Tournament Preoccupation

This week's blog entry is going to be another truncated affair, full of typos, bad puns, and tangents about how disappointed I was to hear the Cardinals optioned Brian Barton to Triple-A Memphis. Honestly, Barton probably isn't quite ready for the majors, but I love his enthusiasm, his background in aerospace engineering, and his soothing entrance music. But let's be reasonable--somebody's gonna get hurt sometime this year. These are the Cardinals we're talking about, after all, so Barton's eventual return to the major leagues (assuming he plays well in Memphis) is probably an inevitability.

Although, the Cardinals have been playing much better in Spring Training than I expected. But enough of that! There will be plenty of time to talk about the Cardinals in the next couple of weeks. Right now, a maddening lack of sleep and the ongoing NCAA tournament have me too frazzled to focus on anything for more than five minutes at a time. Though, to be fair, it's mostly the tournament.

I call it Tournament Preoccupation, or TP for short. However, I tend to avoid using the abbreviation because when I say I'm suffering from TP, people think I'm talking about Native American dwellings or toilet paper, which causes much more confusion than I can handle.

The first two rounds of the NCAA tournament literally are madness. Four days of tons of games going on at all hours, each playing its part in determining the national champion. With up to four games going on at the same time, score updates pour in all day, and I gotta say, whether I'm at work designing newspaper ads, or at home trying to write a sports blog, it's rather difficult to focus on anything when there's a refresh button on my web browser and/or a TV in the next room taunting me to find out what's happened in the last five minutes. That's Tournament Preoccupation for you.

It all started in junior high when I became obsessed with the idea of trying to predict the outcome of an entire 64-team bracket. When I compared my results to some of the other kids at school who were way more into sports than I was and realized I usually wasn't too far off from people who paid attention to college basketball all season, I became more compelled to construct the perfect bracket.

It didn't stop there. Soon I became one of those guys who snuck around school with a pair of earbuds that ran discreetly under my shirt to a small radio in my pocket so I could listen to games during class. Yeah, so there were a couple of days there when I didn't pay very close attention in the afternoons, but I turned out all right. Once I hit trigonometry I wasn't really good at math anymore, but I get by.

Should I mention my unhealthy obsession was helped out by certain teachers who snuck TVs into their rooms so we could watch tournament games during class? If any of you are out there reading this, you know who you are, and I thank you. (I saw "The Shot" Valparaiso's Bryce Drew made against Ole Miss at the buzzer to give them the win live in 1998 in my 8th grade Government class. Awesome.)

My TP continues to this day. I can't ignore the intrigue and suspense and excitement and potential upsets of a 64-team single elimination tournament in which each and every game is win or die. If one high-seeded team goes out there and stinks it up, and their low-seeded opponent plays the game of their life, it can throw an entire bracket into chaos.

I just can't stand to miss that sort of thing.

As of the posting of this blog, the first 16 games are in, and I got 11 of those right, which is good for last place in my pool. (Thanks for nothing, BYU, Cal, VCU, Butler, and Clemson.) My Final Four is Louisville, Memphis, Pittsburgh, and Gonzaga, with Louisville and Pittsburgh in the final and Pittsburgh winning it all (which I thought was a pretty solid pick when I filled out my bracket, but apparently Mike Golic and I are the only people in the world who picked Pitt). So we'll see how it goes from here.

See you all next week, when I will undoubtedly lament all the dumb picks I made. I'm currently on pace to get all four 8 versus 9 match-ups wrong. I'll let you know how that turns out.