The madness technically began last night, but I still don’t care for the play-in game. For me, it still doesn’t really begin until late Thursday morning.

Normally, I’d have already started posting about the tournament before now. Last year I did a post for each region with my thoughts and picks. This year, as of this morning, I’ve barely looked at the bracket. In fact, I haven’t really looked at it since Sunday night. And at this point I’m just hoping to fill out my picks before Thursday around 11am. (I did go ahead and side with - against my better judgment - Coppin State in the game last night, which turned out to be the wrong pick, so I’m already 0-1.)

I’ve had a pretty busy last week or so. I actually saw only one game on Saturday (Arkansas-Tennessee, although I did see part of both Georgia games), and none on Sunday. That’s unprecedented. Things are starting to slow down today, so I hope to have my bracket filled out by tonight, or at least early tomorrow.

Donovan

In the meantime, I like Billy Donovan, but someone needs to settle him down a little. He’s going nuts. And speaking of Florida, I heard them referred to as “defending champions” on ESPN Monday night. But Florida didn’t make it into the tournament this year, so can you really call them “defending” champions now? At this point, they’re not defending anything.

We’re #98!

What the hell is this? The College Basketball Invitational? Do we really need another post-season tournament? I’m not even sure there should be an NIT. If you don’t make the field of 64+1, then you probably should just shut it down until next year. But this? If you’re not good enough to make the NIT, you might want to consider shutting your program down, not playing more games against other underachievers. Instead, we now have the college basketball equivalent to college football’s December bowl games - crappy teams playing meaningless games. Hooray!

Picks by tomorrow. Until then, the first of three . . .