Who knew that trying to cram four days with a 40-hour work week, a 20-hour drive to Greensboro, a little bit of sleep, and a lot of game watching would be next to impossible? Unfortunately, I’m only about 30 minutes from hitting the road for this weekend’s game(s?) in North Carolina, and I’ve spent maybe a total of 15 minutes looking at the brackets since the selection show. As a result, the bracket I just threw together in the last five minutes looks like…well, a bracket thrown together in five minutes.

If you want to challenge (and destroy) that bracket in a free pool, click on over to the Longhorn Road Trip group in the SI Bracket Challenge on Facebook. Winner will earn unending fame on LRT and their choice of one of next year’s two t-shirt designs.

We’re going to be cutting it close on the back end of this trip, as we should be pulling into Greensboro about four hours before the Longhorns tip against the Gophers. I’m not sure what kind of preview (if any) I’ll be able to write for the game, but you can get your hoops fix covered by reading the preview from the fine folks at Burnt Orange Nation and seeing what fellow our blogpollers at The Daily Gopher think about Thursday night’s match-up.

In the meantime, think fondly of us as we travel the long, purple line below. Because while you might wish that you were skipping work to criss-cross the country on a basketball sojourn, the fact of the matter is that we’ll be in the middle of nowhere running on a refined mixture of Starburst, Wheat Thins, and energy drinks. We’re just living the dream.