March Madness

I would like to first take a pot shot at the Mountain West conference. For the 2nd time in as many years (And it's been happening for a while), I have myself thinking that the Mountain West rigged the tournament to make sure that the regular season champion didn't win the tournament. San Diego State won the regular season and the tourney a couple years back, but that's it.

I figure their reasoning is that the regular season champion lately has been in excellent position to make the NCAA tournament, and they wanted to make sure that more than one team made it in. (The tourney champion gets an automatic bid, no matter how bad they were in the regular season.) They get the refs to make it look not completely obvious, but make sure strategic fouls are called on the team in better position to get an at large bid. In the 9 years of MWC tournament, the #2 seed has a 16-5 record, and the #1 seed has a 14-7 record. If San Diego State hadn't won the tourney a couple of years ago, the disparity would have been worse.

Last year, I spent about 4 hours putting together my brackets. I did a bracket with a coin flip. I did a bracket with teams I thought would win. I created a bracket that involved a complicated weighting system. Then, to add in the inevitable randomness of the NCAA tournament, I combined the coin flip and the weighted bracket to come up with another. After all that work, I ended up not doing so well.

I don't have time for all of that this year. (plus it just doesn't work) This year, I am thinking about letting each of the girls do a bracket, based on which team mascot they like better. Then I can do a combined bracket after that. I'm not sure how well that one will go, but it can't be any worse than I did last year...