Nurse the Hate: Hate The Tournament Day 1

The NCAA Tournament is perhaps America's Greatest Gambling Event.  While the Super Bowl is the biggest spectacle, nothing can hold a candle to the rapid fire action of non-stop games going off on a weekday.  Lost a couple hundred at lunch when some kid you never heard of from Robert Morris hit an otherwise meaningless free throw?  No problem.  Double down at 3p on Oklahoma State because you heard a completely unsubstantiated rumor that they have "great senior guard play".  Even now I can recall with vivid clarity the joy of jumping around Cleopatra's Barge in Caeser's Palace when an end of the bench guy from KY heaved in a three point shot at the buzzer to cover a 17 point spread over some early round patsy.  It is, perhaps sadly, one of my greatest sports memories.

Allow me to caution you on my picks.  I know almost nothing about college basketball.  I am aware that Kentucky has the best college team in a couple of decades.  Teams that are always good like Duke, Wisconsin, Villanova, and Gonzaga are good again this year.  That's about it.  Everything else is some faintly registered piece of information I glanced at in a sports page while taking a crap.  Thanks to the Wonders of the Information Age though, I am able to do some deep dives from some sources that have earned a small amount of trust. I will digest this information, and then spout it back off to anyone that will listen and on the surface appear to be quite an expert in the coming weekend.  I have always been able to project a veneer of confidence, even when I don't know what the hell I am talking about.  This is one of those times.  Buyer beware.

One of my pet peeves is to see grown men sitting around bars with their folded bracket living and dying on a first round 8 vs 9 game.  Allow me to be perfectly frank.  Real men gamble on these individual games with real money.  Having just scratched in names on a $5 bracket is for women.  Children.  The elderly on fixed incomes.  When I see a guy by himself eating a sandwich at the bar transfixed at the end of a 67-64 contest where I know the line is 4, that's a man that deserves a nod of respect.  Not the group of four bad haircuts and cheap shoes sitting at the table excitedly saying "I got them on my bracket!  I got them on bracket!" when the final horn sounds.  It's time to set yourself apart from the herd.  Let's get to this thing, make some money, and assert ourselves as more evolved beings, shall we?

I am getting on Xavier.  Mississippi beat BYU in a remarkable comeback two days ago while the guys at Xavier were presumably smoking weed and playing Xbox.  Many fools will feel that Mississippi will come rolling in with “momentum”.  I think they will come rolling in with “tired legs”.  Plus, any time I can bet against anything from Mississippi I like to do so.  That’s a state that really focuses on obesity, illiteracy, and being hurricane victims, not basketball.  Xavier -3.

Ohio State is favored over the higher seeded VCU today primarily because The Public likes betting on Ohio State as they believe (correctly) that Ohio State is essentially a minor league factory for professional sports franchises that dabbles in education.  From what I gather, VCU wins games because they make the opponent’s guards turn the ball over.  Meanwhile Ohio State has that hot shit point guard D’Angelo Russell handling the ball.  Unless that kid flames out under the lights, they should be able to handle the defensive pressure.  I am well aware that Ohio State has a long history of crushing their supporter’s dreams in the NCAA Tournament.  I think they will crush those dreams on Saturday, not today.  I have bought in to Ohio State as a “sleeper”.  Well, for today anyway…  Ohio State -3.5

I am going to take Eastern Washington +9 over Georgetown.  I might as well be completely transparent and tell you I don’t even know where Eastern Washington University is located.  I have driven across Washington, and once you leave the greater Seattle coastal area it gets into this really ugly tundra populated by aggressive hillbillies driving trucks and listening to Kenny Chesney records.  It can’t be easy to recruit top athletes to come play at a school that isn’t even within 6 hours driving of a real airport.  I say this with the confidence of someone that hasn’t even googled where this school might be located despite the information being just two clicks away.  I prefer spouting off from a place of complete ignorance.  It might be located in some idyllic mountain paradise.  Who knows?  That being said, I did learn that Eastern Washington scores almost all of their points chukking up threes pretty successfully.  That can really equalize things when the other team is composed of 8 foot tall thugs, I mean “students”.    Combine that with Georgetown being a notoriously bad tournament team under John Thompson III, and I think this is a live dog.  This game goes off at 10pm.  I won’t watch a second of it.  Eastern Washington +9.