Last year President Barack Obama filled out his NCAA tournament bracket and predicted (as many did) that North Carolina would take the whole thing. He was right. And he was very popular at the time, too, I might add. This year the president’s approval numbers have tanked—he’s somewhere around 46 percent at the moment. And this year he picked Kansas to win the NCAA tournament—the Jayhawks entered the tourney as the overall number one seed. And earlier today in the second round they were eliminated by number nine seed Northern Iowa, 69-67. What else will he get wrong in 2010?
To be honest, the president had a couple of good upset picks—the kinds that you would make if you read a decent amount about college hoops. (Conservatives are justified in ridiculing the commander in chief for the amount of time he must spend reading up on the game as opposed to figuring out how to create jobs. They are also right to think that if this were the previous president, he would be mocked for this instead of perceived as cool. For instance, Bush spent way too much time working out at the gym—shouldn’t he have been more focused on Iraq? In contrast, President Obama spends at least an hour each day working out and thank God for that—he’s sending a positive message to our youth and grappling the issue of childhood obesity, which his predecessor didn’t care about. He was too busy wasting his time in the gym to care about anything! But I digress.)
Nevertheless, Obama picked 13th-seeded Murray State to win a round against number 4 seed Vanderbilt, which they did. He also correctly chose Cornell over Temple in the 12-5 upset (there’s one almost every year). But he got greedy in choosing Siena over Purdue.
So now, only two of the president’s final four teams remain: Kentucky and Kansas State. Obama’s other regional champion, number two Villanova, was thrown out this afternoon by a bunch of Marys—the St. Mary’s Gaels to be specific.
