Preview of first game

 Good morning everyone.  I hope everyone got a good night’s sleep because it promises to be another long day of basketball.  I have changed venues, and will be operating out of my own home from now on.  I have a few less screens to work with, but there are a few fewer games, so I think I’ll be OK.

There’s only 32 teams left, so even though some of the teams we lost were pretty good, I think that the games are predicted to be closer.  The biggest point spread of any game in this round is only 11.5 points, so there shouldn’t be too many boring games.  It also means that a lot of these games will be more or less toss ups.  That makes things pretty interesting.  I’ve always thought that the first round is for fun, but getting these games right is much more important.

So, we start off with one game:

Vegas Line: Baylor -5.5

Picks for Baylor: 175

Picks for North Carolina: 32

Picks for Other: 5

Baylor promises to be the other big beneficiary of the absence of Kentucky (along with Purdue).  They can’t look ahead though, because North Carolina dominated Marquette in the first round, and could easily pull off an upset here.

For fun, here are the picks for who will come out of the East region:

Kentucky	81
Baylor	41
UCLA	39
Purdue	31
North Carolina	6
Virginia Tech	4
St. Mary's	3
Texas	3
Murray State	2
Indiana	2

So, you can see how big a loss Kentucky was for a lot of people.  I’m a little surprised 6 people have North Carolina coming out of this region.  This promises to be a pretty big game for them as well.

Good luck to everyone.  I’ll be back between games with updates and a preview of the next game.