Friday, March 16, 2007

A Fine Start

Yesterday I overheard someone mention that there is no worse feeling than being the first team eliminated from the NCAA tournament. Similarly, from a tourney pool perspective, there is no worse feeling that watching one of your Sweet 16 teams go down to the first upset. And sure enough, there was Duke, who I had picked to upset Pitt and advance to the Sweet 16, losing to Virginia Commonwealth in the first round. It was the first real upset of the day.

Sure, Xavier beat BYU and Michigan State beat Marquette, but 8-9 games are really toss-ups, not upsets. Of course, I also got both of those games right. In fact, I got every game but Duke right yesterday. But they had all seemed pretty obvious to me, so I wasn't viewing this as any grand accomplishment.

Still, before getting too depressed about somehow convincing myself to pick Duke, who I despise, over Pitt, who I kind of like in the absence of Syracuse, I logged on to see how I was doing in my pools. I'm in three. One is run by a friend in the office. One is Foul Ball's pool (ok, that just sounds wrong). The last one is Deadspin's Pants Party Pool. Lo and behold, Scurvy (my entry reflects the absence of non-gendered citrus fruit in this year's tourney), is doing pretty well.

I'm in first in all three pools. It seems some of these obvious picks weren't so obvious. Anyway, this is like the contrapositive to the first team knocked out emotion. There is an irrational exuberance that goes with escaping the first round of the tourney. Similarly, there is an irrational exuberance to being in first after one day. Everything will obviously change between now and the final bell on this race. As soon as Texas A&M goes down in an all too predictable ball of flames, for example, I'll be starting my long slide to pool punditry mediocrity. But for one day at least, Scurvy is riding high.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Seeing as that you are now tied with me slightly down the bracket, Crime Dog, let me be the first to wish you good luck tonight in the inaugural White Sox blogger fantasy baseball league.

Should be an interesting contest this season.

Oh, and as always, go White Sox.

5:28 AM  

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