This March Madness, Enjoy a Little Shameless Promotion With Your Cereal

Here at The Morning Tailgate, we’re not above a little shameless promotion. But today for once we’re actually promoting something designed to potentially benefit our audience rather than the normal nonsense.

See, if you’re at all like us, no matter how well you are able to control your gambling habit 11 months out of the year, you inevitably revert to full-on degenerate when March rolls around. After all, the NCAA Tournament was pretty much created to be wagered on, right? Because how else in the world can schools like Binghamton ever get people to root for them?

So this year, rather than listening to the talking heads on ESPN complain about the ACC teams that got robbed in seeding or reading the picks of columnists who are more interested in the emotional story of the waterboy-turned-point guard than picking a real winner, we’ve struck up a little partnership with the people who run BracketBrains.com, a website entirely designed to provide analysis aimed at winning money on the tournament—be it in your standard bracket competitions, against-the-spread wagering, or those seven-team parlays we always talk ourselves into on the first two days of the tourney.

And it’s not just a bunch of guys giving it their best guess—we’re talking stuff like data-driven algorithms and predictive models that analyze every single Division I basketball game this season and all kinds of other crap that we don’t understand, proving once and for all that math isn’t totally worthless.

So if you’re viewing this little tournament not just as a source of entertainment but also a potential money-making venture, take a look at the packages available at BracketBrains.com and make a little investment in your own well being.

Not everyone in this economy should suffer.

March 16

1961 - Comic book writer/artist Todd McFarlane is born in Calgary, Alberta. Unconfirmed rumors speculate that McFarlane is currently working on a new series called “Auction Man” featuring a main character who was dumb enough to spend over $4 million buying historic homerun balls by steroid freaks Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds and is now desperately trying to find someone who is interested in them.

1989 - Oklahoma star and likely national player-of-the-year Blake Griffin is born. Twenty years later he arguably would be favored if he took on either of the teams in the play-in game by himself.

2009 - No less than 50 news articles and stories will be released supposedly tallying the amount of money the NCAA Tournament will cost America in lost work time. Employees will not look up from filling out their five brackets to notice. ###MORE###

That Coach K is hip.  He’d been telling them about it all season, and on Sunday he finally showed them the awesome handshake that he and the bus driver had been working on.

Jay Cutler-Josh McDaniels/Sean Archer-Castor Troy

After seeing all the headlines about Cutler and McDaniels facing off this weekend, we thought it was only appropriate. McDaniels deserves to feel the bowl cut anyway.

It’s officially March Madness Week, meaning we have every right to display Madness’ Our House.

Interesting group of fellows living in that house.

The man who made selling baseball cards at 3:00 in the morning, Don West, earns his rightful place in JoeSportsFan history.