More Marching to Madness

As you can probably tell from my last couple of posts I'm completely ignoring football to concentrate on college basketball. Get used to it, and if you're looking to see who Jameel Cook signed with go check out Buc Stats or Pewter Pirates (at least for the next couple of weeks).

In what has become an annual tradition, analysts and idiots alike debate which bubble team got snubbed. And this year the two most deserving teams look to be Cincinnati and Missouri State, who should have gotten in over Air Force and Bradley. Although I'm not going to take the Jim Nantz/Billy Packer path here and argue more teams from the power conferences should have made it in instead.

Many of the power conference schools refuse to schedule home and aways with most teams from the mid-majors (with the exception of a few programs like Gonzaga). The power programs risk too much by scheduling away games against the mid-majors, and thus the only chance teams like Southern Illinois or Pacifc have to play a power program on an unbiased court is in the tournament.

Now, I'll listen to arguments that it's not fair to teams like Michigan or Cincinnati to leave them out of the tournament just to make a point to the power conferences, but teams from the mid-majors already have so many chips stacked against them that I see no problem in the NCAA Selection Committee throwing them a bone every now and then.

Anyway, at some point before Thursday I'm going to post my bracket but feel free to drop some of your upset picks and who you think will win it all in the comments section. Who knows, if you're picks turn out to be correct I might hook you up with some Best Bucs points (disclaimer: Best Bucs points have absolutely no real value and are entirely useless outside of this website).