woefully underprepared

I realized today that this is very often my issue, and was with the proposed tournament of cities as well as the bachelor party that preceded it and the home flooding that followed.

I had no pump, no generator, no nothing. I get a foot of water in my basement after this tree snaps an overhead electrical wire and lands on my yard looking like this

and my basement like this


What can you do? People make plans and God laughs. More on this to come. City Sixty-Four needs to be put on hold for one year...

Automatic berths begin rolling in, selection committee hard at work

So I’m stuck on a plane in Harrisburg (which has no shot of making the tournament by the way) and wanted to get this out before I take off again. Flight diverted from Indy, which made a great case this weekend for a high seed.

A couple of automatic berths surprised me this weekend. Santa Barbara, incredible beach town, makes the grade and lives to fight another day. Other similarly sized automatics include Roanoke, VA and Charleston, SC.

This is going to be fun. The full field is listed out below, bracketology to follow…

New York	Phoenix	Orlando
Miami	Washington, DC	Tampa
Los Angeles	Boston	New Orleans
Chicago	Seattle	Detroit
Cleveland	Dallas	Buffalo
Portalnd	Houston	San Diego
Philadelphia	San Antonio	San Francisco
Charlotte	Oklahoma City	Minneapolis
Atlanta	Milwaukee	Indianapolis
Cincinatti	Providence	Jacksonville
St. Louis	El Paso	Hartford
Kansas City	Baltimore	Pittsburgh
Nasvhille	San Jose	Omaha
Memphis	Columbus	Newark
Denver	Albuquerque	Las Vegas
Oakland	Tucson	Reno
Sacramento	Anchorage	Billings
Austin	Lexington	Salt Lake City
Tulsa	Birmingham	Sioux City
Honolulu	Boise	Bismarck
Raleigh	Rochester	Louisville
Colorado Springs	Irvine	Fresno/Sacramento
Wichita	Spokane	Long Beach
Madison	Des Moines	Virginia Beach

So there you have it. The 70 plus cities that have a chance to make it into the final grid. Any automatic berths I’m missing? Send ‘em in.

This includes a play in game between Fresno and Sactown, too good to pass up. There are probably other cities that deserve that type of offer, but my heart leans to @Tlack415 Homerville.

Basic rule. Any city that you don’t inherently know what state it’s in is pretty much automatically ruled out (sayonara LBC, California, by the way). Other unwritten ruled include uniqueness, lack of suburbia. Baton Rouge may get an automatic berth for that reason, even though they didn’t rank high enough for inclusion in the at large field.

Home of college hoops

So the day of flight begins. Difficult at first, then beaming into a bloody mary, the stewardess having to hold back a grim excitement. Perhaps she now realized it was almost noon on Friday. No, we still have Chicago to get to, flip an hour back, then down to Indy. A short 55 minute flight. Who knows what to expect.

I do know that I have six more drink tickets, scratch that seven. Each drink is only one here at @southwest! Yeah!!! I don’t fly Southwest that often any more, living, as I do, in the Northeast. But enough about that, that’s @bitterbill territory.

I’m here to focus on the brackets. March Madness is in full swing if you look at the calendar and caliber of play. Big East Tourney and Big 12 surely to make headlines. Going to Indy, home of the NCAA and the Big Ten tourney. Hoping to catch a game.

Basketball’s birthplace, or close enough. Rabid fans in the year I know more about hoops than in any time during my sportswatching life. I’m on a fantasy team.

But this is just one factor of many. Only fitting that this journey begins as I visit a new city for the first time. Stopover in Chicago, one of my all time favorites and a most likely 1 seed, to Indianapolis. A solid mid major, but where will she go? Shall I wait till after this weekend? I believe I shall.

So here is how it is going to work. I’ve got probably 70-80 cities on a list. This week we have to figure out who is on the bubble and get rid of them.
Rochester, Irvine. Do we even bother? No suburbs, Evansville, Tucson. Right?

Anyway, with no further ado. The field as I see it.

Not going to influence seeding yet, but do with this what you will.

New York
Los Angeles
Miami
Chicago.

See a top seed I’ve missed? Talk about in the comments.