I've been following the NCAA men's basketball tournament for close to 30 years, and I've been in bracket-based office pools for about the last 15, and I've never, ever seen a tournament like the one going on right now.

I've lost track of the number of stunning upsets that have come to pass in the last three days; teams from the mighty Big East conference appear to have forgotten how to play the game; and the overall No. 1 seed in the tournament, Kansas, was bounced today by Northern Iowa. (I didn't even know before last week that there was a school called Northern Iowa.)

Villanova, a No. 3 seed, also went down today, meaning the two teams I picked to reach the national championship game, 'Nova and Kansas, are gone, and I have no chance of winning the pool I'm in. So I tore up my bracket sheet about an hour ago and threw it in the trash.

I can take solace in the fact that the team I've been rooting for since the mid-1980s, Syracuse, remains alive in the tournament. But they're from the Big East and are playing a lower-seeded team on Sunday, so they probably will be out of this thing soon.