Day 1, Part 1

Aaaaand, we're back!

The past couple of years the tourney has gotten off to a pretty boring start. Favorites took care of business, underdogs perhaps put up a fight into the 2nd half, but then couldn't maintain the fight. Any "upsets" were ones most everyone saw coming, and only the bracket pickers who tried to get cute felt the sting on Day 1. In the last 3 years I believe 5 people have successfully nailed all of the games on Day 1. Day 2 is when the upsets started wreaking havoc on the brackets.

This year is definitely a change-up.

The first set of games started with perhaps the worst display of offense at Notre Dame since the days of Ron Powlus. About 10 games ago, sitting firmly on the bubble and with their star player injured, Notre Dame decided to slow their games down to a crawl, only take shots with less than 5-7 seconds on the shot clock, and hope this frustrated the other team and kept the game close through the end. Unfortunately, it worked. It also created some of the most boring basketball I've ever seen (Ty Willingham would be proud). Fittingly, Notre Dame wasted the last 8 minutes of this game, during which time they hit a grand total of 1 bucket (Charlie Weis would be proud...what? Too soon?) I usually pull for Notre Dame, but I don't want to see that ever again.

Doing a complete 180, BYU's Jimmer Fredette was awesome. 37 points, and 2 big 3's in double overtime to finally help BYU pull away from a surprisingly tough Florida team.

Finally, there was the Providence game: Villanova (2) vs Bob Morris (props to ESPN for this one) (15). These games usually are, ahem, terrible. But Bobby came to play, and Villanova...didn't. Things didn't get off to a rocking start for 'Nova with coach Jay Wright benching 2 of his starters for the first 4 minutes for..well, no one knows why. I don't think he was expecting much of a fight (I can't blame him, Robert Morris? Please.) But Ol' Bobby jumped out to an early lead and had a 6-point edge at halftime. Nova's best player Scottie Reynolds wasn't hitting anything (he finished 2-15 from the field), but thanks to his driving and foul-drawing skills, Nova stayed within striking distance, but with 4:19 left they still trailed by 8. Finally Nova started taking advantage of the bucketfuls of turnovers (21 for the game) Bob Morris and clawed their way back in the game to force OT. At the beginning of OT, Bobby looked outclassed, but then Nova started getting careless with the ball. In the end, plucky Bob was down by 3 with 9 seconds left and the ball on their own baseline. They then proceeded to dribble out the clock in one of the worst plays out of a timeout I've seen in a couple years. The little guy who drained a 3 from the parking lot 20 seconds earlier? Never touched the ball, mostly because he didn't cut for it until 1.5 seconds or so were left. Nice job coach. Maybe you can call lanes for Dutch speedskaters next.

I've already started to hate the Ivan Brothers. Bad sign, as I'm going to see them 3427 more times between now and April 5th.