Welcome to the opening weekend of the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, also known as the Greatest Four-Day Spectacle in Sports That Doesn’t Involve 12-year-old Chinese Girls.

While most IndyCar drivers have about as much college education as my dog, there is one driver who does in fact possess a college degree and will eagerly be cheering on his school today. Okay, technically there are two drivers, since Milka Duno also has a degree – six of them, actually - but her Venezuelan college is ineligible for the NCAA. I think Robin Miller is saying they attempted to bring massive sponsorship to try to participate in this year’s tournament, but everyone knows the only team that can buy their way in is the University of Arizona.

Really, is there any other explanation how a 19-12 team that finished 5th in their conference and lost 5 of their last 6 games got into The Big Dance? No, there is not.

But I digress, as the one college graduate I was initially referring to is none other than Ed Carpenter, Butler University class of ’03. And lucky for Ed, his Bulldogs are playing today, drawing a death-seeding against LSU, with the winner playing #1 seed North Carolina on Saturday. Barring a miracle, Ed will not be distracted from racing much beyond this weekend.

(Also, unconfirmed reports are that Sarah Fisher also attended Butler, so it’s apparently THE school for IndyCar drivers. The ones who go to school, that is.)

Anyhow – Go Butler! Even though you’ve got a horribly difficult road ahead just like other surname-sounding schools (see: Radford, Binghamton, and Siena), you’ve got one thing they don’t to help you get out of the first round – Hoosier karma.

And if Butler doesn’t float your boat, well, you can always cheer for some Silent Pagoda schools. Well, school. Flash is a graduate of Bikram’s Yoga College of India, Roy’s alma mater (Stinson? Swenson? Stepford?) didn’t make the tournament this year, so that leaves us with sole representation by my Arizona State Sun Devils. If you didn’t pencil them into the Elite Eight, you obviously let your dog fill out your bracket.

Or possibly Dan Wheldon.