Well, the NCAA tournament is upon us. It starts with the play-in games tonight, and then the Big Dance kicks off on Thursday. Given the expected dominance by the Big 10's Wisconsin, Michigan State and Ohio State, not to mention an early exit by that school Dan seems to like, I figured we could use this to capture all the idle chitchat and ramblings over the next couple weeks.

I'll start things off with a question - why aren't all of these play-in games used to determine the #16 seeds? The Iona-BYU game is for a #14 seed and tomorrow night's South Florida - Cal game is for a #12 seed. That's crazy talk!

I mean, the whole idea of the play-in games was to expand the tournament by 4 more teams. So if you're going to have 8 teams play what amounts to a qualifying game in order to advance, shouldn't it be the 8 worse teams? Furthermore, shouldn't the 4 winners, i.e. the best of the worst, go on to play the #1 seeds?

I'm sure the powers-that-be in the NCAA and over at CBS have a perfectly logical (to them) explanation for all this. Somehow I get the sense that the winner of some meaningless exhibition game and lack of hotel rooms has something to do it...

What the hell are you looking at?