It’s mid-March, and if you aren’t already mad, then you should be soon, because March Madness is coming to Seattle. The NCAA basketball tournament is my favorite exploitation of unpaid student-athletes, and this year we’ll be covering a few of the games live (insofar as I'll be reporting from the stadium... you get what live means in this context, yes?).
This weekend, Key Arena will host second- and third-round postseason college basketball games involving such collegiate colleges as Gonzaga, Lousiville, Davidson, Iowa, and Northern Iowa. Gonzaga is the closest thing Seattle has to a home team in the tournament, with the Huskies collapsing after a hot start and Seattle U losing in the WAC Conference Finals.
Also, you’re probably going to be asked to fill out a bracket at some point this week. If this happens to you, and you have no idea what to do, and you’ve for some reason come to Slog for bracket advice, allow me to advise you. This year’s bracket is a binary exercise: Either pick Kentucky to win or don’t pick Kentucky. Once you’ve decided that, everything else falls into place.
Kentucky is undefeated and really, really good. They’re also kind of vile. Their coach, John Calipari, was also highlighted on last night’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for his seven-year, $52 million contract. But then again, as you’ll see in the clip below, everyone’s kind of vile. There’s no new news in Oliver’s report on the NCAA, but there’s lots of old horrible news, all laid out in a row over 20 minutes. Watch for yourself, as apparently HBO can somehow profit from allowing us to embed the whole video right here:
Other highlights include Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney being as wretched as you'd expect a football coach from South Carolina named Dabo Swinney to be, and former University of Washington president Mark Emmert making an ass out of himself for not the first time in his tenure as NCAA president.
In other sports news from this weekend, the Sounders' newly appointed central defender Brad Evans looked like a newly appointed central defender, as he got schooled on a number of occasions in Seattle’s 3-2 loss to the San Jose Earthquakes. This despite the Earthquakes playing with 10 men after San Jose defender Victor Bernardez's early-second-half red card. San Jose striker Chris Wondolowski was particularly successful against Evans, turning him inside out for an easy chance that he put away with aplomb, as Chris Wondolowski always does. I can’t think of one time when Wondolowski has missed a crucial goal-scoring opportunity… oh wait…
Goddamn it.
