The only thing worse than your team losing in the first round of the conference tournament is when your team is favored to win but loses in the first round, at noon, you have non-refundable hotel rooms and you're located in Cincinnati. And no matter what you do or where you are interested in going, every cab driver in the city suggests you should go across the river to Kentucky to find what you are looking for.

Somehow I don't think the visitor's bureau is ecstatic about the marketing slogan, "Come to Cincinnati ... we're close to Kentucky."

But before we were consigned to a weekend in Cincinnati without a basketball team to watch, seven other George Washington grads from the class of 2001 and I had arrived in town from all over the country to watch the tournament. Being a GW basketball fan is the rough equivalent of waking up every morning and fervently rooting for an eclipse. So it was with some degree of amazement that we had all watched GW become the biggest surprise of the college basketball season.

GW's game, which started at noon, necessitated a traveling scramble as the guys from the East Coast left in a van at 1 a.m. in order to be in town for the tipoff. Those traveling with me from Nashville had to manage the difficult Central to Eastern time zone issues.

Just a question: Why does anyone think that it's an advantage for a team made up of college kids to play a game at noon? Granted, you get more time to recover before your next game, but you also have to eat breakfast in some strange hotel conference room at 7 a.m. and get your groin taped up by 10. This seems like it cancels out the advantage. Regardless, congratulations to Temple for ruining our weekend in Cincinnati with a 68-53 victory. Somewhere, Bill Cosby's Jell-O is tasting extra sweet.

By the end of the day, all four top-seeded teams had been upset. I believe there is a 53 percent chance that the A-10 champion this season may actually be Moeller High from Cincinnati.

The A-10 basketball tournament is the only athletic event I have ever attended where you can clearly hear everything the coaches say during timeouts. This seems like it could be an easily exploited issue. For instance, on Thursday, as I sat about five rows behind the George Washington basketball team, I could both see and hear everything GW coach Karl Hobbs said to his players during the timeouts. Had I been an agent for Temple I could have then moseyed on over to the other bench and relayed everything I had heard during the timeout. Not that I think this happens, but the mere possibility of its occurrence is a testament to the odd confluence of events surrounding the A-10 Tournament and its place in the college basketball universe.

In the NCAA Tournament and the NBA playoffs, a benchwarmer who hasn't played since the bubonic plague hit Europe will make it his entire job to block the camera's view of the timeout. Well, at the A-10 Tournament, they need one of those sound-masking devices and a hospital dividing curtain to raise during timeouts. I can't imagine this is an issue for very many other conference tournaments.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the A-10 tourney in Cincinnati:

1. They sell alcohol here ... but the crowd was so small for the Thursday afternoon session that the sales lady brought a book to read. A book. And she was selling alcohol. I can't even imagine what the poor cotton candy salesperson was doing.

2. This isn't really about the A-10 tourney, but there is some sort of Tupperware convention at my hotel. As I am writing this, two of the most annoying women on Earth are discussing how pliable new Tupperware is. I keep expecting Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite to come walking into the business center.

3. My photo was taken wearing one of those GW foam hats and sitting by myself with an entire arena surrounding me and no one else in the picture. This photo was taken in the midst of the game.

4. In any group of guys, there is always one friend who manages to get drunk at the athletic event in about 20 minutes and then spends the remainder of the game making 15 trips to the bathroom. Do everyone a favor and put this guy on the aisle.

5. I received 11 phone calls and four text messages deriding GW and my support of GW, all beginning to arrive within about 30 seconds of the score going final. Among these calls, one of my friends actually said this about ways to spend the remainder of our time in Cincinnati: "Well, the Underground Railroad Museum is pretty cool."

The capstone on the loss came shortly after midnight on Thursday when over half of the starting five and sundry other GW players arrived in a downtown Cincinnati bar. Shortly after that, several Charlotte basketball players arrived as well. So if you were looking for the No. 1 and 2 seeds in the A-10 tourney, you could find them rebounding from their losses by closing down the bar late Thursday night.

Seeing both GW and Charlotte's players out during the night of a loss just brought home once again how crazy and unpredictable the world of college sports are. I also wouldn't change them for anything.