In the Field: Elliott Sadler

Sunday was a rough day for me. As if battling that danged COT all day at Bristol wasn't bad enough, then my boys -- the North Carolina Tar Heels -- lost in the regional finals of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

As soon as the Food City 500 was over, I had to think about getting home as fast as I could. I was flying with Jamie McMurray on his plane, so right after the race, I saw a little bit of the end of the first half.

• Driver Page: Stats, videos, etc
• Store: Everything Elliott Sadler

During halftime I jumped on the helicopter, got over to the airport and jumped on Jamie's jet. We flew home and I got to listen to the rest of the game on the radio on the way back to my apartment.

As everyone knows, the Heels pretty much had a 10-point lead with about eight minutes to go, and they went into, like, the stall offense to use up some clock. They lost their momentum, the boys went cold and I just felt like they gave the game to Georgetown.

I just hate it because the boys played so good all through the tournament. They had a young bunch of guys and it's very heartbreaking [to lose]. I really thought they had a team that could go to the Final Four and contend with Florida and Ohio State and teams like that.

But it just wasn't meant to be.

So Sunday was not a great day for me -- either professionally, or as far as my Tar Heels were concerned.

It was just one of those days, but I'm still a basketball fan and I'm still going to be watching the Final Four this weekend. I don't know who I'm going to pull for, yet -- but I'm just going to watch and enjoy those guys playing.

I don't know. My travel plans didn't leave me any choice, so I don't know if it wasn't better that I didn't get to watch the end of that second half, and overtime.

I was listening to [the Carolina game] on my radio on the way home, and you wanted to see and to visualize what was going on. I would have liked to have seen it, but it just didn't work out because of my travel plans.

But I got to kind of put some of the visual stuff together with some of the highlights I saw on TV Sunday night when I got home and Monday morning.

So that helped me to put it all together. All I know is, you can't shoot two-for-23, the last 25 shots of the game, and beat a team like Georgetown. It's just not going to work.

Should they have kept running? If you said Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, you just hit it -- whether it's basketball, football or racing.

I saw people Monday morning quarterbacking Kyle Busch to death on what he should have said or shouldn't have said after he won the race at Bristol.

It's easy to sit here and say, 'If I was the coach -- if I was Roy Williams, I would have let them run.' But how do you go against a guy that's won more than 80 percent of his games?

You can't do it. I would have liked to have seen them try to do something different, but if they would have won, I would have thought it'd been fine, what they were doing.

They did the best they could and they made what they thought were the right decisions at the right time -- but no matter if you're running or if you're holding the ball, if you shoot that poorly the last 25 shots of the game, you're not going to win anyway.

I don't care what kind of offense you play.

It's like if my Dodge Dealers/UAW Charger is the fastest car on the racetrack, but you have bad pit stops, you're not going to win a race, either. It's the whole package deal and you have to have the whole thing.

But I'll tell you -- despite everything I was feeling on that ride home, my biggest pain Sunday was having a car good enough to win, and not finishing any better than we did, 27th.

We caught Tony that one run, passed him -- and then we ran first and second with him a good part of the day, with a great racecar. You know, I haven't been in Victory Lane in a long time and we thought this was a great chance to return.

So that, by far was my biggest pain on Sunday. I didn't like seeing my boys lose, but the way we lost that race on Sunday was hard to swallow -- by making a mistake in the pits.

You don't get many chances to have a top one or two racecar -- and we had one at Bristol. So it was kind of tough to swallow that.

And now we go to Martinsville. With what we had at Bristol and how that new Dodge Avenger Car of Tomorrow handled, I'm very enthusiastic about going to Martinsville.

Martinsville is not my best track. I feel like I'm a lot better at Bristol than I am there, but we feel like we're ahead of the learning curve with the COT car.

We feel like we're right there with Hendrick and Gibbs and those guys, so we feel like we've got a good chance to go to Martinsville and to be competitive and to run up front.

Hopefully we can do that. We've got our fingers crossed that everything's going to go our way. We've had some not so great luck this year, but we're not letting it get us down.

We're always looking forward to the next race to try and improve on things, and we feel like we've got a handle on the COT car. We've done a lot of testing to get ready for Martinsville.

I think I've tested at two different racetracks to make sure when we unload at Martinsville that we're going to be pretty close. I've been to Caraway Speedway once and to Lakeland [USA International Speedway] twice, just to get ready.

My teammates have been to some tracks down in Georgia and in Iowa and stuff like that. We've tested and gotten ready as best as we can for the race this weekend and hopefully we will be.

Of course, what our Evernham Motorsports team does this weekend is the most important item on my mind -- but I don't mind saying I'm happy with the way the schedule works for watching the tournament.

I don't know if I'm going to root for one particular team or not. I'm just going to watch, to be a fan of college basketball. I think Florida is going to be the one to beat because of their experience.

A lot of their guys in the starting five played last year in the Final Four, in the championship, and they won it, so I think they've got it all figured out and they understand what's going to happen.

UCLA, too, was there last year -- so I'm kind of pulling for them, because nobody's really talking about UCLA. So if my boys aren't playing, I like rooting for the underdogs -- and everybody's kind of written UCLA off, even though they were No. 1 for half the year in the polls.

I think they've got a great basketball team. I think them and Kansas had one of the most exciting games of the entire season, the other day, to make it to the Final Four, so I'm really looking forward to seeing UCLA and Florida play -- kind of a rematch from last year.

And then I'm looking forward to watching Greg Oden [from Ohio State] and [Roy] Hibbert from Georgetown play -- two 7-footers duking it out in the other game. So each game has a good story line, but I think Florida right now is the team to beat.

I honestly think, whoever wins the Florida - UCLA game will win the championship.

Saturday night, I'm either going to watch my cousin, Owen, race at South Boston or stay in Martinsville and watch the games at my bus, while I'm getting ready for Sunday's race.

My family will all be up in Martinsville for the race -- and we're all basketball fans so I think we may end up cooking dinner and hanging out at the bus and watching the games.

Monday night we'll probably be somewhere around Emporia. We might all go over to somebody's house to watch the final -- but nothing extravagant.

We'll just hang out and watch it, because I've got a test Tuesday morning, at Richmond, so I won't be doing anything out of the ordinary for that Monday night game.

Elliott Sadler, now in his ninth full season in the Cup Series, shares weekly with NASCAR.COM readers life on the road through staff writer Dave Rodman.