March Madness!

My knowledge of sports is relatively limited. I grew up in a family that liked sports, but we were more of a gymnastics/dance/track family. Ha. None of us played a real team sport till I joined the Lacrosse team my junior year of high school. (My last blog says a little about that. Ha.) Anyway, Even today, my other sisters danced, but the only other sibling to play a team sport is the baby of the family who's starting to play basketball and volleyball. We were also pretty strict about sports on sunday. This meant no playing or even watching sports on sunday at all. My dad was a sports fan though. He grew up playing every sport but was also an individual sports man in high school doing gymnastics and swimming. He also reads the paper like mad, including the sports section. So even though he didn't watch much pro sports (NFL games are all on Sunday), he did read about them. So every once in a while, he would sneak the TV on with the volume on mute and try to watch the world series, or the PGA tour when Tiger was about to win it all or something. Ha. The point of all this is that we didn't get a whole lot of exposure to sports as kids.

Us as kids with Elder Scott and Elder Jensen.

So, you wonder what this has to do with March Madness? Ha. Me too. Ha. Jk. Well, my hubby is about as crazy about sports as it's possible to get. He knows everything there is to know. He's practically a sports encyclopedia. :)

There's my hubby playing golf in St George a couple months ago. :) Isn't he cute! :D ---->

So when we got married I started to watch a lot more sports. He's also friends with a lot of people that know as much as he does. (BTW, he's nudging me to erase that comment cuz he doesn't think he knows everything, but as far as i'm concerned he does!) Anyway, in order to keep up with him and his conversations, I had to start learning more. I'm a person that isn't afraid to ask questions so I asked a TON of questions. And i started learning a lot! Now, 3 years later, i am much smarter about sports. :D I'm very proud of my learning curve. ha. Granted, a lot of what i have to say in conversations are things he said in a previous conversation that I have stolen, but it still makes me sound smart! I'm certainly never going to know as much as he does, cuz the more i learn, the more he memorizes. Ha.

So we're coming into the end of march and this means march madness!!! For those of you reading this that don't know what that is, it's the college basketball tournament. And what's great about this tournament is that a lot of people have a chance to win! The reason people love it so much is that they publish the bracket at the beginning of the tournament and a lot of people go through and guess who's going to win each game and by process of elimination, who's going to win the whole tournament. And it's a HUGE deal to win this tournament. A lot of people put their own brackets with their predictions into betting pools and whoever gets the most guesses right sometimes wins a prize. Some people bet thousands of dollars on it. Our group of friends usually does one and the winner get to be taken to dinner by all the loosers. Ha. It's been a fun tradition. my first bracket experience was pretty pathetic. I prolly only guessed 5 or 6 games right. but since then i've gotten a little better! Well, i guess not really compared to some people, only compared to myself. Ha. Justin and i were talking a few minutes ago about the brackets and i realized it must be REALLY hard for him to do this! The reason being that he actually knows a LOT of the teams that are playing and how good they are and how well they match up with their potential match-ups. So he has to really think about who he thinks is going to win every single game! Some choices are easier than others, but some are hard! Ha. Most of my choices have to do with how much I like the color of their jerseys or their mascot. Well, at least it was that was in the beginning. Now i know a little more and can make more educated guess, but i'm still terrible at it. But it's still fun! The cool thing is that sometimes he think about it too hard, so he does terrible. Last year he didn't get ANY of the final 4 right. Which is un heard of. Granted, lots of people didn't get them right because there were a lot of unforseable upsets, but he was upset! That's another thing that's great about the brackets is that really anything can happen and no one really knows. Some teams catch on fire and play out of their minds and others just have a bad game but as soon as you loose, you're out! I guess we'll see what happens this year!

I'm especially excited to see what happens this year with BYU because it's the first time in a long time where we have a real shot at making it past the first and second rounds. BYU got Jimmered this year so it's been a lot of fun to watch. Unfortunately our chances got significantly lowered when we lost one of our best players due to an honor code violation, but we still have more potential than we usually have. I hope we can pull it off!

A quick note about last year... BYU played Florida in the first round last year, and I had a final I had to take towards the end of the game. And we were doing really well! So we went to our final that happened to be in our classroom and the teacher turned the game on and put it on the projector and said "Do your test! but this will be on." Ha. The thing is that it was at the end, so we expected it to be one for another 10 maybe 20 minutes. Turns out it went to 3 overtimes! So there were a lot of people, including myself who were done with their test but still sitting in the room watching. Ha. And we won! (and I aced that test! ha)