First things first… join the women’s pool! Deadline tomorrow morning!
As for the men’s tourney: we only saw two “upsets” yesterday, and neither of them was a classic David-over-Goliath situation. We had Colorado over UNLV — exciting locally, but at the end of the day, just a BCS team beating a Mountain West team. And we had one instance of “mid-on-mid violence” that, with all due respect to VCU, likely hurts the mid-majors’ chances down the road. (I could see Wichita State giving Kentucky a scare. VCU, not so much.) It was a great game, but much like Western Kentucky over Drake a few years ago, felt sort of empty at the end, as the end result was the elimination of a team you’d have liked to see tested against above-the-Red-Line competition. Alas.
Beyond that, we saw some “scares” (New Mexico surviving Long Beach State, Baylor getting past the Jackrabbits) and one near-historic result derailed in part by horrible referring (#16 UNC-Asheville vs. #1 Syracuse), but no buzzer-beaters or even near-buzzer-beaters, and not a ton of real excitement, frankly, by March Madness standards. So… hopefully today’s better!
The early games don’t have a ton of Cinderella potential, but maybe #14 Saint Bonaventure can knock off #3 FSU in the second wave of afternoon games. Don’t laugh — Loyacita picked that as her one major first-round upset, and she is presently winning my law firm’s 29-person office pool. LOL! Go Loyacita! (She’s only 32nd in the LRT pool because she went 1-3 in the First Four, but those games don’t count in the office pool.) Anyway, if the Bonnies win, I’m taking that kid to Vegas. 🙂 Here’s her bracket:
(As you’ll recall, these really are her own picks.)