I’m a Brit originally who doesn’t even follow soccer outside of the World Cup, love sports but rarely enjoy watching them… but I love March Madness.
Feel free to talk about your picks and the games, share brackets etc
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Oh you’re late. My piece of advice is NEVER trust a slow-tempo team like Virginia or Wisconsin, when they are a top-4 seed. They will break your heart
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Is there a thread already?
No, you were too late for me to warn anybody not to trust Virginia. They already pooped the bed
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I appreciate it, anyone with real knowledge of the game and these college teams will be the ones really putting meat on the bones. Excited as I am by all this my comments will be more like “Dang I had hopes for Charleston” and “Prinston wut?”
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I’m happy for FDU. What a rush. I don’t have Purdue going far in any bracket anyway thank goodness. There can’t be any perfect brackets now….
Sho nuff
“0 perfect brackets remain”
Hoping on Drake…… nope.
At least Charleston? Jeepers.
I haven’t watched a single game nor filled out a bracket… usually I love march madness but this year I’m not sure what happened but I simply don’t care.
That ending with FAU and Memphis. You’ve got to be kidding me. Some divine hand is spontaneously rewriting the endings absurdly just to pound my bracket into the dust. Of course also the first year I put any money on it (just $10 in a pool with friends).
All this “calling time out” and “having a foul to use” is over my head. I’m not a fan of when rules to the sport become key strategies over actually playing the sport being behind a win, like diving in soccer at every opportunity to buy injury time etc.
Just about every team sport changes in late clock scenarios of close games. The final 2 minutes of American football games within 1 score drag into eternity too. Nature of the beast, I’m afraid.
I love March Madness. Best sporting event of the year IMO. So much drama. This year there hadn’t been as many upsets as some but the 2 at the top (Purdue and Arizona) were monumental.
Whoever above said don’t trust a high seeded slow tempo team was dead on. I understand why Princeton of old slowed the game down so much: they didn’t have the athletes to compete in a high-possession game. So, they slowed it down and turned it into a low-possession, high variance affair. That worked well enough to occasionally upset a blue blood who didn’t play that way. What I never understood was why big name schools who could conceivably recruit lots of athletes decided that such slow tempo was the way to go. You can have a good season that way, but at some point you won’t slow everyone down enough and you have to put the ball in the basket enough to keep pace.
There have been a grand total of 2 slow(ish) tempo teams to win a national title: 2010 Duke and 2019 Virginia. That Duke team had probably the GOAT basketball coach and was exceptional at offensive rebounding which actually kept their possession number fairly high while keeping their opponent possession count down. 2019 Virginia actually had to increase their normal tempo slightly and was of course almost the same roster as had been the only 1 seed to lose to a 16 (until last night) just the year before. Like I said: high variance.
If I’m a major conference program with a name I’m not doing it that way. 2 titles out of what, 80+, is not enough for me to try to build a program that way. But maybe that’s why I’m not a basketball coach 
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Yeah I said that. Wisconsin is the poster-boy for this: they’ve gone to multiple final fours as a sub-5 seed and have burned out in the first weekend as a top-4 seed.
Arizona getting slowed down and ground out is one thing. But Purdue had 13-0 and 8-0 runs during the game. The rest of the game they were out scored 63-37 and lost a “first to 60” game. The biggest sin was handing FDU a lifeline to stay close by not scoring for SIX minutes at 7:10 of the 2nd half, because they were scared to shoot or play with any pace is abysmal
Some of Purdue’s not scoring was the result of FDU’s defense. What really surprised me was how fast their players were into double teams. They were ripping the ball away from Edey right as he was catching it more often than not. But even so, agreed, a 1 seed needs to be able to adjust to that and pull away from a 16, no excuses.
Go Hogs! Sweet 16! 
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2024
Maybe it shows how little I know, and how I decide with my heart… but I have UNC coming out top in both my brackets, after a valiant battle with Kentucky.
Also in my main bracket the UAB Blazers make it through to the Elite 8 (before BYU taken them out) purely because they are a dragon.