Problems with the wireless in the Detroit airport caused this post to go up way past any appropriate time, but it should be fun to look back on it and see how things went. Jon has poured his heart and soul into this over the weekend, and he has done a tremendous job. There’s no way we could have kept pace without him. So here are the last of his NCAA hoops words for the weekend as we march toward the Sweet 16:

Take in the atmosphere, sports fans.  It is Sunday at the NCAA Tournament, the final day of four consecutive days of wall-to-wall basketball.  At 11:10 Thursday morning, Greg Gumbel appeared on CBS for the first time of roughly 4,729 this weekend.  He stumbled over his first sentence.  Soon after, Clark Kellogg topped him by picking Stanford against Louisville, despite the fact that, upon further examination, Stanford was playing only four players, two of them less than four feet tall.

Things did improve from there, but we’ve reached the end of the line, and now everyone needs to be off the court by the time “60 Minutes” starts.  By 7:00 tonight, barring an NCAA-record fifteen overtimes between USC and Texas, we’ll have the field of 16 set for the remainder of the tournament.  And the way things are going, we’ll be lucky if any of them are underdogs; currently, we’re looking at Vanderbilt as next week’s Cinderella story, and the Commodores were 21-11 this year and finished third in the SEC.  It’s not exactly Milan High, is it?

Today is somewhat of a compressed slate, with seven games starting between 1:00 and 4:15, and only one early game.  The matchups for Sunday:
11:10 - South: #4 Virginia vs. #5 Tennessee
1:15 - Midwest: #1 Florida vs. #9 Purdue
1:30 - Midwest: #2 Wisconsin vs. #7 UNLV
1:40 - West: #4 Southern Illinois vs. #5 Virginia Tech
1:50 - Midwest: #3 Oregon vs. #11 Winthrop
3:45 - South: #2 Memphis vs. #7 Nevada
4:00 - West: #1 Kansas vs. #8 Kentucky
4:15 - East: #4 Texas vs. #5 USC

Eight more games.   We’ve seen forty games in three days, and somehow, the eight we have left seem like too small a number.  Soak it in.  It’s the last day of four of the best in sports.  My advice: enjoy it while you still can.

The picks:
ESPN National Bracket (32/40): Tennessee, Florida, Wisconsin, So. Ill., Oregon, Memphis, Kansas, Texas
The Oddsmakers (33/40): UT by 2.5, UF by 11.5, Bucky by 5.5, So. Ill. by 1, Oregon by 3.5, Memphis by 5, KU by 8, Texas by 2.5
Jon (32/40): UT, UF, Bucky, VT, Oregon, Memphis, KU, Texas
RandBall (30/40): (Abstaining).

It’s been a fun couple of days for me, subbing here on RandBall.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  The band’s playing me off, and I’m heading back to the wilderness.

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