I don't follow college basketball in any real form outside of the occasional glance towards a story or two on a news website during the regular season. I did know that Kentucky, who's on CBS at this moment, has made it through this entire season undefeated, and looks to close out the tournament as such, the first undefeated champion since Bobby Knight and Indiana in the '70s.
This is the time of the year that bettors and television hounds call "March Madness", when the field of now 68 college basketball teams get set up into a bracket and then duke it out in single elimination to eventually find a winner. This is the road to the Final Four.
Anyway, last night, a Friday night, after getting back home after dinner, we put the one game on that was on free television. They go by fast, and we don't have a real rooting interest, besides keeping an eye on the brackets we filled out. The game was an 8-seed versus a 9-seed: San Diego State versus St. Johns University.
SDSU is in the same conference as Cal Poly and Long Beach State, so if we feel a twinge of proximity-rooting, as happens from time to time, we'd be rooting for the Aztecs. St. Johns is in Queens, and, like with LIU-Brooklyn, we also root for New York City teams.
This game was back and forth, and San Diego State won. The teams are stationed in the South region, for reasons I'll be hard-pressed to understand, in an arena in Charlotte, North Carolina.
San Diego versus Queens in Charlotte.
The arena was nearly empty. I've been hearing that there are many arenas this year where guys can't give tickets away. They're also saying that the fans of college basketball are starting to align closely with two other sports' fans: golf and baseball: trending older and white.
There was a sports score tracker updating the other games going on on other channels. One game was 15-9 with six minutes left in the first half. This year the talk has also been about how bad the basketball product has been, how boring and brick-filled the games really are. First team to 55 wins? Even Obama mentioned the, er, "pace" of the college games.
Big tournament of occasionally bad product being played in sad, nearly empty arenas.
The Final Four and Final will be full and exciting, we're all pretty sure.
Morning... I filled out 3 brackets this year.... it was a "fun" team building experience.... I follow college sports very little little and basketball in general even less.... so I'm sure my brackets will do well... I do find it terrible that the colleges will make billions off this month while raising tuition and not even educating the players.... but I'm sure the coach needs a new bonus boat or something....
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