I think I have to come up with a new strategy for picking my March Madness brackets, because my old one just isn’t working.
For years now, I’ve employed the novel approach of actually watching the college basketball regular season, getting to know the strengths and weakness of a few highly seeded teams and using that knowledge to make informed picks.
What a chump, right?
It seems that each year, no matter how much basketball I watch from December to February, everything I thought I knew about the sport gets turned on its head once March rolls around. Suddenly, my top seeds start dropping like flies, the squads I wrote off as opening-round flops start putting together Cinderella runs, and quicker than you can say “John Wooden,” I’ve seen my bracket completely busted.
Sure, part of it is my fault. Every time the tournament rolls around, I get caught between thinking with my head and my heart and end up pushing the one team I root for, Villanova, into the Elite 8, despite the fact that I know full well that Jay Wright’s crew has a long history of disappointing exits.
As a result, my brackets tend to be disasters. To add insult to injury, my colleagues, many of whom have no interest in sports whatsoever, routinely top my picks in our inter-office pool.
It’s a bad look when a sports editor can’t come through during the one time a year his professional skills actually mean something.
So what am I to do? Do I simply go against my gut on every pick and push 15- and 16-seeds into the next round? Do I pick my teams based on nicknames? If so, how far do I roll the dice on the Cal State Bakersfield Roadrunners or the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks? Do I dare pick the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors over Kansas in the Sweet 16?
Heck, maybe I’ll give some love to the local teams in the tourney and predict first-round upset wins for Iona and Stony Brook.
Anything I choose to do will likely work out better than my normal strategy.
I’ll be honest; I don’t really care if I win the office pool. We don’t play for a tremendous amount of money, so no matter what happens, I’m going to have to come in to work in April.
All I want is to stay alive long enough that the second weekend of games will still mean something to me, even after Villanova gets ignominiously bounced before I even realize that the tourney has kicked off.
And if I can retain some shred of dignity as a sports editor, that would be even better.
