The Best Time of the Year

The best time of the year is upon us.

Selection Sunday is one of my big 5. It means the start of the NCAA Tournament - SICK - which, of course, ends just as our beloved baseball season begins. The weather is starting to get warmer, the days are getting longer and everyone commits to getting in healthier shape for the upcoming summer.

Selection Sunday is a great time of the year.

To celebrate the nice weather and happy basketball spirit I ordered a large pan pizza and buffalo wings from Pizza Hut. It wasn't very well thought out, more of an impulse purchase on the suggestion of one of my roommates. Nine hours later and I think I have an early candidate for biggest regret of 2007.

A nice lazy Sunday spent between trips to the bathroom and multiple viewings of the Bourne Supremacy took me up to the selection show, one of the best hours in sports.

So many questions to answer: What seed will my alma mater, the Quakers of UPenn get? Who will they play? Who's in? Who's out? Why do I have sharp pains in my side?

The answers to those and many more questions give me the only reason all year to tune into CBS. Especially now that Murder She Wrote is off the air.

I'm all geared up for a big week of over-analyzing and annoying phone calls from girls who need help with their brackets, the same girls that will inevitably win the pools that mean so much to us dudes. This of course excludes Coop. If she wins, she deserves it. God bless you.

I'll go into a little more detail this week about the tourney, chaos with our boy Duaner and anything else that might go down on USA or TBS.

As for the tourney, my money is on Florida to repeat. They're basically an NBA team. A bunch of guys going to the NBA who for some reason came back to college. And so just like with the NBA, Florida didn't really try all year, lost some games they shouldn't and didn't dominate everyone like we all expected.

But now it's March, Joaquin Noah will put away the bubbler for a couple of weeks, Billy Donovan will get the boys in shape and Florida will run away with this thing.

Otherwise, I really like Texas A&M to make a run. Acie Law is the truth, one of those players that everyone will fall in love with come March. They have a solid shooter in Josh Carter and big Anty Kavaliauskas is my guy. Dude just has a really sweet name, and he is kind of a young Vlade. I don't know, they'll probably be at the end of my bracket which means they will probably lose to the Quake in the first round.

As for first round upsets, I like Stanford to beat Louisville, who like most of the rest of the Big East, I think is just kinda bad. Though I am and have been all about the Hoyas for a little while. They can win games defensively.

Having watched every chance I could, I can easily say that Kevin Durant is the best college basketball player I have ever seen. He scores every way possible with amazing ease. He consistently puts up 25 and 10. I really can't think of a player in our lifetime who has done to college basketball what he is doing. And he is a really young freshman.

But I don't like Texas in the tourney. They are easily the sexy pick this year. They are fun to root for and have been there before. But to me, they showed against Kansas on Sunday that they are just too young and inexperienced.

And as much as I love Durant, I don't think he can carry a team like Melo did a couple years back. As great as his numbers are I just see him like I see Kevin Garnett. The best guy on the court but not someone that can truly take over a game even when they are putting up filthy numbers.

This will be controversial I know, but I'm the one who is writing here and this is just one of my opinions. And I am very often wrong.

That's all for now. Enjoy this week, it really is one of the best times of the year.

VCD,
Sip

(Pics courtesy of kenston.us)