March Madness

In honor of the best day of the year, the first day of the NCAA Tournament, I want to share a little story with all of you from the 2006 NCAA Tournament.  As most of you know, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about sports, especially college basketball.  I watch a good deal of games, take in the analysis, and follow the big teams throughout the season.  In the spring of 2006, I was in the second semester of my sophomore year, and was taking one of the most stimulating classes offered by the College of Business Administration at Pitt, Business Communications.  In "BusComm" as we lovingly call it, we learned how to write memos, use proper business etiquette, and prepare letters.  A great class...if you're 14 years old.

Anyway, one of the projects for BusComm was a "How To" project.  Simple rules:  give a presentation that explains how to do something, and bring a visual aid.  We could have chosen anything.  Because it was the beginning of March, and the NCAA Tourney was right around the corner, I decided to do a "How to Choose Your NCAA Bracket" presentation.  Pretty simple, I would make a PowerPoint presentation showing a bracket, and print enough blank brackets for the entire class.  I prepared the presentation in all of 10 minutes with a few simple rules for picking an NCAA bracket.  Since I'm anal and save every document I've ever developed from high school and college, I just opened up the presentation and would like to share some of the contents with you.

Here are the contents of Slide 5, which explained the "Do's" of the "Do's and Dont's:"

Do:

• Put at least one #1 seed in the Final Four.
• Pick at least one #12 seed to upset a #5 seed.
• Pick Florida to lose in the first round.
• Choose the hot teams.
• Pick at least one major upset.
• Pay attention to the tiebreaker.

Notice anything wrong with those recommendations?  Well, if you're any sort of college basketball fan, you would realize that my advice was to pick the NCAA CHAMPION - Florida Gators to lose in the first round.  Not only did Florida win the championship in 2006, they won it again in 2007 for good measure.  Luckily for me, the presentation was graded before the conclusion of the tournament (I got an A).  If  my professor would have waited until the end of the tournament to grade me, she should have given me a F for shitty advice.  The one positive out of all of this?  Everyone was so bored during the 2 weeks of presentations, I don't think anyone listened to my advice anyway.  That's usually a good thing.

That reminds me.  During these presentations, one of the kids in the class gave a "How to Tie Your Shoes" presentation.  He actually gave a 2 minute presentation on how he tied his shoes.  After he finished, the professor asked, "You weren't at all prepared, were you?"  He knew he was caught, and didn't even put up a fight.  I wonder what he got on that presentation.

But I digress.  Anyway, my Final Four this year is Louisville, Memphis, Pitt, and Oklahoma, with Louisville beating Oklahoma in the championship game.  Let's hope I'm wrong and Pitt wins it all.  Enjoy the best time of the year, March Madness!

- Kaps

Song of the Day:  Thursday - Resuscitation of a Dead Man