Bust out your high-tops
It's that time of the year. The 2006 NCAA men's basketball championship tournament starts this morning at 9:20 A.M. PST, ushering in nearly a solid month of the best that college basketball has to offer. Sixty-four teams from around the country, from conferences of different sizes and configurations, wade into the dizzying fray of sporting unpredictability that has come to be known as March Madness.
For millions of fans and office pool players, and even the uninitiated, the month of March is all about college basketball. The women's tournament and the NIT are part of the tasty delight of obscure teams, funky mascots (the Albany Great Danes?), clutch performers, thrilling upsets, and very exciting basketball, but the star of the show is the men's tournament.
If you're lucky enough to have the day off, CBS will be televising the tournament. If you've got to work (and of course, if your work involves a computer with a high-speed Internet connection), you can catch every game of the first three rounds on the Internet for free, courtesy of CBS. Certainly they will be charging for this content in years to come, but this vial of hoops crack is free now, so get it while it lasts. The package of games even has a boss button so you can quickly switch back to your TPS reports if The Man comes snooping around your cubicle.
The 2006 brackets are loaded with the usual suspects like Syracuse, Kansas, North Carolina, and Michigan State, as well as dangerous upstarts like Iowa, Gonzaga, Pittsburgh, and Boston College, but it's hard to envision any scenario that doesn't include Duke and Connecticut in the final game. That's why they play the games though. Hope springs eternal on the March hardwood, and it is one the essential ingredients that fuels the passion of the tournament.
One thing jumps off the bracket sheet: why did the selection committee cheat us of the possibility of a Magic-Bird redux? By putting Duke in the Atlanta region and Gonzaga in the Oakland region, they have ensured that the nation's two best players, Duke's amazing marksman J.J. Reddick and Gonzaga's unstoppable scorer Adam Morrison, will not be playing against each other in the national title game.
Cal is the only local horse in this race, unless you consider the University of Pacific (Stockton) a Bay Area team. In fact, the drought is statewide--there are just three teams from the entire state (Cal, Pacific, UCLA) in the Big Dance.
Jake Curtis at the Chronicle envisions a "quasi-plausible" scenario in which da Bears make the Final Four, but realistically, Cal will be thrilled just to beat first-round opponent NC State. Ironically, Cal beat NC State in the first round of the 2003 tournament on a last-second shot by current Cal senior Richard Midgely. Cal plays NC State Friday at 4:20 (duuuude) P.M. in the American Airlines Center in Dallas.
Cal might be the team from the Bay Area playing in the tournament, but there will be four tournament teams playing in the Bay Area March 23-26 when the Oakland Arena hosts the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 rounds of the Oakland regional. Don't pack your face paint just yet though. The small amount of tickets made available to the general public have long since been snapped up; if you want to go, you'll be paying through the nose.
Even so, the NCAA tournament is so compelling, it's almost worth it. Almost.