March Madness Starts Now!

March is my favorite month of the year, and it really doesn't have anything to do with my birthday. I love it because as spring starts (we hope this year) to come in to sight, the NCAA Basketball tournament kicks off. For a majority of people they assume this starts with the opening round, this year that is March 21, if you don't count the first four games. However, if you want the feeling to last longer than just a couple weeks, I would encourage you to really get into the conference tournaments, especially the smaller ones.

If you want to subscribe to that thought, you don't have to wait 21 days, you just have to wait three days. On March 4 the Atlantic Sun tournament kick off with the quarterfinals. For the most part these games won't matter come March 21st but the could on selection Sunday. The leaders of the A-Sun is Liberty and Lipscomb, with the latter being a bubble team at the moment. Most likely they will need to reach the finals and hope they run into Liberty in the final, the two have secured the top two seeds. Tonight (March 1) Stetson and Kennesaw State play in the final regular season game and the final spot in the A-Sun tournament, so it is basically the first elimination game of tournament season.

Most of the conference tournaments start later next week as only seven of the 32 start before next Friday. The first automatic bids will be secured eight days from now when the Ohio Valley Championship is played. Currently Belmont is a bubble team and is tied with Murray State for first. Murray State has one of the best players in the country on it, giving you added reason to check out the tournament.

The A-Sun, Big South and Missouri Valley all come to a close on the 10th. All three are most likely one-bid leagues and in the case of the Missouri Valley and Big South there aren't teams that have clearly established them ahead of everyone else in the league.

The Missouri Valley used to be a fringe but power conference but since the departure of teams Creighton and Wichita State combined with power shifts to big major conferences have really hurt this conference. Northern Iowa, Valpo and Loyola-Chicago are all having strange years too which doesn't help.

In the Big South, there is player for Campbell named Chris Clemons who is 6th all-time in scoring with over 3,100 points. He is player to watch before he graduates at the end of the year. Currently Campbell is 2nd in the league, trailing Radford by one game. They play each other this weekend, Campbell won the first game at Radford. Earlier this year Radford beat Texas so they too are a team that could pull a first round upset.

The rest of the conference tournaments will come to close between the 11th and 17th, including 19 of the 32 being decided on the 16th or 17th. Most other Championship games fall on the 11th and 12th before the big conferences get into the action in the middle of next week.

Not only is this an exciting time when teams play their way in or out (as a Minnesota fan, I assume they'll do the latter) of the NCAA Tournament but it is a time for great drama. As an added bonus there are ton of games that start in the middle of the day so you can practice ignoring work and watching basketball before that is all you do on the 20th and 21st.

Don't wait for March 20th to start watching and really getting into the season. It all starts now, enjoy it and prolong it!