Niners Nation After Dark: 2011 NCAA Tournament Bracket Prediction Contest

Welcome back to Niners Nation After Dark. Hopefully you made it through the weekend without too much trouble. I'm wrapping up my trip to Las Vegas. I was in town for the Mountain West basketball tournament and then enjoyed a little bit of today's NCAA tournament selection show. The NCAA tournament brackets are out, which means it's time to flush money and/or pride down the toilet and start making predictions. If you need a bracket, SB Nation has come up with a printable NCAA tournament bracket (PDF) at sbnation.com. The first page is a bracket and the second page provides a rundown of associated team blogs.

In years past we've had a group over at ESPN for folks to make their bracket predictions. It's all about pride and bragging rights. I'll post a FanPost reminder at some point in the next day or so, but I figured I'd get it started here. I've created the group Niners Nation at ESPN's Tournament challenge. The password is 49ers. Even if you know nothing about basketball, go ahead and sign up. Sometimes the less you know the better you'll do.

For our foreign readers, I was curious if your respective countries/cultures have the same obsession with brackets as we do in America? We have brackets and tournaments for everything from basketball to pop culture. Is this an American phenomenon or something everybody loves?