March Madness starts today…and, for the first time since 1973 the Tournament will be played without either NC State or North Carolina being represented. Wow.
We’ve already promoted our coverage platform and message forums in this link, so no more of that. Despite NC State’s omission from the tournament, the show does in fact go on. We just posted a new poll in the right panel of the front page of the blog and would love your participation in the question. For the record, I voted for Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and Butler.Similarly, there is still a little time to join the annual friendly SFN Bracket Challenge group.
If you have thoughts on games during the day, please don’t hesitate to post them here. If you’re at work (like most of the posters on here during the day) and want to watch the games, go here. The next two days are some of the most exciting of the year, when even office assistants in their mid-50s actually care about San Diego State.
Only one ACC team, Wake Forest, takes the court today. The No. 9 seed Deacons, in the East Region, will take on No. 8 seed Texas at 9:35 p.m. in New Orleans in a battle of two of our favorite teams in the country not named NC State. Wake Forest limps into Tournament play losing five of its last six games. Four of the five losses came against teams not in the field of 64 (NCSU, Va Tech, UNC and Miami). For a preview of the game, check out this article from the Winston-Salem Journal.
The ACC has started strong in the postseason by going 3-0 in the NIT, so hopefully the conference can keep it up in the early stages of the NCAA Tournament. We’ve got a lot of tough seeds, so getting as many teams through the first round will be key to respectability. Getting more than two teams into the Sweet 16 would be major for the ACC to establish some bragging rights.
While Wake Forest is on the mind, this link will take you to some good stuff related to the late Skip Prosser’s son leading Wofford against Wisconsin today.
If you are looking for some interesting basketball knowledge on some teams that didn’t ultimately make today’s dance during some the games then you should really check out the information in this article. It may have been easy to miss with all of the activity that we have had here recently.
Even though we have a policy to never link to trolls like this jackass, I thought his post selection hangover article would fit nicely in this entry. ACC fans will find the following quote interesting on a few levels:
The school I cover went 10-6 in the ACC, Mr. Committee Chairman. Do you not understand what that MEANS?
That would have been me then. It’s just about me now. If it’s me in five years, smack me. Because I’ve been doing it for almost a decade, and it’s getting tiresome. The whole charade is a cliché disguised as something fresh and new.
It’s like attending a Duke basketball game. Go one time, and the chants and cheers from the students will blow you away. The band plays great music. The Blue Devil mascot struts around with funny signs taped to his head, and then he surfs over a human wave of student volunteers. It’s incredible, the first time you go. The second and third time, too. But then you go the next year, and the next. And the next. And after a while it dawns on you: It’s the same damn thing, every year. The students come and go, the players come and go — the guy inside the mascot comes and goes — but it’s the same damn movie. And that is one tiresome revelation.
Let ’em fly.
