13 seed. Unfortunately for the Gaels it just wasn't in the cards this year. They're a really great group of guys and I feel very bad for them that they didn't make it in because I know they wanted it so badly.

That's just the way the brackets fall, I suppose. Speaking of brackets, I just filled out mine for the tournament pool that I'm in. I feel like these are always so "luck of the draw" because there are inevitably going to be upsets, Cindarella teams, and those teams that cruise through the tournament...I guess that unpredictable nature of the tournament is what makes it so fun to watch year in and year out.

Here's my bracket in case you care to see it. I think I have every Big Ten team advancing past the first round, so that's probably my first mistake... I also have a really hard time deciding which #1 seed won't make it to the Final Four (it's no fun to select all four to make it...), so I had to eliminate one from my bracket, and not surprisingly it's North Carolina since I'm most definitely a DUKE BLUE DEVILS fan and hate to see UNC do well! haha I didn't pick Duke to go all the way either though.

I think you can click on it to make it bigger and see the actual team names!


We'll see how the tournament goes...