March Madness Down To 4

Three weeks ago I wrote in the four top seeds - Kansas, Ohio State, Duke, and Pittsburgh - to advance to Houston for the Final Four. The way I looked at it Kansas and Ohio State were the two most talented teams in the country, Duke had the experience after winning last year's national championship, and Pittsburgh was due to finally advance to the last weekend of the college basketball season after several years of early exits.

Of course all four teams failed to win their Regional. Pittsburgh bowed out first, falling to Butler in the Second Round. Duke and Ohio State made it to the Sweet 16 and Kansas reached to the Elite 8 but none of the top seeds reached Houston.

In their place will be Connecticut, Kentucky, Butler, and Virginia Commonwealth. It really is March Madness.

UConn is the highest remaining seed (#3 in the West Regional). Kentucky is being led by a group of freshman that will probably be playing in their final college games. Butler is back at the Final Four a year after nearly knocking off Duke for the title. VCU - one of the teams that was involved in the inaugural "First Four" and had to beat Southern California in a play-in game just to make it into the Field of 64 - is this year's Cinderella team.

I am going to go with Jim Calhoun and Kemba Walker in the UConn-Kentucky game and with Matt Howard and Butler over VCU in the National Semifinals and then Brad Stevens will put his team into the history books with hard fought victory over UConn in Monday's championship game.