Brett Davis/US Presswire
Perfecting chest bumps, check. Next stop, an NCAA tournament win.


As we cross more and more March days off our Great Moments in USA Curling wall calendar, we get more and more excited about the NCAA tournament. The good news is we don’t have to wait all the way until the play-in game March 16. We don’t even have to wait until the major conference tourneys start March 9. Because there’s tournament-y action going on right now. Yahoo!

Teams are on their way to punching their tickets to the dance as we speak. So while Doug Gottlieb summons and dismisses bubble teams with a touch of a finger on his big magic screen, we’re here to offer some early NCAA tournament tidbits. Consider your March Madness appetite whetted.

First, we’ll head down South and way West, to where No. 10 New Mexico clinched the Mountain West Conference title with a win over TCU Wednesday night. This gave the Lobos their first outright conference title in 16 years and tied a school record for wins (28, matching the 1995-96 season).

Our own Joe Lunardi has the Lobos as the No. 2 seed in the West in his psychic bracket, which is cool with us. We’re fans of any team that used to have a live wolf as its mascot (well, they did for a little while in the 1920s at least). Of course, UNM was forced to stop using the live wolf when a child teased it and got bit. But we don’t really think that’s the wolf’s fault, is it? Anyway, the Lobos still have some dynamite mascots in Lobo Louie and Lobo Lucy. And they don’t bite. We think.

In the Southeast, we even had our first upset of tourney time in the good old Atlantic Sun. No. 8 Kennesaw State upset No. 1 Lipscomb, 72-69, in the conference tournament Wednesday. And if you don’t know anything about Kennesaw State, here’s a fun fact to impress your friends. The UPS guy (you know who we’re talking about) went there. We’d say he should draw up some plays, but unless spelling out the UPS logo is going to send Kennesaw State’s future opponents into a nervous fluster, we don't think it would help.

The conference tourney upsets continued up the East Coast in the Patriot League, where No. 7 Holy Cross (the old stomping grounds of our own Bill Simmons) knocked off No. 2 Bucknell, 67-64, on Wednesday. In all likelihood, this just means that Holy Cross has earned the right to lose to Patriot League favorite Lehigh (the conference's No. 1 seed), which then has the right to lose to the NCAA tourney's overall No. 1 seed (if Lehigh wins the play-in game, that is). But hey, if there’s anything that these pre-tourney weeks have taught us, it’s that a Kennesaw can always beat a Lipscomb. Whatever that means.