March Madness 2012: NCAA College Basketball Championships

Image via Wikipedia

Are you ready?

March Madness 2012 is almost here!!!  The Big Dance!

The NCAA College Basketball Championships  give every team the opportunity to be an upset star even if they are not perceived to be among the top teams in the country.  It is so much different from the college Football championships where the sports writers still basically “pick” the champion each year.

In NCAA college basketball teams pick themselves.  Usually the top teams make it to the Sweet 16 round where the last 16 teams standing vie for the Final Four spot from which a champion will be crowned.

When is the 2012 March Madness?

 From 3/13/12 to 3/23/12

So who will be in the mix this year?  Will your favorite team be there?  Will the nation’s Top teams still be there when we get down to 16 teams?  Will you win your Final Four pool at work or at school?  Or online?

Heck even the President loves March Madness.  so get your “Brackets” ready.

Are you a Comcast/Xfinity customer?  Go here to sign up and win great prizes in their tournament.  Their March to Glory has $1,000 daily prizes and a $10,000 Grand Prize!

Sign in with your Comcast ID before the games begin on March 13th and you’ll be ready to catch the college basketball action online with XFINITY from 3/13/12 to 3/23/12

Check your cable provider and your cellular service provider to find out about their tournament.

And players?  Players often cement their Draft placement or move up or down based on their performance especially in the Final Four teams.

The NCAA even has their own Bracket Challenge .  Throw your bracket at the basket!!!

Build your own tournament and host it on paper or online yourself.

Here’s a March Madness flow chart to help you balance career, school, family and yes……..Basketball!

You don’t want to track the teams as they win, lose and move along or fly out?

ESPN will update this actual bracket starting Sunday March 11th.

Check out the Brackets Everywhere ad!!  Excellent.

The Men’s Final Four will be in New Orleans this year.  The women’s Final Four is hosted in Denver.

March 11th:

The Dr is in (the Brackets!!)

Print the pic below and fill it in before the games start March 13th!!!  The teams are set and you can check the NCAA interactive bracket here  for the 1st round of games.  It will be updated game by game until the 2012 championship so save the link.

The Dr has…Notre Dame beating Syracuse in the championship game.

Go Irish!!!

The Number 1 seeds are:

• Kentucky
• Syracuse
• North Carolina
• Michigan State

And although I just put Notre Dame in my “wild seed” racket as the eventual Champion…that was indeed my Wild Child Seed….

 I expect North Carolina to be the eventual 2012 NCAA Champions crowned in New Orleans.

And my $$$ Bracket has NC over Syracuse for all the Benjamins!!!

Kentucky has a very good team with just two losses this year.  But loss #2 happened just this past weekend…to lowly (but bracketed) Vanderbilt.  That ended Kentucky’s 24 game winning streak.

And watch out for one of the Final Four teams from last year…little known VCU.

Michigan State was the only one of these top 4 teams that actually won their conference tournament as they defeated another big time team, Ohio State.

Bubble teams such as Drexel, Seton Hall, Mississippi State and Pac-12 regular-season champion Washington curse what might have been as they did not make it into this years tourney, and will be wondering how Iona, California, North Carolina State and South Florida made it in.

“The Big East led all conferences with nine teams, including defending national champion Connecticut, a dangerous No. 9 seed, conference tournament winner Louisville and, of course, Syracuse,which cruised through most of the season with only one loss.”

Bracket Smack-it

One more day and they are OFF!!!

Are you a gambler??  Vegas picks their winners here.  Check the link.  I don’t want to spoil it for you.

And what about the Glass Slipper this year?  Well, it won’t be the perpetual Cinderella team Butler.  They did not maker it into the 60 team grouping this time .  The bulldogs were not selected for the first time since 2006.

So without Butler are these the four teams that may wear that sweet Glass Slipper and be called the 2012 Cinderella team???

• Long Beach State: The 49ers played a tough nonconference schedule before beating up the likes of UC Davis en route to the Big West Conference title. Games against Louisville, Kansas and North Carolina prepared The Beach for mid-March games.

• Saint Mary’s: His teammates in Moraga call him “Delly.” Outside the Bay Area, junior Matthew Dellavedova is unknown. The dynamic point guard who led the Gaels to the Sweet 16 as a freshman is ready for another run.

• Harvard: If you think the basketball world went “Lin-sane” when the Knicks’ Jeremy Lin took New York and the NBA by surprise, imagine the chaos his Ivy League alma mater could cause with an early win.

Detroit: The Titans are the first Horizon League representative other than Butler since 2006 and long shots considering they tied for third in league. But Clint Eastwood says we should rally behind Detroit, and we don’t want to make Dirty Harry’s day.

Read more at the link above.

Good stories & good NCAA teams!!

KENTUCKY - The Wildcats are so loaded that John Calipari’s biggest worry heading into the postseason was that his players would be so busy worrying about the NBA draftthat they would forget to take care of business. That might well have been the case last year when Kentucky was beaten in the national semifinals by Connecticut

MISSOURI – There is no quieter top-five team in the country than the Tigers. That’s probably fine with first-year coach Frank Haith, who made the wrong kind of headlines before the season when questions were raised about his ties with a booster at the University of Miamiwho liked to show players a good time.

LAMAR – No, the Cardinals won’t make a run deep into the NCAA tournament, though that doesn’t make them any less fascinating. Lamar hasn’t lost since coach Pat Knight ripped into them for being, among other things, quitters and drug users.Psychologists can debate the method, but no one can debate Lamar’s place in the tournament

SYRACUSE - Bernie Fine won’t be on the bench for this Final Four run, and for a while it looked like Jim Boeheim might not be either. But Boeheim survived the child sex-abuse scandal surrounding his longtime assistant and his team won 31 games to get the No. 1 seed in the East. Assuming yet another scandal – players on previous teams not being suspended for positive drug tests- doesn’t derail the Orangemen, they have a legitimate shot of making the title game for the fourth time in Boeheim’s 36 years in charge.

MICHIGAN STATE – My personal favorite (the Sacramento Bee writer of the article covering the above teams) in the tournament, if only because I love the way Tom Izzo coaches. He schedules tough teams and isn’t afraid to take a few hits doing it, something that happened this year in opening losses to Duke and North Carolina.

So many good stories. Almost as many good teams.

March 13th:I hadda call in sick!

I got that old Bracketitis…achoo ya’ll!   Because today is the day, tourney time starts NOW!!!

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Thru March 12th my Wild Child Voodoo Bracket status is:

                       Place            Percentile

voodooDr

0

190,963

55

Not too bad actually.  Like a trillion-gazillion peeps have entered the official Bfracket Challenge at www.NCAA.com

I won’t stay in the top 55% long unless a few long-shots win.  Well, a lot of long-shots.

March 15th:

I dropped a little.  Not too bad, but it means some of my long shot teams imploded and failed me…miserably.

                           Place           Percentile

voodooDr

0

214,825

49

March 16th:

Only a slight drop again.  I’m hanging in there, need a ouple of good wins to get back to .500!  Anybody in the official NCAA Challenge?  Post your status in the comment setion below or (like some have) on Twitter.  I won’t put them here unless ou ask me too.

But James…damn!  How you keep going up when I keep going down man??  Great work and good luck.

                           Place           Percentile

voodooDr

13

224,537

47

Have a good St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow with all that green (or red) beer, corned beef & cabbage you an stand.  I’m hoping it will be a good day for Notre Dame tomorrow.

On Thursday Vandy got some!  Nice game.  After falling asleep they sent Linsanity’s Harvard group home early in the “brain bowl”.

And Murray State made it thru their game??  Really??  It meant a loss for me ad I had Colorado St in that game.

Wins were Marquette, Louiseville, Baylor, Ohio State, Gonzaga, Kansas state.

Losses were U Conn in the upset of the tourney so far…Long Beah State (in kinda my long-shot for the day I guess)

Top Seeds were 109-0 in their opening games.  Zero.  Z-E-R-O!!

March 17th:

I kept the losing streak away…until yesterday when my bracket fell in the toilet!

Entry	Points	Rank	Percentile
voodooDr     18                273,528         35

Losses included longshot St Marys & San Diego State.  Duke, although I really like Lehigh’s team and attitude.  And the big one?Mizzou…I feel for you.  I cannot believe Misssouri lost.  I went out and did not watch the game expecting they had no problem with lowly Norfolk State,  I gotta watch that game now.   How could they win?

 Props to the Spartans.  Are they the 2012 Cinderella team???

March 18th:

Climbed UP a few percentile points….oh yeh!  From 35th to 39th.  Overall Rank went up like 40,000.

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr          28                         257,445                39

Indiana moves on…nice.

Wins came from Marquette, Ohio St, Louiseville, Kentucky and Syracuse.

Sweet 16 here we are.

Losses included VCU, Coorado and Vandy.

March 19th:

Dropped a few more percentile points.  Once my longshots dropped off the board the teams that are left go up against Top Seeds.  That’s my excuse.

My  good wins were NC State and Cincinnatti.  Cinncinnatti???

My losses?  Lehigh,  Purdue and Saint Louis.

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr              28                              280,897                         34

March 23rd:

Same Percentile, climbed up 20k in Rank and good bump in points:

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr      32                                    277,801                           34

Wow!  Louiseville was all over the Michigan State Spartans.  Having Magic Johnson courtside for his Alma Mater did no good as the Cardinals smashed them 57-44.  Louiseville’s big center Gorgui Dieng slapped away 7 shots with his shot blocking prowress.

Syracuse seems to be on their way to a Final Four spot surviving y one point against Wisconsin while Ohio State cruised past Cincinnatti.

Syracuse & Ohio State meet up on March 244th for that Final Four berth while Louisevile will meet Florida who made it by Marquette.

On March 25th, North Carolina meets NC State.  Maybe.

If we get this game, this shoud be the best matchup in this entire series.  Inter-state rivalry, two top teams…man…AFTER they both make it past their opponents today.  NC meets Ohio while NC State takes on Kansas.

March 24th:

My Percentile remains the same while my Total Points go up by 2 and my Rank drops by 2,000.

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr                 36                                     279,619                                        34

North Carolina wins a squeaker with their injured star Guard, Kendall Marshall, while the Kansas Jayhawks had their star Guard Taylor, but may have wished they didn’t he played so poorly.  Kansas slipped past NC State anyway.

So no interstate NC vs NC State this year!

Baylor made it past Xavier, only to have to face the Kentucky powerhouse now.

March 25th:

With some of my primary teams gone I stick pretty much in the same spot each da,  Mizzou, Michigan St, Notre Dame (ha ha) all gone…

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr           36                              280,192 34

Even if my primary pick, Syracuse, stayed around and went on to win it all I won’t jump up much if an ecause my other teams are mostly gone from the race.

Good job Ohio State….and my friend Isaac who picked them….beating Syracuse.  It’s what is so exciting about the one-and-out tournament.

And Louiseville goes to the Final Four after beating Florida.

My picks based on the actual Sweet 16 are going well other than the early ouster for Michigan St.  And the ouster of Syracuse.  And who else?  Dang…

March 26th:

The only teams I expected to make it to the Championships that actually made it??  Kentucky.  Ohio State.

                                                                         Congratulation to Louisville & Kansas.

Dropped one percentile point.  One thousand in Rank.

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr            36                                  281,518 33

And so we have:

Saturday March 31st—

Kentucky vs Louisville

Ohio State vs Kansas

My pick?  Maybe one out of four is easier??  Kentucky over Kansas on Monday, April 2nd.

April 1st:

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr         36                              281,739                       33

Kentucky yeh!

Kansas yeh!

April 3rd:

A bit lower in rank, same pointss and same Percentile.

 

Entry	Overall Points	Overall Rank	Overall Percentile
voodooDr           36                              281,754                               33

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

March 15th:

Before today’s games the SB Nation has NCAA Bracket Predictions: Breaking Down Each Region And Looking For A Winner.

We’ll start with the Final Four.

South – Kentucky

West — Mizzou

East — Ohio St.

Midwest – North Carolina

My Champion pick out of those four?  Gotta be Missouri.  Excellent guard heavy team should sign in the NCAA for sure.  Kentucky would have a great chance.  Ohio State is everyone’s pick, but not mine this year.  But definitely Final Four material.  NC State scares me.  Excellent excellent team.

The Bracketologist makes his picks!!

Great article as he weaves thru every team to get to his very good Final Four selections:

 Final Four Semifinals 1 Kentucky over 2 Missouri 2 Ohio State over 2 KansasFinal 1 Kentucky over 2 Ohio State

March 21st:

The Sweet Sixteen!!!  Image gallery of the teams still in the quest for the 2012 NCAA title.

*****My Sweet 16 Picks*****

NOTE:  I have to re-work this and post again with the same picks.  WordPress just doesn’t like my formatting.  This will be attempt #4 (and the last

First team is MY pick…..BOLD is actual winner.  I added the team moving on in parenthesis ( ),  below my choice if it is different.

                                                            

                                                               Championship Game

                                                             Syracuse/North Carolina

And that’s your winner.

The Orangemen of Syracuse beating the 2012 version of the Tar Heels from North Carolina!!

Unless I’m wrong…

March 26th:

Yes, I was wrong wasn’t I???  That’s why I am in the 33rd percentille and dropping…

And so we have:

Saturday March 31st—

Kentucky vs Louisville

Ohio State vs Kansas

My pick?  Maybe one out of four is easier??  Kentucky over Kansas on Monday, April 2nd.

March 31st:

1/2 of my game picks get there for Monday.

Kentucky beats Louisville 69-61.  Louisville was a scary team in this game even though Kentucky had the superior group.  You just never know.

“Anthony Davis and top-seeded Kentucky will play for the national title Monday night after finally putting away pesky Louisville 69-61 in the Final Four on Saturday night. It will be Kentucky’s first appearance in the title game since winning a seventh NCAA crown back in 1998. The Wildcats (37-2) will face the winner of Kansas-Ohio State.”

Good job Wildcats!

Good job Jayhwks!

Now on Monday we will have Kentucky over Kansas.  Shouldn’t be close.  This is a great matchup for Kentucky, they will punish Kansas inside.

April 2nd:

Who did not expect Kentucky to win tonight?  And who did expect Kansas to come back so well against this Kentucky team.

It kept looking like a blowout and Kansas just kept fighting.  Kentucky was obviously the better team but Kansas refused to quit, refused to concede, refused to give up.  This team has guts.

For the record: Kentucky wins 67-59 over Kansas for the 2012 title.

Related articles

• How To Explain March Madness To A Foreigner (schwingeninswitzerland.wordpress.com)
• March Madness 2012: Bubble Teams That Will Make a Run in NCAA Tournament (bleacherreport.com)
• March Madness 2012: Under the Radar Programs That Will Make Noise in Tournament (bleacherreport.com)