A fine smoking ruin

... is what your NCAA Tournament bracket looks like right now, I'm guessing.

The Blob's, of course, does not look like that at all, on account of the Blob didn't fill one out, for reasons it explained a few days ago. This means I haven't missed a game yet. Or it means I've missed them all. You can go either way.

At any rate, the Blob sympathizes with your spectacular failure, and asks if it would be OK if it grilled a few brats over the glowing remains of your bracket. Someone should take advantage of what was as Mad and memorable a first weekend as the first weekend of the Madness always should be.

You say you had all four No. 1s getting to the Sweet Sixteen, including Virginia and Xavier?

Sorry. UMBC and Florida State ruined that for you.

North Carolina?

Crushed by Texas A&M by 19.

Cincinnati?

Blew a 22-point lead against, um, Nevada.

Michigan State? Arizona? Tennessee?

Done, done and done.

This was true Madness at work, and perhaps karma. Some of those who got sent home, after all, seemed victims of a case of just desserts, if you looked at it a certain way.

Consider: Kelvin Sampson, a blatant repeat offender who somehow was allowed back into college basketball after blowing up the IU program 10 years ago, coaches Houston now. And of course Houston got taken out by Michigan in the cruelest way possible, on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer.

North Carolina?

Maybe getting laminated by A&M was retribution for getting away scot-free with one of the biggest academic scandals in NCAA history. Back to your fake classes now, Tar Heels.

Arizona, a sexy national champ pick fingered in the FBI's ongoing probe, got blitzed by Buffalo out of the Mid-American Conference. No soup for you, Sean "That Ain't My Voice On The Wiretap" Miller. And Michigan State, whose athletic programs (including, yes, basketball) seem to have a rather casual attitude toward sexual assault, got flummoxed out of the tournament by Syracuse and its fabled zone defense.

I don't know if the gods of the cosmos care about college basketball. But it sure seems like they did this weekend.

I mean, Sampson, Sean Miller and Carolina are gone, and Loyola and Sister Jean are still around. How do you not see some greater power at work in that?