{"id":1027,"date":"2014-03-20T21:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T04:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/?p=1027"},"modified":"2014-03-20T21:00:31","modified_gmt":"2014-03-21T04:00:31","slug":"this-years-ncaa-tourney-is-dead-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2014\/03\/20\/this-years-ncaa-tourney-is-dead-to-me\/","title":{"rendered":"This year’s NCAA tourney is dead to me"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, I was really excited<\/a> about NC State’s chances in the NCAA tournament.<\/p>\n

This is one of my favorite times of year. I used to watch a ton of basketball, and spend hours staring at my brackets as they turned more and more red. Even with all of the crap my family throws at each other, the NCAA tournament was the one thing that kept us together. And, last year or the year before, I finally won!<\/p>\n

Not this year.<\/p>\n

Not when those kids couldn’t hit a damn free throw to save their lives.<\/p>\n

Not when I’m sitting on the West Coast without a single person giving a damn about the games. It’s so hard to get into it on your own. 5 people signed up for the office pool :-\/<\/p>\n

I swore I wasn’t going to let 18 year old kids bug me this much. College sports is an epic case of exploitation and obsession. But Tuesday left me feeling so damn good, and tonight I can’t even open ESPN to check the scores because I’m so damn depressed.<\/p>\n

Oh well, there’s always next year \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, I was really excited about NC State’s chances in the NCAA tournament. This is one of my favorite times of year. I used to watch a ton of basketball, and spend hours staring at my brackets as they turned more and more red. Even with all of the crap my family throws at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQyAq-gz","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1010,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2014\/03\/16\/this-week-in-review-10\/","url_meta":{"origin":1027,"position":0},"title":"This week in review","date":"March 16, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Not a lot of sleep. Micky being in NYC fills the whole house with weird creaks, and this strange sensation that every noise is someone out to get me (or maybe I've watched too much Burn Notice...). The week ended well, and the weekend was even better. Saturday was good\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Updates"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":255,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2010\/02\/08\/another-bug-bites-the-dust\/","url_meta":{"origin":1027,"position":1},"title":"Another bug bites the dust","date":"February 8, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been working on an interesting project lately that I hope to share with everyone soon. I keep running into the oddest of problems trying to get things going. It's almost as if just getting the whole thing started is the biggest challenge. After that... it's going to be a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Technology"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":160,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2009\/08\/30\/football-betting-2009\/","url_meta":{"origin":1027,"position":2},"title":"A new series... Football Betting 2009","date":"August 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Our new CEO, Ian Small, made a point of making commitments to hard deadlines and hard actions, and then following up on those items when the time comes. I really like this sense of accountability. When you're behind, then you need to be able to account for what went wrong.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sports betting"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":509,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2012\/02\/10\/gosh-i-miss-college-basketball\/","url_meta":{"origin":1027,"position":3},"title":"Gosh I miss college basketball","date":"February 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Between NC State beating Georgia Tech tonight (which we desperately needed to keep NCAA hopes alive), and the quality of the last 4 minutes of the Duke\/UNC game, I'm reminded how much I miss college basketball. I genuinely believe that it is the purest form of the game. The level\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sports Stories"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1641,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2015\/10\/11\/this-week-in-review-19\/","url_meta":{"origin":1027,"position":4},"title":"This week in review","date":"October 11, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Ok, I'm going to get back in the swing of the family weekly update. That means many things have to happen. (1) I need to take photos. (2) I need to start recording these kids more because honestly unless you hear it from their mouths, then you won't believe it.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Updates"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1491,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2015\/03\/06\/my-140-date-night\/","url_meta":{"origin":1027,"position":5},"title":"My $140 date night","date":"March 6, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"It all started when we saw the trailer for The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. We knew we would go on opening night because that's our people. So I pre-ordered the tickets because a Friday night at the Kabuki Theater is quite the crap shoot for a good seat. That's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "just thinking out loud"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}