The Burrow

We sent our children to Final Four schools.  We were sure of it. But, instead of Bobby Knight and John Thompson Jr, we had Mike Davis and Kelvin Sampson and Craig Esherick and JT III.  Not exactly the upper echelons of the college coaching fraternity, by anyone's estimation, be they Republican or Democrat, Big 10 or Big East or ACC booster.  Instead of family vacations in Indianapolis or New Orleans or Atlanta, we were sitting on our individual couches in our individual living rooms, texting rather than hugging. The Cuters graduated, the teams got no better, the Parental Units moved to Tucson, and UofA's 5 time Final Four coach Lute Olsen had a stroke and retired.  We were cursed. The Bride graduated from Kansas, which managed to survive the departure of Roy Williams, thus providing us with a rooting interest.  IntrepidCat graduated from UNC, and they are always good for a cheer or two.  Her sister, Niece-the-Youngest, is a South Carolina grad, which,...

I apologize denizens. I have been remiss.  For those of you who rely on The Burrow for water cooler chatter on sports, I have let you down.  We traveled and I was ill and Arizona lost and it just never seemed to happen, did it?  I apologize, again and again. But, reading this (as the 20 or so of you who do so) on the day it's posted, you have time to make your feelings known.  You can participate, with little or no memorization required. Start out with "My bracket was busted two rounds ago."   Everyone else will nod in understanding. After the round of 64* there was only one perfect bracket out of the 11.6 million or so entered on espn.com.  You don't have to reveal that you picked Iowa State to go to the Final Four (as did someone I love)... you don't have to reveal anything at all.  Just look stricken and shake your head. I've been doing it for two weeks now. ***** *64 was the number of teams in the tournament when I began paying attention, i...

Hour after hour of young men in shorts tossing an orange ball through a hoop may not be everyone's idea of heaven, but, for our family, there's no better time of the year.  The boys were on the phone all afternoon, my inbox is full of Reply All  messages cheering and jeering, and I left the CTGMF Spring Training Dodgers v Cubs game at Kino Stadium today at the seventh inning stretch to be home in time for Arizona's first game. I did stay to sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. ***** There are lots of empty green seats in the arena; apparently, the Gonzaga fans didn't stick around for the second game.  It's basketball's version of all-dressed-up-and-nobody-watching. I have to think that those tickets could have been put to good use, somehow.  There has to be a Boys and Girls Club that would have been delighted to use them for this game. ***** There are four regions in the tournament..  It's odd to think of Harvard playing in the West, but it's just wro...

Denizens of The Burrow pool results:  After the first two rounds Jenny Hileman is in the lead.... by A LOT! I can barely formulate a sentence that doesn't reference basketball. Grocery shopping and dinner preparation and blog posting have all taken second place to March Madness.  My heart has soared and sunk and I'm ready for a break from whistles and free throws and large young men adjusting their too-log shorts on national television.   It's the first Monday after the first weekend of competition and it's time to take stock of the situation. Some of us are happier than others.   Did anyone else notice that the printed brackets from ESPN's Tournament Challenge have a very tiny font size?  Would it have been so difficult to use 12 instead of 8 and turn the whole thing to a landscape orientation?  Even McDonald's recognizes that an older demographic is tuned in; have you seen this commercial? I'm just sayin' ...... The weekend start...

If you know what to do, click here for the link to our group's brackets. .  The password is theburrow. I'm using ESPN's format because that's the one Big Cuter uses for our family pool and I understand it. Feel free to make a suggestion for next year if you like another one more. If you're a newbie to the whole situation, the rest of this post is for you; if you have no interest in the topic, we'll see you tomorrow for a picture post. So, you want to participate in the pool but you don't know where to begin.  The Burrow is here to help you.  I'll try to keep it Goldilocks information (not too much, not too little, just the right amount).  If you like visual references, click here. 64 men's basketball teams teams are divided into four regions for a single elimination ("win or go home") tournament. The process, which now seems to have grown to include the conference championship tournaments (The Big 10, the Pac-12), is called March Mad...

Our family has been running a March Madness pool since the kids were old enough to hold a pencil and make their choices.  It's a tradition as old as Little Cuter reading the Night Before Christmas on the night before Christmas.  It brings us together in day to day contact, as our teams rise or fall. When they were younger, there was much discussion surrounding the prize to be awarded to the winner, the runner up, the one whose Cinderella team went the furthest.  Cash, Toy R Us prizes, special dispensation from despised tasks (" I don't have to take the dog out in the dark," ) were considered, agreed upon, and quickly forgotten.  It was more about the games than the rewards. We were living 3 blocks from the DePaul University gym back when Mark Aguirre and Skip "Money" Dillard and Terry Cummings and Rod Strickland were following Coach Ray Meyers' lead to the big dance year after year.... and losing in the first rounds.... year after frustrating year.  ...