March Madness has officially come to an end as the Lady Vols beat down on Stanford earlier this evening, a game where not even the hype of two girls all over each other (Candice on Candice Part II) could get me to watch this pad straddling fest some call basketball. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for women's sports and achievements and all that garbage, but don't ask me watch it. I especially like the fact that Yahoo Sports page didn't even have an option to check the box score mid-game and ESPN failed to have the players names linked to a personal profile. Bravo.
But my real focus was on the tournament - the one not on the rag. Most people recognize men's college basketball by joining the office pool and filling out a bracket full of unknown teams with numbers by them. Fair enough, the regular season doesn't really matter anyway. But who tends to win these pools? Logic would lead you to believe the avid and knowledgeable sports fan would have the best chance. Others, through experience, realize the dumb blond who just randomly picks teams to win based on syllables, team colors, or the voices in their head has a great chance to win due to the amount of semi-unpredictable upsets in the tournament. In other words, things always happen that shouldn't happen...you just can't pick them unless you don't know any better.
I have never had much luck with this tournament and bracket shit, I feel as though I'm too rational of a person to predict the unpredictable. Maybe I'm just stupid, the point still remains I suck at this. Even worse, when the "knows nothing but likes to think he does" kid cashes in your "friendly" pool while you don't, it makes you wanna cry...or kill a bunch of homos. But that would be wrong.
So I started to think - why can't I ever win? Why don't I see those crazy upsets coming? As a scientist, I analyzed this years pool and finally figured it out. My whole mindset was wrong - the winning bracket has nothing to do with what games were picked, or even how many it got right. I was too focused accumulating the most total points to be the winner. That would make too much sense and be way too obvious. The decisive measure was the name of the bracket. Look at the data from my personal pool this year - the two bracket names that won money this year were "redwhiteandCarolinablue" and "awkward turtles." These names are clever, yet not crossing any lines. One is a patriotic pun representing UNC and USA, while the other is both a cartoon turtle and a universal hand signal. Clever, yet not offensive - that's what brings home the cash money. Now, my bracket name, "alabama hot pocket" (Google it), while quite clever and witty, crosses that line between winning and losing. I finished a respectable fourth, simply due to the slick name, but didn't win because I lacked class.
Lesson learned - don't worry about your picks, worry about the name. Don't spend all the hours before the tip of the tourney pondering matchups and upsets. That's precious time you could be using to come up with the perfect bracket name, the only true path to success. And if that flamboyant kid with the chronic giggle still wins it again next year, rest easy knowing that even God feels sorry for them once in a while. It's only fair.