Jay Hawks/Moutain Hawks and other March 18, Midwest Conf. Games

In the March 18th match-up of the Kansas Jayhawks against the Lehigh Mountain Hawks, the Mountain Hawks have a distinct advantage of being a real animal.  However, I must resist the temptation of underestimating something simply because it does not exist.  Take, for example, The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Steve Pribby Moots, and dinosaurs.  And also, because that deranged little bastard mascot of theirs looks like some cross between Heckel & Jeckel and the Chuckie doll from the Child's Play films, I am rather intimidated by it.  Perhaps it would lure the unassuming mountain hawk to it and then stab it in the neck with a straight razor.  And so, I'm picking Kansas over Lehigh.

A slightly more interesting match-up, I'd say, will be played earlier that evening, when the 8-seeded UNLV Rebels go up against 9-seeded Northern Iowa Panthers.  As you see, I'm sure, I like to illustrate my predictions, but to do that, I first need to settle on avatars for these two teams.  You may know the UNLV logo represents themselves with a Yosemite Sam-lookin rebel, but I prefer a more James Dean style rebel, so I'm crossing the two and representing UNLV with the cracked-out, bearded incarnation of Joaquin Phoenix.  As per the panthers, I have chosen to use the same image on the wikipedia page for Cougars a.k.a. Mountain Lions a.k.a Catamounts a.k.a. Panthers for every team in this tournament represented by a cougar, mountain lion, catamount, or panther.  And in the pairing of Joaquin Phoenix vs. a Cougar, I pick the cougar.

In the game of Aztecs vs. Volunteers, despite their gumption, strength in numbers, and access to various tools, I have to wager the Volunteers will be massacred by the angry Aztec gods, whose precise mathematical calculations have astonished mathematicians for years.

In the pairing of Georgetown and Ohio, my money is on the bobcats to nom up the hoya.

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NCAA Championships Kick-Off

It's that time of year again, when everyone forgets about foreign disasters and stops poring over cached photos discovered in the storage garage of a recently apprehended serial killer and turn on Basketball.  That's right, this week kicks off the 2010 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, and tomorrow marks the most exciting and talked-about game of the whole tournament: the Southern Division 16th-seed play-in game, in which, this year, the Eagles of Winthrop will take on the highly-favored Golden Lions of Arkansas-Pine Bluff.  Will the winning team defeat Duke and perhaps win the Championship (held this year in Indianapolis, in honor of the Colts losing the Super Bowl) on April 5?  Only time will tell.

Concerning this all-important first game of the series, most people have favorited the Arkansas-Pine Bluff Golden Lions (pictured below with Darren Aronofsky) to advance onto the Salient Sixty-Four over the Winthrop Eagles (also pictured below) and I am not one to go against this prediction.

Some have suggested that the Eagles have an extreme advantage over the Gloden Lions with their ability to fly.  However, I do not think this defrays the great size advantage lions have over eagles.  Also, to cite precedent, I think we all know cases of a cat eating a bird, but the other way around?  Surely never.  Also, examine the detailed image below of a Golden Lion presented to David Lynch at the Venice Film Festival in 2006.

 

As you can see, just like the eagle, the lion is winged too!  This levels the playing field, just as it would to cut off the eagle's wings, or to make them fight underwater, and both of these two scenarios would result in wins for the lion, or perhaps a tie at the very worst in the second instance.

And so I say with relative certainty that the Golden Lions are a lock, but only time will tell if they should go on to win the Championship.

Keep checking in to This Blog Will Change Calder's Life for more NCAA predictions!