Of the seven deadly sins, I’ve always favored gluttony.

That’s why I awaited the opening weekend of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament with such slobbering anticipation:  I would spend it in Vegas, where gluttony is a civic duty.

And, civic-minded as I am, I gorged myself on basketball, watching games non-stop from nine in the morning until it was past my East-Coast bedtime – but still drinking time in Las Vegas.  I ate randomly, frequently, and awfully, kicking off the weekend with a breakfast of nachos and Fat Tire at the ESPN Zone Thursday morning, solidifying it with seconds of bacon, sausage, and corned-beef hash at the breakfast buffet Saturday morning, and punctuating it with Cheesy Tots and French Fries at the Burger King on the Strip just past midnight Saturday evening.

(Quick aside – thanks to the above press release, I have just discovered my new dream job:  “Chief Concept Officer” for the Burger King Corporation.  This post was held, at the time of said release, by someone named Denny Marie Post, who apparently gets paid to say things like, “This is the way the King gets sweet in the morning – thick French toast with real cinnamon and maple flavor through and through, fluffy omelet egg, melted American cheese and new thinly sliced ham or a choice of two other meats,” (discussing BK’s French Toast Sandwich) and “new CHEESY TOTS are the ultimate, craveable side item. When we were testing them, we always had to make them twice because the first batch would disappear. They are unbelievably good.”  If I understand correctly, the primary responsibility of this “Chief Concept Officer” is to think up, and then test out, new food items for Burger King.  I would do that job for free.)

I also wagered, discovering that while filling out a bracket (or three) makes the tournament more interesting, betting on every game – against the spread, on the halftime spread, on the over/under, on the halftime over/under – makes the tournament much more interesting.  So, interesting, in fact, it can make a room full of depraved men care about a 40-point blowout between the top-seeded Jayhawks of Kansas and the 16-seeded Purple Eagles of Niagara.  When you’ve got money on the line, every game is interesting: I have a stack of losing betting slips in my wallet to prove it.

As a result of all this gluttony – and the travel involved in getting myself to it, and the recovery needed after getting back from it – I didn’t get the State of the Union March Madness Viewer’s Guide written in time for opening weekend, as I usually do, or even in time for the Sweet Sixteen weekend, as I hoped I would.  To those of you who annually rely on the All-Tournament All-Name Team to help make sense of those crazy first two rounds, I apologize profusely for my delinquency, but I assure you, I thought of you every time I placed a ridiculous four-team parlay bet or slurped a one-dollar casino Bloody Mary.

In an effort to compensate for my delinquency, I am delivering this year’s Viewer’s Guide just in time for the Final Four, and sprinkling it with bits of Las Vegas randomness.  I do hope you’ll forgive me.

Where Have You Gone, Kevin Pittsnogle?
Ah yes, the All-Tournament All-Name Team.  If only you could see me, poring over the post-Selection-Sunday (and this year, Selection-Monday; more on that later) USA Today in my annual ritual, highlighter in hand, carefully scanning all 129 team rosters, highlighting potential candidates, saying their names aloud to myself, saying them again only with funny voices, and cackling.  Very much with the cackling.  I think you’d enjoy watching me highlight and cackle almost as much as I enjoy highlighting and cackling.

But since you’ll have to wait for next year to do that, I encourage you to capture a little of the flavor of the ritual for yourself and read this list aloud.  In funny voices.  Especially if you’re in public.

The Men’s Team

East Regional
Ousmane Barro, Junior, Forward, Marquette*
Hatila Passos, Junior, Center, New Mexico State
Shamari Spears, Freshman, Forward, Boston College
Lodrick Stewart, Senior, Guard, Southern California
Ken Tutt, Senior, Guard, Oral Roberts*

Midwest Regional
Joevan Catron, Freshman, Forward, Oregon
Gaston Essengue, Senior, Center, UNLV
Taurean Green, Junior, Guard, Florida*
Scooby Johnson, Junior, Forward, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi
Bambale Osby, Junior, Forward, Maryland

South Regional
Sterling Byrd, Senior, Forward, Long Beach State
Antanas Kavaliauskas. Senior, Center, Texas A&M
Ibrahim Jaaber, Senior, Guard, Pennsylvania
Jemino Sobers, Senior, Forward, Central Connecticut State
Tunji Soroye, Junior, Center, Virginia

West Regional
Pierre Marie Altidor-Cespedes, Junior, Guard, Gonzaga*
Daviin Davis, Sophomore, Forward, Weber State
Zabian Dowdell, Senior, Guard, Virginia Tech
Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, Sophomore, Forward, UCLA*
Rome Sanders, Senior, Center, Florida A&M

The Women’s Team

Greensboro Regional
Lady Comfort, Junior, Center, Temple*
Seyram Gbewonyo, Sophomore, Guard, UC-Riverside
Impris Manning, Sophomore, Guard, East Carolina
Epiphanny Prince, Freshman, Guard, Rutgers
Rashidat Sadiq, Senior, Forward, Oklahoma State

Fresno Regional
Psyche Butler, Senior, Guard, Robert Morris
Sparkle Davis, Sophomore, Guard, West Virginia
Timi E-Nunu, Senior, Forward, New Mexico
Suntana Granderson, Senior, Guard, Xavier
Sugeiry Monsac, Senior, Forward/Center, Robert Morris

Dallas Regional
A'Quonesia Franklin, Junior, Guard, Texas A&M*
Tulyah Gaines, Junior, Guard, Notre Dame
Chioma Nnamaka, Junior, Guard, Georgia Tech
Tojjinay Thompson, Senior, Forward, Texas-Arlington
Gaati Werema, Freshman, Forward, Prairie View

Dayton Regional
Alexis Hornbuckle, Junior, Guard, Tennessee
Starr Orr, Junior, Guard, Middle Tennessee
Efueko Osagie-Landry, Senior, Forward, Marquette
Sarah Smrdel, Junior, Forward, Marist
Shavonte Zellous, Sophomore, Guard, Pittsburgh

(* indicates a member of the 2006 squad)

What Do I Look Like, A Rockefeller?
I appreciate the desire of the NCAA (and ESPN) to give the women’s tournament a little more attention by moving their selection special from Sunday to Monday.  But don’t they realize this means I now have to buy USA Today on Monday and Tuesday?

The White Zone is for Immediate Loading and Unloading of Passengers Only
In Las Vegas, you can smoke anywhere you want, and you can gamble any time you want.  You can drink anywhere you want, any time you want, and you can bet on cricket, if that’s your thing.  But you cannot bring your own bottle of Jagermeister into Nine Fine Irishmen and start drinking it.  The bouncer will make you pour it out.

Again With The Different Names?
The NCAA has proven to me, once again, that it is the most geographically-confused organization in the world.  How else to explain why first-round games in the men’s East regional were held in Winston-Salem (definitely East), Spokane, and Sacramento (definitely not East)?  How else to make sense of the fact that first-round games in the men’s West regional were held in Chicago, Columbus, and Buffalo?

Of course, those assignments were practically genius compared to what they did on the women’s side.  For reasons I cannot begin to explain, while the NCAA returned the men’s regional names to, you know, like, the names of regions (West, East, Midwest, South) instead of last year’s pseudo-regions (Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Minneapolis, Oakland), the women are once again saddled with the names of “regions”:  Dallas; Fresno; Dayton, Ohio; and Greensboro, North Carolina.

Well, at least they’re all big-time cities.

As it is with the men’s regions, it appears that the NCAA’s geographer was spinning around in circles while spinning the region-picking globe:  Stanford, California; Hartford, Connecticut; and Austin, Texas, feed into the “Dayton” region; Los Angeles and East Lansing, Michigan feed into the “Greensboro” region; Hartford, Austin, and Raleigh, North Carolina feed into the “Fresno” region; and Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis feed into the “Dallas” region.

If I were an NIT-bound mid-major, I wouldn’t trust their judgment, either.

Unfortunately, I Can’t Think of Any Other Word that Starts with Pitts
The whole “Where Have You Gone” thing was intended as a rhetorical question, but then I got to wondering – where has Kevin Pittsnogle gone?  Turns out, Pittsburgh.  Sort of.

After getting cut by the Boston Celtics in October, he signed with the Pittsburgh Xplosion of the CBA in November, where he had an xplosive rookie year until getting sidelined with tendonitis in his non-shooting elbow.  He’s now back home in West Virginia, resting the elbow and getting ready for the NBA Summer Pro League.

In other Pittsnogle news, last year, Kevin and his wife Heather welcomed a baby boy into the world, and slapped upon him an appellation all but guaranteed to land him on the All-Tournament All-Name Team sometime around 2025:  Kwynsie Pittsnogle.  I am totally not making that up.

If They Were The Lady Mean Green, It Might Bother Me Less
Though I support the Wildcats of Villanova, I find “Wildcats” boring (as a team name – not the movie).  This is perhaps because this year’s men’s field included five Wildcats, including three (Weber State, Villanova, and Kentucky) in the same regional, plus Arizona and Davidson.  There were also five Eagles:  Winthrop and Boston College (plain), Marquette and Oral Roberts (Golden), and Niagara (Purple).  There were even two Blue Devils:  Duke and Central Connecticut State.

That’s why I was so excited when I saw that North Texas bore the nickname Mean Green.

And so deflated when I went to MeanGreenSports.com and discovered that they’re really just a bunch of loudly-squawking Eagles.

(I’m serious about the squawking.  Turn down your speakers before clicking.)

A Loooooooooooooooooooooong Shot

I thought Oral Roberts was a longshot.

Last year, USA Today uber-oddsmaker Danny Sheridan pegged the odds against Oral Roberts winning the tournament at 5 sextillion to 1.  He’d shed made-up numbers (for a while there, he was favoring numbers in the gazillions, which, as I discovered last year, don’t exist – in 2005, the winner of the Oakland/Alabama A&M play-in game had odds of 22 gazillion to 1; in 2003, IUPUI was posted at 100 gazillion to 1; in 2002, the odds against Winthrop were 14 gazillion to 1; and in 2001, the odds against Monmouth were 4 gazillion to 1; before that, I wasn’t paying attention) in favor of insanely large numbers – a sextillion is a one followed by 21 zeroes, meaning, for those of you who like things spelled out, that the odds against Oral Roberts were 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:1.

So how bad must the guys from Jackson State have felt when they opened the paper the morning after Selection Sunday and found that Danny had slated their odds as 50 sextillion to 1?  Like it wasn’t bad enough they had to play defending-champ Florida in the first round?  Could they really be ten times worse than Oral Roberts was last year?

I hope they looked at the bright side:  this year, Danny had Oral Roberts at a highly-respectable 1 million to 1.  If that doesn’t offer a program like Jackson State hope, maybe they don’t belong in the tournament.

And Where’s My Bloody Mary?
My digestive system has finally returned to normal functioning, but I still had a hard time watching the Sweet 16 games last weekend.  My bracket is totally busted (I had Texas winning it all), and since I was watching the games from my couch and not the sports book at the Excalibur, I had nothing at stake – and only one, normal-sized TV in my living room.  It was all very ... weird.  And normal.

Sometimes it’s really too bad that what happens in Vegas has to stay in Vegas.