Top Ten reasons to love March Madness

With the NCAA Tournament only a week and a few days away, here are the ten reasons why March is the best month of the year for sports fans.

10: Selection Sunday

This may deserve a Top Ten list of its own, but I would say that the selection show is the best non-sporting sports event of the year. Watching the guys on CBS unveil what seed teams are, which bubble teams made it in the bracket and which missed out is exciting for some reason. Even though the actual games don’t start until four days later, the selection show is the real start to the Madness.

9: Everybody is an expert

There is no time during the sports year where so many different people have so many different opinions than March. Put 20 people in a room to talk about the NCAA Tournament and there will be 20 different opinions on which team will cut down the nets, which surprise team will go farthest and which teams will be one-and-done. Then of course there is the random person in your bracket pool who isn’t an expert, has no knowledge or opinion of college basketball and ends up winning all the money anyways.

8: CBS coverage

This wouldn’t have made the list any of the past 30 years, with Billy Packer as the voice of the Final Four. But since CBS decided to dump college basketball’s Ebenezer Scrooge, their broadcast suddenly has become a strength. Anytime you can watch Gus Johnson, Kevin Harlan and Bill Raftery on the same network, it’s a positive in my book.

7: Gambling

Other than former Washington/current UCLA football coach Rick Neuheisel, does anybody not enjoy gambling on the tournament? With money on the line, every game is significant and picking the correct Cinderella team becomes that much more important. Also, winning cash makes a normally forgettable team suddenly memorable, a reason I still have props for Juan Dixon, Steve Blake, Lonny Baxter and the rest of the 2002 Maryland Terps who helped me win like $150 that year.

6: Upsets

It’s only a matter of time before a 16 seed takes down a #1. Until then, schools like George Mason and Davidson will provide the entertainment by knocking off higher seeded teams and either making or ruining a person’s bracket.

5: Scenario generator

Every website that hosts tournament pools has this feature, but I am biased to Yahoo’s scenario generator. The feature allows players to plug in hypothetical game results and then see where they would finish in their pool, making it useful for people who had a poor first round and want to see if they still have a chance of winning anything. Outside of actually watching the games, the scenario generator probably is responsible for more wasted time across the country in the month of March than anything else.

4: School / Office pools

As somebody who has been in a pool with the essentially the same people for almost ten years now, facing competitors who give their brackets names like Voyager Express and Real Madeez Nutz, I can say almost nothing beats being in a pool with your friends and talking trash about their picks. Only thing that tops it? Taking all their money at the end of the tournament.

3: The Bracket

Filling out an online bracket is fun and saves a lot of time and trees. But other than Michael Barrett’s fist and AJ Pierzynski’s face, does anything in sports go together better than a NCAA bracket and an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper? There is no wasted space, with every inch of the paper filled with school names, lines and by the end of the Madness, giant marks through the incorrect picks and circles around the right ones.

2: Unforgettable moments

Here are the moments that instantly popped into my head: Laettner’s shot to shock Kentucky, Tyus Edney going coast-to-coast, Jordan’s baseline J to beat Georgetown, the Fighting Illini’s Elite Eight miracle, Bryce Drew’s three, Jimmy V looking for somebody to hug, Mario Chalmers pushing the title game into OT. What could possibly be better?

1: Games all day

The first two days of the tournament are, without doubt, the two best days of the sports year. 16 games Thursday, 16 more on Friday, with the first tipping off at 10:30 a.m each day and the last ending after 11 p.m. Sure, there’s a good chance your hope for a perfect 63-out-of-63 bracket (odds of that happening: 1 in 7.2 billion) will be over by Thursday’s lunch, and your chance of winning your pool could be done by Friday morning. But that doesn’t prevent those days from being the pinnacle of the college hoops calendar.