If anyone is still checking their brackets, here are the leaders through Round 4. Honestly, I have almost all but forgotten about this what with the excitement of the Final Four and the match-up against Louisville, but felt it was my duty to keep y'all updated.

Congrats to all who are in the top 10 at this point and it appears all but one of you in that top 10 (oh, the horror!) picked Kentucky.

Complete list of our Yahoo! bracket challenge standings. Group Name # 69250. Password: asob2012

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I've attached the standings results of our bracket challenge below. There were a few upsets in the first weekend that appears to have thrown most of us for a loop. No upset for the group pictured above, however. No sir. Our boys are alive and well, and on to the Sweet Sixteen.

Good luck to all going forward!

Yahoo! Bracket Challenge Home

Yahoo! Bracket Challenge Standings

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I know, technically the madness has already started, but I'm old school, TODAY is really the first day for me.

Use this space to talk about today's action. Enjoy!

The link below provides the date, time, television channel, play-by-play, analyst and reporter information to all the games for the 2012 NCAA Tourney.

2012 NCAA Tournament TV schedule

(in order for this very helpful post to stay at the top of the fanpost list so it is easily accessible and can be seen by all we need at least three recommends. Thanks in advance!)

It's that time of year again, boys and girls, time for March Madness and the annual (5^th, I believe?) ASoB bracket challenge.

Since we have been doing this for a while now most of y'all know the drill, but for the sake of our new people, please bear with the pertinent details once again.

Those of you who participated in this challenge in years past are old pros by now and know exactly what to do, but for those of you who didn't get in on the fun before this year or for those who need a reminder where to go, please click here. Once you click on that link, you will want to pick the "Join Group" button. If you don't currently have a Yahoo! account, you will be prompted to create one. After you have created a Yahoo! account, or you have simply signed in to your existing account you will need to enter the Group ID # 69250 and Group Password asob2012 (no space, case sensitive) to access our group and once you have created your bracket name you can then enter your picks.

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Good Morning, y'all. We've had some reports of difficulties logging onto the site. We apologize for the inconvenience. It is being worked on, and thanks so much for your patience. Hopefully the site will be accessible to all very soon.

UPDATE from Glenn: The site is back up, and I have no idea yet what happened, why it went down, or why it is now back up. I have requested a postmortem from support, which I expect to receive sometime later today. At that point, I will put up a FanPost talking about the outage, what we know and what we don't know.

UPDATE 2 from Glenn: A full postmortem of the recent outage can be found here. Thanks for your patience.

My camera certainly got a workout last weekend because in addition to the FF we were also lucky enough to attend a Kings/Rockets game while in Houston.  It was super fun seeing some of our former players in action.  The game itself turned out to be a good one so that was awesome, too.

The NBA game was a totally different experience than the FF.  It was different in that the Toyota Center only seats around 20,000 which is a lot more of an intimate setting than say a place that holds 75,000, and on top of that we had club seats which basically means we got to see the action super close and were literally 15 feet from the bar and restaurant.  It was great fun as you can imagine. 

Oh, and as a quick aside, we were having some dinner and drinks at the bar behind our seats before the game and had some lovely conversation with a few Rockets season tickets holders.  They are absolutely in love with Patrick (they call him 2-Pat) and Chuck.

So, anyway, assuming y'all aren't totally sick of seeing my elementary photography skills and provided that you are interested in seeing some pictures of Chuck, Patrick and DeMarcus, here are just a few visual memories from that experience.

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I apologize for the delay in getting these results posted, but better late than never, I guess.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's challenge, it was great fun.  A big hearty congrats goes to md2 for winning our bracket challenge this year.  Md2 came out on top with a total of 114 points.  Next in line was Cincy with 77 points followed closely by jords with 76 and then bob in bg also with 76.  Great job, all!  

I'm not sure if it's luck, brilliance or a bit of both, but congrats again to all of you mentioned above and better luck to the rest of us next year.

The top ten standings for our bracket challenge are listed below.  For a full list of the scores and standings and to see how the rest of you fared on an individual level, once again here is the Yahoo! link.

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I'm home from the Final Four and finally getting back to reality.  The game on Saturday night was an unbelievable experience both because of the shear atmosphere of the place and the excitement surrounding the actual game itself.  UK fans were out in force and I'm not sure how it sounded on television, but the BBN voices were incredibly loud inside that stadium.  Several people from other teams and simply people from Houston who attended Saturday night's game commented on just amazing our turnout was.  "Wow, y'all really showed up", they said.  They were impressed and so was I. 

It's been mentioned ad nauseum other places, but from someone who was actually inside Reliant, let me just tell you how enormous it was.  It was gigantic, massive and all other adjectives you could possibly think of to describe the place.  I'm sure it's a great place to watch a football game (which, of course, is its main intent), but it was sort of weird to watch a basketball game there. 

Our seats were behind the western basket and we were pretty high up, but in talking with some people who had lower level seating it appeared that we might have had the better seating than those who were nearer the floor because we had sort of an overhead view and could see the whole entire floor and the players instead of looking over and around other people in order to see.  Watching a basketball game live with 75,000 people is really, well, different.

The end of the season is always hard, but for me I think this end was particularly hard to swallow not because we lost because I think this year ended better than I ever imagined it would have, but because of the fact that I was not in my usual comfortable surroundings.  I sort of felt like I was wandering around aimlessly.  Looking for some sort of closure, but nothing around me was familiar so that made it tougher than normal, I would say.

Sometimes you don't get the full appreciation of a situation until after it's gone, and at the time of our loss and then when you add in the fact that we had to soberly suffer through the worst FF championship game in history, well, you could say that I was pretty bummed initially. 

But, given a few days to reflect and get back home, I can honestly say that this was a great trip and the FF was a fun experience.  I would definitely do it again, UK playing or otherwise.

After the jump there are some pictures taken from Reliant from the average fans perspective.  I hope y'all enjoy them.  I had a blast taking them.

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Good morning, y'all!  It's a glorious day!  It's game day! 

Ok, so I'm all packed for Houston.  There is an abundance of UK gear and apparel in our bags, UK temporary tattoo directions are being looked at, fingernails have been painted a seriously kick-ass blue, and my back-up liver is all set.  I'm ready.

We are just about to leave for the airport, but first I wanted to pop in and say good morning to my ASoB family.  You know, ‘cause y'all are awesome and my hoops season totally wouldn't be the same without you. 

I can't even describe how excited I feel right now.  I'm about to jump out of my skin I'm so antsy.   I got all of, I don't know, about 4 hours of sleep last night and I'm pretty sure that nothing in this world can put a damper on my mood right now. I am in seventh heaven.  The weather is going to be awesome, Houston is expecting around 2 million people to come into town for the FF festivities so the town will be all abuzz and exhilarating, and I will be spending the weekend with our ‘Cats.  I think I've hit the college-basketball-vacation jackpot. 

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It's March Madness time, 'Cat fans!

To celebrate March Madness and get in on all the fun around here, ASoB is once again going to do our very own NCAA tourney bracket challenge on Yahoo! Sports.  This will be the fourth year in a row for the ASoB challenge and if you would like try your hand against your fellow ASoB members, I invite you to fill out a bracket(s) for yourself.  All ASoB members are welcome and encouraged to participate.

Those of you who participated in this challenge in years past are old pros by now and know exactly what to do, but for those of you who didn't get in on the fun before this year or for those who need a reminder where to go, please click here.  Once you click on that link, you will want to pick the "Join Group" button.  If you don't currently have a Yahoo! account, you will be prompted to create one.  After you have created a Yahoo! account, or you have simply signed in to your existing account you will need to enter the Group ID # 60638 and Group Password asob2011 (no space) to access our group and once you have created your bracket name you can then enter your picks.

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This isn't really Laker related or even NBA related, but since we are all sort of hoops-in-general obsessed around here I thought it might be fun to create an SSR March Madness NCAA tourney bracket challenge for us to participate in as a group.

I'm not sure if y'all are familiar with Yahoo! Sports, but that is where I have created these things in the past and it's really pretty easy to make your picks and check your bracket scores and standings once the Madness starts from there.  You can even sync your Yahoo! bracket with Facebook so that your score and the standings after every round post to your FB profile.  So, if you feel like diving in for some March Madness fun and want to gauge your hoops knowledge against that of your fellow SSR members, I invite you to fill out a bracket(s) for yourself.

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Play some tough D, shoot the ball with confidence and this game should be ours.

Let's Go 'Cats!!

I don't know about all of you, but I have watched more early-season NBA basketball this year than I have in probably the last five years combined.  Since the NBA season is so long and what with the fact that there is usually a game on almost every night at least on some channel, it gives me a chance to see all our former players pretty often.  I'm totally enjoying it.

I'm not sure if any of you caught last night's matchup in Sacramento between the Lakers and the Kings, but it was a pretty good game early on.  I thought DeMarcus had some pretty impressive spin moves, a couple which even impressed Lakers fans.  His stat line wasn't stellar like John Wall's recent home debut, but nonetheless, I thought he did fine against what is a legitimate NBA title-contending team with some very experienced and very skilled players.  It will be interesting to see his game mature and I look forward to watching more of him as well as all our former ‘Cats in their new professions.

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Ah, the lovely lazy days of summer.  Fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, either grown with our own two hands or purchased from those who grew them, the incredible accommodating weather, basically living out on the deck, cooking each and every meal out on the grill, lounging by the pool, swimsuits, skirts, shorts, sundresses, tank tops, sandals, flip-flops, sweet tea, lemonade, or if you have a taste for something with a kick, maybe you fancy a cold beer, mojito, or simply a bourbon on the rocks to quench your thirst in the months of June, July and August. 

Whatever the case may be, and whatever you may be eating, drinking, growing, or doing to make the most of your summer, the point is that all of this, all of our summer activities, for the most part, all have a sort of fun, light and indescribably free feeling and description about them.

Football season is just around the corner and Ken has given us a great and very in-depth breakdown of the first few games here, and roundball season is a ways off yet, so in keeping with that light, fun, and free-spirited feeling of summer I thought it might be fun to give the actual UK sports such as football and basketball that we all obsess about so much a little break in this post, have a little diversion, and get just a bit more personal and talk about how we as fans display our fandom outwardly. 

We know we are crazy in our love, admiration, and support for our players and teams in other ways such as driving thousands of miles to see games, flying and paying exhorbitant amounts of money to see them in far off destinations such as Hawaii, or even perhaps Alaska -- but how about actual gear?  What are some things we wear to show our support and show our pride for UK?  Are we equally as crazy about UK gear in the sense about what we put on our bodies, in our homes, cars, yards or use in our recreational activities as we are about our feelings for our team?

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It's NBA Draft time.  I'm ready, yet nervous and excited for our boys. 

Good luck to Wall, Patterson, Cousins, Bledsoe and Orton.

Discuss the picks, draft fashion.  Whatever.

[Added by Truzenzuzex]

And a few late links for between picks:

• D.C. Sports Bog - John Wall Wizards shirts for sale at NBA draft
• NBA.com: Draft preview: Ranking the centers
• Patrick Patterson not sure which team will pick him in NBA draft - Patrick Patterson - SI.com2010 NBA
  
• Draft Guard Rankings: Breaking Down The Backcourt - SBNation.com

• DeMarcus Cousins pre-draft interview - InsideHoops.com

• SB Nation draft coverage

  Tons of coverage, links to team blogs, all kinds of good stuff from the Mothership.

The 2010 NBA draft is now a mere week away.  If you are at all interested in what might transpire on that night (I'm incredibly excited!), specifically and most importantly, what extremely lucky NBA franchise each of UK's five draft prospects might end up with, well then, my fellow UK fans -- look no further than the lovely SB Nation NBA Draft Blog, Ridiculous Upside.  RU is currently doing a mock draft for the entire first round of this year's draft with each of the SB Nation NBA-team blogs/head blogger making the picks.

Keep in mind that this is just a mock draft (total guesses) and that this mock is comprised of the opinions of SB Nation NBA-team bloggers and it is they who are making the picks and not any official representative of each of the NBA teams.

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