Sweet 16 Day 1 Recap

We're starting to thin out the pack a bit, tonight's games seem like they could be the toughest thus far. The choices are starting to get harder every day. Last night we mostly lost people who thought the second best team from the Missouri Valley Conference could beat the second best team from the ACC. That turned out to be....unwise.

Last night was also the final time Matt Stainbrook played a college basketball team since those asshats from Arizona had to send him and his Xavier team back to Cincinnati. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I didn't spend more time watching Xavier basketball and appreciating Stainbrook. The Stain Train has left the station for the last time folks, he was beautiful:

But, we can't spend our lives looking back. If you're still alive today you face all sorts of tough choices. Do you take Gonzaga and just expect them to beat UCLA? If you do that, are you burning a Gonzaga team that could definitely beat Duke or Utah next? Do you really want to burn any team from the South right now considering how big of favorite the South winner will be versus the winner of the East in the Final Four? So, do you take a team from the East? But, which team from the East? Louisville has already lost to NC State. NC State kind of blows, but they get those 9 beautiful tie breaker points. Michigan State lost to Texas Southern this season...but, Izzo. Oklahoma is from the Big 12...THE BIG 12! The Big 12 has had about as much success in this post-season as Tim Meadows has had post Saturday Night Live.

Yes, the real complexity has now begun. Finding that delicate balance between picking winners and saving the right teams to use later. Personally, I think the Sweet 16 is the most complicated round of the entire tournament for this pool. You're down to a point where there are few enough teams left that you really have to pay close attention to the path you want to take for the rest of the tournament. But, there's still enough games left that there's a lot of games left that could alter your strategy. Once we get to the Elite 8 and Final 4 the choices you have to make often become obvious based on what teams you've already used, there isn't a great deal of thought required when you only have one or two teams left as options. It's the decisions made in the Sweet 16 that leave you with good options all the way to the Finals. Or, those Sweet 16 decisions can leave you with no options for the last few rounds.

The good news is we're down to 66 entries out of the original 221. If you've made it this far you're better at this than 145 suckers, so you've got that going for...which is nice.

I would say good luck, but I wouldn't mean it. May your picks be different than mine, and may they be awful choices.