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I guess I can breathe a little bit now that the latest edition of TRASHionals has come and gone. Not only was there plenty of work to do on the tournament – including serving as the bracketeer (now only if Jennifer Connelly could’ve joined me on the mission), and writing questions sometimes based on links/articles I would’ve normally used here. I can’t give that type of advantage to those competitors who usually read these things.

The tournament went over very well, I think, as it seemed like a bunch of us knew what to do and/or took control of the situation. Other than some problems with figuring out the main entrance that wasn’t locked on Saturday, the BU facility worked well – everyone in the same building is a good thing, even if it is spread out over five floors. A bunch of the BU folks were really helpful and made our jobs easier.

As Craig did last week, here were our brackets:
Saturday’s Round Robin: (Peter) Gammons, (Will) McDonough, (Bob) Ryan – homage to Boston sports writers; sorry, no Bill Simmons here – at least not for now
Sunday’s Playoffs: Williams, Yaz, Rice, Manny, Greenwell, O’Leary – Red Sox left fielders; however, there was some debate whether Greenwell or O’Leary deserved to be last. I thought Greenwell was better for a longer period of time to deserve not being last.

It was a load of fun seeing everyone again, although I did wish I could’ve spent more time with my friends on a bunch of the teams. But sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice some of that to make sure the tournament goes over well.

I hope questions went over well. I saw a decent amount of points scored in all of the matches I read, so I don’t think the tournament was overly difficult, but I guess everyone will have their different opinions.

The entertainment value seemed to be higher than last year. Part of it can be attributed to the questions. Part of it can be traced to some decent organization. Part of it has to do with the players. Having Charlie around really upped the fun level of the tournament, especially reading for the top playoff bracket Sunday. The match against the eventual champion Keenans was one of the most light-hearted playoff matches I’ve been part of ever. (The dictionaraoke question helped with that, as did some funny negs.)

Of course, the pinnacle of entertainment value came from Dave Murphy’s playing Dance Dance Revolution as a bonus question. I think we did well in putting that in there to make for a fun question and great theater for the finals.

Congrats to the Mike Keenan Employment Agency, LLC for becoming three-time, three-time, three-time TRASH champions by beating Battleplanet in a rematch of last year’s finals. I wonder if we’ll keep on seeing that matchup in the next couple of years. However, I was impressed by much of the field. My alma mater made an impressive run to qualify for the top playoff bracket and finish fifth overall (I also loved the Sports Night-themed team name). The Rutgers team (featuring one of my brother’s high school teammates who’s really good) pulled off upsets of both NU and Battleplanet.

To any regular readers of this blog, feel free to add some comments about your favorite questions from the weekend. Maybe I can take credit for some of them, maybe I can’t. Maybe I’ll just steal some of the credit.