NCAA basketball tournament

To All Those Bracket Busters

/ Ragamuffingospelfan / Leave a comment

I love this time of year when the season known as March Madness descends on all those who love college basketball (or just good competitive sports in general).

It’s the time when people fill out brackets of who they think will win each and every one of the 67 games all the way up to the national championship game. Mostly, it’s just for fun and mostly it’s akin to throwing darts at a dartboard while blindfolded.

This time around, I filled in 11 brackets, hoping that maybe one might actually win me something– if nothing more than a good sense of pride in finally having a decently picked bracket.

This is also the time of year when at least one team will come out of nowhere to pull off the monumental upset that will wreck just about everybody’s brackets.

Last year, it was Middle Tennessee shocking Michigan State and rendering a lot of brackets as birdcage liner or recycle bin filler.

Four years ago, Florida Gulf Coast knocked off Georgetown and managed to break into the Sweet Sixteen before being unceremoniously ousted by Florida.

A lot of us know what it’s like to be the underdog. Many feel like outsiders and outcasts in a world where image and style are everything.

Yet in God’s economy, those are the ones He picks to advance His kingdom on this planet. Those very underdogs are the ones He calls more than conquerors through Christ.

So far, every one of those NCAA Cinderella teams eventually get kicked out of the ball and end up going home short of being champions. Just about every time, it’s one of the power programs who ends up winning it all.

With God, it’s a different story. It’s the last who are first and those outcasts who end up with the victory. It’s the nobodies who are the ones God calls His beloved.

So far, my brackets are still in the running, for the most part. I still have an outside shot of ending up with a respectable outcome. If I win any money or fame, I promise to remain the same humble blog post writer as always.

 

My Bracket’s Got a Hole In It

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Busted-Bracket

I recently checked my NCAA basketball tournament brackets– you know, the ones that were supposed to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams and completely irresistible to women?Yeah, that one– and was more than pleasantly surprised at one of them.

As it turns out, my Fox Sports bracket was doing better than 99.6% of all the brackets out there. If I believed in jinxes, which I do not, I would have thought that I jinxed myself. That was as good as it got for my bracket.

After that, my brackets went in a direction decidedly warm and southward in a handbasket. Three of my Final Four teams lost, including the team I had pegged to win it all. The team a LOT of people had marked to win it all– Michigan State. They lost. So did my runner-up, Michigan.

So, I won’t be rollin’ in a Rolls Royce or Maserati anytime soon. But I had fun filling out my brackets. And at least I got this far before my brackets busted. Unlike most of my efforts in the past.

For those of you who don’t follow sports, it means that the world didn’t end. I didn’t have any money to bet on these games, so I didn’t lose any. Not that I would EVER have bet money on sports, says the good Baptist boy.

Nothing will happen to me other than maybe me being knocked down a rung or two on the ol’ ladder of my sports pride.

I’ll be back next year, filling out as many brackets as humanly possible and basing all my picks on gut instinct and my sportly intuition. Which loosely translated looks a lot like eeny-meeny-miney-moe. . . .

I have no illusions about having a perfect bracket. I just hope my championship pick doesn’t lose in the first round.

 

March Madness Yet Again??

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valpo

I have to confess that I’m not quite the sports fan that I used to be. Maybe it’s the absurd salaries and extreme lack of loyalty to anything other than the almighty dollar. Who knows?

I do know that when March rolls around, the sports fan in me awakens from hibernation and comes alive. Why? March Madness, i. e. The NCAA Basketball Tournament.

I’ll fill out my brackets and wait. Usually by the second round, my brackets have crashed and burned. Then I start rooting for the underdogs.

It seems like every year there’s a team that makes it further in the field than they should. A team that overachieves and who gets billed as the next Cinderella, the next David to knock off a Goliath.

I love those stories because I remember that I, too, was once an underdog with no hopes and no chance at all of winning. That’s my take on Ephesians 2.

But God who is rich in mercy (how I love that phrase) found me and rescued me and put me on His winning team.

Maybe one day one of those long-shot mid-major teams will finally win it all. I hope so. But I’m thankful to be reminded on a daily basis that in Christ, I’ve already won. I’m more than a conqueror.

So bring on those brackets this year. I’m ready.