Tourney Thoughts, Day Two

By Tiger Fan

-Let's hear it for the Bradley Braves! Any team that exposes kU as a fraud in the tourney earns my respect and admiration. Now the only question is who do I cheer for if Bucknell and Bradley meet in the Sweet 16? That's a tough decision I'm happy to face... because it means the beakers choked again!

-All in all, a wild day at the tournament. The winners of the Big XII tourney and the Big Eleven tourney joined Big East tourney winner Syracuse on the outside looking in as kansas and Iowa both lost. If you didn't see the end of Iowa's loss to Northwestern State, it's a must-see. An instant classic. It's headed straight for all the top ten lists.

-I'm not sure what to make of UConn's near-debacle against No. 16-seed Albany. Is UConn overrated or is parity really taking over in college basketball?

-I'm a little peaved with CBS. The Kentucky-UAB game was on TV here in Ohio, where I am visiting this weekend. That made sense. But what didn't make sense is when CBS decided to jump to close contests between North Carolina and Murray State and the aforementioned Bradley game in the waning seconds. When those games ended, there were about 5 minutes left in the UK-UAB game... but rather than show the end of those games and come back, CBS tried (and failed) to jump back and forth. The end result was that we saw a foul and a timeout at the end of the UNC game and nothing of substance (maybe a made free throw) in the Bradley game. Meanwhile, UK pulled ahead and the end of the game we were watching was nothing special. Nice work in the studio, fellas. I hear that lots of people missed seeing the NW St. miracle shot earlier in the day because of the same problem. That's a shame.

-The kU loss did serious damage to my brackets... but that's okay, I'd rather see kU lose and screw up my brackets than vice versa. Anyway, after two days, here's how my experiment on ESPN.com is working out: My bracket of actual picks has climbed to the 97th percentile, my mascot bracket sits in the 30th percentile and my "Better Place to Live" bracket has fallen to the 7th percentile. I gotta say, I'm pretty pumped about my real bracket so far... I've climbed into the top 90,000! Yee-haw!

Tiger notes...
Since you're here:

-We may be talking about a Tiger national champion soon: wrestler Ben Askren has advanced to the NCAA final at 174 pounds. The team sits in 15th.

-Nathan Culp led the Tigers to a 5-1 victory in the baseball team's Big XII opener against Texas A&M. Scherzer missed his start with bicep tenderness.

-No. 13 gymnastics team finished the regular season with a win over SEMO.

-Women's tennis beat Air Force.

-Women's basketball tips off its NCAA tourney run on Sunday.

-After watching the UK-UAB game tonight, I'm not sure if Mike Anderson is right for Mizzou. I like the energy that UAB played with and it was nice to see some solid defense. But they also took a lot of bad 3s and missed lots of free throws. Frankly, I've seen enough of these two things at Mizzou over the last few years. If that's part of Anderson's system, I'll pass.