No Cinderella's

I find it interesting that I hear a lot of complaining in the blog network about no Cinderella's, as if this is a bad thing for the NCAA tourney. Just because there is less material to write on, does not mean a lack of Cinderella's are a bad thing. In fact, I find stories often to get in the way of enjoying sports (see what Olympic coverage has become with half the air time spent on the stories of the competitors and half spent actually watching the games).

There are two positives to this phenomenon of not having any Cinderellas though, that are being overlooked.

1. The quality of the games in the later rounds are better. Eventually the lower seeds are going to lose, and when they do, they will probably get crushed by a much better team. (This point has been brought up a little bit, but is not being given enough weight). I'm more of a casual tourney fan, though, so this point is secondary to....

2. This is most important point as to why not having any Cinderellas is a good thing, everyone's brackets are still alive. Cinderellas kill everyone's bracket. When a 1 or 2 seed gets knocked out, all of a sudden, its hard to care anymore about the tourney, if you just lost your eventual champion. I know the hard-core fan will still watch, but what about the fan who only pays attention in March, and only as long as they have a chance of winning the cash. I know I paid a lot more attention to the second round than I have in the past, because I had my entire sweet 16 still alive after round 1, and with 7 of 8 elite 8 teams and my entire final four still alive, I will be glued next weekend to the T.V. as well. (Go UCLA!!) I'm not the only one though. I'm in 4 different groups this year, and at least half (if not more) of the members in these groups all have their final 4 still alive. That's a lot of fans that will be keeping an eye on the games this coming weekend to keep up with how their bracket is doing.