NCAA Championship -- UCLA vs Florida

[District303aPastPlayer]

Does anyone else seem uninterested in this game?

[sahen]

i dont really care anymore, i wanted george mason or LSU to win it...but being that i cant watch any baseball but the giants/padres i guess i'll watch it....

[turbostud]

It seems like every game in the tourny was great until the semi finals. I hope the game is good tonight.

[BreckTxLonghorn]

I'm kinda interested to see this Joakim Noah play, but not anticipating the game.

24 and Survivor: SPI are my two interests for the night.

[SintonFan]

Originally posted by BreckTxLonghorn
I'm kinda interested to see this Joakim Noah play, but not anticipating the game.

24 and Survivor: SPI are my two interests for the night.
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24 is good but has less plot twists than Survivor: SPI.:inlove:

[SintonFan]

Originally posted by District303aPastPlayer
Does anyone else seem uninterested in this game?
.
It comes along once a year. I'll keep it tuned in.:cool:
Did you see Friday's SA Express News article on how this year busted absolutely everyone's bracket?:D
I'll try to find it if you haven't seen it.

[SintonFan]

Here ya go A-playa:
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Basketball: From experts to regular fans, we got this Final Four wrong

Web Posted: 03/31/2006 12:00 AM CST
Jeff McDonald
Express-News Staff Writer

You did your homework.

You crunched numbers, studied RPIs, pored over blank brackets as if they were the Dead Sea scrolls. You scanned Web sites, tuned into talk shows. You absorbed everything ESPN's Jay Bilas and Digger Phelps had to say. You ignored ESPN's Dick Vitale.

You even hired a fortuneteller, who shuffled tarot cards, scattered chicken bones — and foretold of an obvious Duke-Connecticut finale.

Then you painstakingly filled out your NCAA tournament bracket, plopped down the $5 entry fee for your office pool — and promptly watched your bracket incinerate during the first maddening weekend of March Madness.

But take heart, Mr. and Ms. Busted Bracket. In this nearly unprecedented season of bracket havoc, you aren't alone.

"Everyone's bracket is busted," said Will Leitch, sports editor of the popular Web site Deadspin.com, which runs a pool.

March Madness always has been about upsets. This year, the average American's bracket contains more wrong answers than Vince Young's Wonderlic test.

Not a single No. 1 seed survived the tournament's first two weekends — the first time that happened since 1980.

So Duke, UConn, Villanova and Memphis are out. George Mason, the first 11 seed to make the Final Four since 1986, is in.

Joining the Cinderella Patriots in Indianapolis are Florida (a third seed), UCLA (a two) and LSU (a four).

You couldn't have picked a more random foursome with a dartboard, a blindfold and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

That means most of us are like Tim Merryman, executive sports producer at KTKR radio in San Antonio.

He saw his well-thought-out bracket go boom in a hurry. You can now find it at the bottom of a trashcan.

"Mine is torn up just like almost everybody else," Merryman said. "I picked the favorites, and I got burned because of it."

Indeed, if you were in a tournament pool this year, odds are you've muttered something along the lines of the following:

"If only Boston College hadn't lost on a goaltending call, and if only Kansas weren't coached by Bill Self, and if only Duke's J.J. Redick weren't such a notorious Sweet 16 choke artist, and if only ..."

Correctly picking this year's Final Four wasn't exactly a million-to-one shot — but it was close. A Rhode Island mathematician calculated the odds of doing so in the ESPN.com pool at 1-in-750,000.

The on-line pool at cbssportsline.com accepted two million entries this year. Not one of them pegged the last four teams standing.

Out of a million entries on yahoo.com, only one accomplished that feat.

And if you actually did pick George Mason to make the Final Four? Chances are good you did it by accident.

At least Russell Pleasant, a 46-year-old software developer from Bellevue, Neb., is willing to own up to it.

He is one of the four in 3 million ESPN.com users to correctly pick this year's Final Four, including George Mason.

How did he do it?

He got George Mason confused with George Washington, that's how.

Just one of the 1,541 participants in Leitch's Deadspin.com pool had the Patriots headed for Indianapolis.

"It was a prank bracket," Leitch said. "That person also had Monmouth in the Final Four."

For the first time in the recent history of NCAA tournament pools, cracking wise seems to have been a viable strategy toward finishing in the money.

Marc Frey, former comptroller for the San Antonio Missions, entered a bracket pool with several members of the baseball team's front office.

He submitted an entry he dubbed the "Myopia Runneth Over Bracket," which featured Kansas — his alma mater — winning the national title.

KU got bounced in the first round, but Frey's joke bracket included so many crazy upsets that it finished second.

Josh Levin, an assistant editor at slate.com, stands tied for fourth place in the ESPN.com pool after nailing three of four Final Four teams — all but little George Mason.

The secret to his bracket-filling success?

"I was in India," he said. "And I missed the conference tournaments. Not watching them was an advantage."

Just don't ask him how he finished in his Indian cricket pool.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jmcdonald@express-news.net

Express-News staff writers Tim Griffin, Clint Hale and David King contributed to this report.

RECIPE FOR A BUSTED BRACKET

The NCAA began seeding the entire men's basketball tournament field in 1979, and the tournament expanded to a field of 64 in 1985. This season's Final Four is the first since 1980 without a No. 1 seed and is the least likely group of teams (based on adding the seeds together; lower totals mean more favorites) since 2000 (champions in bold):

Year Final Four participants: (Seed) Team Seed total

2000 (1) Michigan St. (5) Florida (8) N. Carolina (8) Wisconsin 22

1980 (2) Louisville (5) Iowa (6) Purdue (8) UCLA 21

2006 (2) UCLA (3) Florida (4) LSU (11) George Mason 20

1986 (1) Duke (1) Kansas (2) Louisville (11) LSU 15

1979 (1) Indiana St. (2) Michigan St. (2) DePaul (9) Pennsylvania 14

1992 (1) Duke (2) Indiana (4) Cincinnati (6) Michigan 13

1983 (1) Houston (1) Louisville (4) Georgia (6) N.C. State 12

1985 (1) St. John's (1) Georgetown (2) Memphis (8) Villanova 12

1990 (1) UNLV (3) Duke (4) Georgia Tech (4) Arkansas 12

1982 (1) N. Carolina (1) Georgetown (3) Louisville (6) Houston 11

1984 (1) Kentucky (1) Georgetown (2) Houston (7) Virginia 11

1996 (1) Kentucky (1) Massachusetts (4) Syracuse (5) Mississippi St. 11

2005 (1) Illinois (1) N. Carolina (4) Louisville (5) Michigan St. 11

1987 (1) UNLV (1) Indiana (2) Syracuse (6) Providence 10

1988 (1) Arizona (1) Oklahoma (2) Duke (6) Kansas 10

1989 (1) Illinois (2) Duke (3) Seton Hall (3) Michigan 9

1995 (1) UCLA (2) Arkansas (2) N. Carolina (4) Oklahoma St. 9

1998 (1) N. Carolina (2) Kentucky (3) Stanford (3) Utah 9

2002 (1) Kansas (1) Maryland (2) Oklahoma (5) Indiana 9

2003 (1) Texas (2) Kansas (3) Marquette (3) Syracuse 9

1994 (1) Arkansas (2) Arizona (2) Duke (3) Florida 8

2004 (1) Duke (2) Connecticut (2) Oklahoma St. (3) Georgia Tech 8

1981 (1) Virginia (1) LSU (2) N. Carolina (3) Indiana 7

1991 (1) UNLV (1) N. Carolina (2) Duke (3) Kansas 7

1997 (1) Kentucky (1) Minnesota (1) N. Carolina (4) Arizona 7

1999 (1) Connecticut (1) Duke (1) Michigan St. (4) Ohio St. 7

2001 (1) Duke (1) Michigan St. (2) Arizona (3) Maryland 7

1993 (1) N. Carolina (1) Kentucky (1) Michigan (2) Kansas 5

Source: Official 2006 NCAA Men's Final Four Records Book

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I enjoyed it myself.
:cool:

[clayton7]

Total dominance made it a boring game.

[JasperDog94]

I'm glad I missed it.

[Bulldog_12]

Yeah, I am glad the stros played during a majority of this game. When I turned it on in the second half, it was pretty much game over.

[JasperDog94]

Were the stros on TV?

[Bulldog_12]

They were in B/CS. The game was on Fox Sports Net.

[sweetwater07]

Originally posted by District303aPastPlayer
Does anyone else seem uninterested in this game?

your crazy...UCLA is my team.....i'm watching it

[DaHop72]

Originally posted by sweetwater07
your crazy...UCLA is my team.....i'm watching it Uh, the game was last night??:doh: