Let The Madness Begin! Your Top Four No. 1 Seeds

With March Madness less than three weeks, what better time to speculate on who we feel will be the top four seeds in this year's 64-team tournament.

(We're not counting the play-in game, it's meaningless to us.)

Most bracketologists believe this year in college hoops there is not one dominate team that will parade through the field on it's way to the Final Four at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan.  

(Commence Lions jokes now.)

We respectively disagree with said bracketologists, and we have our reasons.

This season, we've seen a team ranked No. 1 fall multiple times, with the Pittsburgh Panthers becoming the latest victim after losing to Providence Friars last week.

For the first time in 33 years, the Friars, who showed as much heart as Maggie Dixon did in the final days of her wonderful life (May she rest in peace) defeated a top-ranked team.

This on the heels of the Panthers convincing win over the previously top-ranked Connecticut Huskies, which head coach Jamie Dixon said was a result of his team imposing their will on its biggest conference rival.  

Jim Calhoun can't complain he's underpaid any longer, as his team never played so poorly in all his tenure. UConn fans deserve a full ticket refund after such a complete letdown.

All this proves is the Big East is what we all thought it was: The best conference in college basketball.

One of the first No.1 ranked teams to lose this season was the North Carolina Tar Heels, who lost to an unranked Boston College Eagles team.

The then 18th ranked Eagles lost in heartbreaking fashion to a team of future lawyers, doctors, and pharmacists—Harvard.

Never before in their 100 or so years of higher education had Harvard ever beaten a nationally ranked team!

Head coach Roy Williams never swore so much before in his life.

And just last week, in the Red-River rivalry, the Texas Longhorns defeated a Blake Griffin-less Oklahoma Sooners.

Although the Sooners remained competitive for much of the game, a first-quarter concussion knocked out the best player in college basketball for the next two games.  

So where does this leave us, and what does this have to do with who will be the top four seeds in the 2009 edition of March Madness?

Well—nothing we suppose, but it makes for a good article.

On any given night, a team can play down to its level of competition and lose. Regardless of how talented the team, players get hurt and refs miss calls.

The underdog overachieves, and the overconfident underachieve.    

It's no different in college basketball, and that's why they call it madness. It just so happens to last the entire month of March.  

So our four top seeds include the following:

South: Oklahoma

Midwest: Pittsburgh

East: Connecticut

West: North Carolina

Our money is on the Big East.

Our sleepers: Clemson, BYU, Michigan, Washington, Wake Forest.

Let's see if any of them are still alive for the Sweet Sixteen.

Remember 64 will enter, and 63 will fall.