Genius

OMG! In fact, strike that. Make it a "ZOMG!" Because if anything is worthy of the extra "z" on there, it was the first day of the 2010 NCAA Tournament. What an incredible day full of stories, shockers, and more than anything else, a whole mess of awesome games.

Seriously, think about this for a minute. In 16 games on Day 1 of the Tournament, we had one double-overtime game, two single-overtime games, three games decided by just 1 point, two games decided by 2 points, and three games decided by 3 points. Does it get any better than that?

Actually, it does. Some of the stories from Thursday's NCAA action are just sick. So many schools busted out with historical wins on Thursday, it's not even funny. I heard these on the radio this morning and I just don't have time to go looking it up right now, but I'm going to go ahead and butcher the stats anyways by trying to rememberguess the time periods. On Thursday, just going in the order the games occurred, BYU beat recent champion Florida in two overtimes to nab its first NCAA Tournament win in something like 26 years. Old Dominion beat Notre Dame to win its first Tournament game in 15 years. Murray State beat Vanderbilt on a last-second jumper for its first NCAA win in thirty-some years. The Baylor Bears pulled away from Sam Houston State as a #3 seed for their first NCAA Tournament win in sixty years! St. Mary's College beat Richmond for their first win in 20 years. Northern Iowa, their first NCAA win in almost 40 years. And of course, Ohio beat my beloved Georgetown to score their first win in the Tournament since the late 1970s if I recall correctly.

I most definitely do not ever remember a first day of the NCAA Tournament with this many fun upsets and this many great, historical stories. Last year as I recall was among the most boring tournaments in memory, so this year seems all the more special. We had enough down-to-the-wire, last-second and sudden death games with huge shots and small schools going crazy and storming the court just on Thursday to basically last us all the way through this tournament. And we're only a quarter of the way through the first weekend. Just incredible.

Oh, and that thing I said yesterday about the Big East? I'm a genius, what can I say. My feeling is that some of these Big East teams are just not taking these first round games seriously, and it shows in how they are playing. Villanova, the conference's only win on Day 1, had to hold on for overtime just to beat lowly Robert Morris on Thursday (seriously?), while a team like Georgetown came out just like they have against so many other bad teams this year and fell too far behind to be able to come back from. Notre Dame and Marquette were very predictable losers I think, but nobody in America who didn't graduate from Ohio could possibly pick Ohio to beat the Hoyas, an Ohio team who many people still don't know had to win the MAC tournament to even find their way into the Big Dance after a 7-9 in-conference record on the season. We'll see how the top Big East teams come out today in West Virginia and Syracuse, but I expect them to learn a lesson from the pussy play we saw from their colleague teams on Thursday to help stem the bleeding out of the best conference in the country heading into the weekend.