The NCCA Tournament is down to its Final Four: Michigan, Syracuse, Louisville And Wichita State.

If you’re like me, your bracket looks … horrible. Just horrible. I thought Ohio State was going all the way, but what do I know? I also thought NC State was going to do well. What’s wrong with me?

The good news is that the folks at Chips Ahoy! are working hard to make sure I feel better about my tournament performance in two important ways: 1) by scouring college campuses across the country to find the “sweetest bracket” and creating a bunch of endearing fan videos along the way, and 2) sending With Leather a gigantic box of Chips Ahoy! cookies. So now I get to see the side of the NCAA tournament that isn’t “HERE’S A THOUSAND HD PICTURES OF A BROKEN LEG,” and everybody I know gets a free bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cookies. Maybe I should send a few of them to the guys at NC State.

Anyway, ChipsAhoy.TV is adorable. After the jump I included clips from the teams who are still in it (because these people are the ones you should be listening to), but they’re all pretty great, so check them out.

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As I most often point out as to avoid being called a hack – my feelings get hurt easy, y’all – I do not profess to be a sports expert, like ol’ Dick Vitale up there. I’m simply a guy who has a big TV and 12 web browser windows open at all times to follow multiple games until smoke starts to spray out of my ears. And watching all of those games, I develop opinions that I like to share with all of you. I believe that Mufasa or Pumba called it the “Circle of Life.”

So my point is that there are people out there who might be flipping through channels tonight, and they’ll be all like, “Hey, these guys are playing basketball, but I don’t know a thing about them.” Even worse, you could be a dude on a date with a hot girl and she’ll be like, “Why don’t we go back to your place and watch NCAA Tournament basketball and maybe I’ll take my shirt off if you know a lot about the games.” But you’re all like, “Snap, I haven’t watched anything.”

That’s why I created this handy-dandy guide to enjoying the Sweet 16, and to keep with the time-honored tradition of UPROXX live-blogging, I’ll be hanging out tonight to chat and make jokes about things that I notice. I invite you to join me, mainly because it’s fun, but also because I’ll be giving out free shirts at random to people who tell me why I’m wrong.

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With Brandon out gallivanting around Austin for SXSW, living the rock star life, and me back here at home watching the baby, I realized that I forgot to do a ROFLMNBAO post last week, and for that I can’t apologize enough. But I also figured that we could take a breather from Dwight Howard’s flip-flopping, Chris Bosh’s squawking, Blake Griffin’s air balling and Derrick Rose’s back injuring and celebrate some of the stars of the weekend’s NCAA Tournament action for this week’s edition.

After all, there were some great games that none of us expected as the Sweet 16 field presented itself. And to tie the NBA and NCAA ends together, I got to wondering what would have happened if Florida Gators coach Billy Donovan would have taken the Orlando Magic head coach position a few years ago, instead of backing out and returning to UF. And I don’t imaging it would be much different, as Otis Smith would have still traded for the worst contract in basketball and I’d still have the liver of a 63-year old.

On with the celebration and mockery of America’s student-athletes!

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I’m not one for conspiracy theories, especially when it comes to sports. The effort it would take to orchestrate a fix on an institutional level, combined with the cover-up afterwards to keep everybody quiet, would be monumental. All it takes is one person looking to cash in on a salacious story and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. And for what? To advance one team one round in a tournament? You’re going to risk the integrity of your entire sport for that? It’s just not worth it.

BUT, I am one to point out a horribly blown call, especially when it prevents something potentially awesome from happening. Something, for example, like a 16-seed upsetting a 1-seed in the NCAA Tournament. That’s why I’ve helpfully screencapped this moment from yesterday’s Syracuse vs. UNC-Asheville game. With about 30 seconds left, and a 66-63 lead, Syracuse was inbounding the ball from under their own basket, and the ball clearly bounced off one of their player’s hands before going out of bounds. Despite this, they were awarded possession, and promptly locked the game up with free throws.

Now, you could certainly point out that there was a pretty obvious foul committed by the UNC-Asheville player on the play, but that is besides the point for our purposes. If the referee wasn’t going to call the foul, for whatever reason, then the play needed to be treated like the foul didn’t happen. The point is that, during a live play, the ball went out of bounds after touching a Syracuse player, and the referee blew the call. Saying “Yeah, but if the foul would have been called …” gets us nowhere because, to quote the lead singer of the band Crucial Taunt, if a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hops.

The main reason I’m so upset about this is because it cost us something so potentially cool. A 16-seed has never upset a 1-seed, and it was *thisclose* to happening yesterday. There’s no guarantee that UNC-Asheville would have hit a tying three, or even cut the lead to one with a quick basket, but it would have been a blast to watch them try. Hell, maybe they would have just thrown the ball right to Syracuse, tripped over their shoelaces in unison, and flubbed the game away anyway, but at least then they would have done it on their own. It’s tough enough for David to take out Goliath as it is. Goliath doesn’t need a crowbar.

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"Yes, weep for me, you pathetic children."

For some reason, parents think it’s a lot of fun to humiliate their children on the Internet by posting videos of them crying over sports on YouTube. But people seem to love them, so mom and dad just keep the cameras rolling as they tell their little Courvoisier Winetavius Richardsons and Yolanda Supersads that their favorite players are leaving or their most hated teams won and so on and so forth. Call me old-fashioned, but I only like to laugh at crying children who just finished making me a new pair of Oakleys.

Our latest tear machine is a 4-year old boy whose parents informed him that his favorite college basketball player – Syracuse’s Scoop Jardine – is graduating and will not be leading the Orangemen for another NCAA Championship run. Well the boy didn’t like that very much, so he obviously cries and it’s all pretty much paint-by-numbers from there.

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Robert G. Burton has demanded that the University of Connecticut return a $3 million donation that he made to the Huskies athletics department in 2004 because he feels that the athletic director was not inclusive enough in the process of hiring a new football coach. Burton, who has donated more than $7 million to the school and had the football stadium named for his family, wrote a letter to athletic director Jeff Hathaway expressing his displeasure in not being a part of the coaching search. It is unknown if the letter was written in comic sans.

“For someone who has given over $7,000,000 to the football program/university, I do not feel as though these requests were asking for too much,” Burton wrote. “Your lack of response on either of these requests tells me you do not respect my point of view or value my opinion.”

“I am fed up with you as a manager because you did not let the hiring process take place in an open manner,” Burton wrote. “You and your committee of three talked to some coaches and made a critical decision about who you were going to hire without input from knowledgeable people who care about the program.” (Via Hartford Courant)

The letter also cites Burton’s experience as a football player and he proclaims to be the perfect deciding force in selecting a coach because he knows “more football coaches than the majority of Athletic Directors in America.” According to additional sources, he is threatening to move scholarships from UConn to Syracuse and “totally TP the girls’ dorms, bro.”

The athletic department and university issued a brief statement explaining that Burton was consulted throughout the entire hiring process, as were other donors, adding: “Tough titties, crybaby.”