From our couch correspondent - Matty K who has picked Kansas to win.
Enter the Madness – NCAA March Madness 2011
In case you live under a rock or are pretending not to notice, the NCAA Men’s basketball championship tournament, otherwise known as March Madness begins tomorrow. No, March Madness has nothing to do with “the Ides of March”, tax season or having the runs after St Patrick ’s Day, it’s all about being glued to your sofa for non-stop thrilling action (and this literally could happen as the action in the first few rounds goes on for 12 hours straight so make sure you do some stretches every couple of hours).
The NCAA college men’s basketball tournament is arguably the best and largest sports tournament in the world. Essentially, if you love sports, competition and thrilling single elimination games, then you will be glued to your television (HD preferably) for the most part of the next 2 and a half weeks. If you despise the latter, I suggest you sign up for some marathon origami classes or take a trip to Siberia for the next few Thursday through Sundays.
64 teams will commence play Thursday and Friday. By the end of the weekend there will be 16 (Sweet Sixteen) , by the end of the following weekend there will be four (Final Four) and it will all come to an end on the weekend of the 2-4 of April with the final held on Monday April 3rd.
If you’ve been harassed in the last few days by friends, coworkers or homeless people about filling in your bracket, rest assured that this is a fun and easy process that doesn’t require much effort or knowledge. Essentially every normal human being on this side of the Atlantic, men, women, child, senior joins a bracket pool with friends, generally for a cash pot. Now relax , it is impossible to have a 100% correct bracket (not even that arrogant jeopardy computer could do it!!!) so the point is to have the most correct picks based on a point scoring system. Several pools also have bonuses for picking underdogs.
Now all this talk about points scoring and underdog bonuses might sound intimidating but rest assured, the entire North American economy is dependent on Fantasy sports so we have software systems to do all the work (sorry if you were looking for a job as a “March Madness points tabulator” but check the jobs tab above for new exciting opportunities) .
Some of the best March Madness moments right here
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrL1zs12LMA[/youtube]
Here are some links to the best NCAA March Madness bracket pool:
-http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com
-http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/en/
-http://mayhem.cbssports.com/splash/mayhem/spln/opc/free?ttag=BC11_on_al_cspt_hp_hps_0001
Lastly, below are some useful terms to know that you will surely be hearing a lot of in the next few weeks:
Bracket: The entire 5 round pick selection
Sweet 16: No shame in this sweet 16, you actually are encouraging to make an appearance regardless of age or sex! This is the third round with you guessed it, 16 teams.
Elite 8: See above, subtract 8 teams and leave out the slightly perverted comment about 16 year old girls b-day parties.
Final Four: The holy grail of the tournament, if you place at least one or two teams by this point, you should still be in it
Cinderella Team: A low seeded team that pulls off one or more big upsets and becomes the fairytale story of the tournament. Every year you have two or three Cinderella's making noise until they lose their Air Jordan slippers.
Jayhawks, Blue Devils, Buckeyes, Panthers: The top four seeded teams, or the “four #1s” as they are known since every bracket has 4 different regions with seeds from 1 to 16 ( 16 teams X 4 = 64 teams ). Those teams are respectively from Kansas University, Duke, Ohio State and Pittsburgh.
