Sixty-seven sets of NCAA men's basketball brackets, 103 teams listed ... none from Iowa

We are not being served in Iowa this year when it comes to men's basketball.

This is nothing new in certain circles, say, uh, Iowa and Iowa State. The Hawkeyes haven't been to the NCAA Division I tournament since 2006, the Cyclones since 2005.

But we've had Missouri Valley Conference teams to bail us out. Drake went to the Dance in '08, Northern Iowa in '09 and '10. UNI scored the first win(s) in the NCAAs by an Iowa team since ISU beat Minnesota in a 2005 first-rounder.

This year? Something big is required at a conference tournament.

Something called the Bracket Project looked at 67 sets of brackets from well-known sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo.com to lesser-knowns like Rainmaker Bracketology and Seed Madness.

This year, 68 teams go to the Dance. The sites have cited a combined 103 different squads they project getting tourney berths.

None are from Iowa. None out of 103.

Northern Iowa is the only one of Iowa's four teams with any real hope, and the Panthers have to win three times in three days at the Missouri Valley Conference tourney to do that. Which is what they did in '09 and '10, though they likely would have made the field anyway last year, if not both.

UNI failed to get its 20th win of the season Tuesday night when it lost at home to Indiana State. There will be no at-large berth for the Panthers. They must run the table in St. Louis. Drake must do likewise, but will almost surely have to win four games in four days because they'll probably have to play in a Thursday night play-in game at the MVC tourney.

Iowa and Iowa State will have to win four games in four days at the Big Ten and Big 12 tourneys, respectively, to get to the NCAAs. Given they have a combined four wins and 24 losses in league play, it's more likely twenty-dollar bills will rain from the sky on Championship Week.

It isn't like the state hasn't endured an NCAA D-I (men's tourney) drought in a long while. This will be the fourth of the millennium. The state got skunked in 2002, 2003 and 2007, too.

But I don't like it. I like covering NCAA tourneys. I like the tension in the arena. I like March Madness, and I've seen a lot of it firsthand over the years. That's another blog post.

A happier one.