2010 March Madness Bracket (printable)

Here’s your Water Cooler 101 textbook for Monday morning in the form of the NCAA Basketball Tournament 2010 March Madness Bracket! The tournament doesn’t get rolling until the ridiculous “play-in” game March 16 and then the rest of the tournament kicks in on Thursday, March 18 – so that gives all of you at least three days to collect those filled-out brackets and dollar bills for your office pool! (Click the above photo for a larger, printable version!)

The Super Bowl has better commercials and the World Series has more history, but there’s nothing really to compare to the immaculate beauty of the NCAA basketball tournament! 64 teams (I refuse to acknowledge the “plus one”) and over 600 college athletes from around the country and around the globe come together and whichever team can win six games in a row walks home the champion! That’s it! It doesn’t matter if you’re Duke or Lehigh and it doesn’t matter what happened during the regular season – all you have to do is win those six games. It’s a beautiful thing!

Judging from the experts’ predictions, the big surprise is that Virginia Tech of the powerful Atlantic Coast Conference was left out. It was also a surprise to most that the University of Florida made it in. Ahhh, but arguing over the 48th-ranked team in the country is much better than the absurd BCS situation in college football where opinion decides who gets to play for the national championship. Pffffft! MARCH MADNESS, BABY!!!

In case you wanted a bracket with the complete school names instead of abbreviations, here ya go:

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