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brackets

March 17th, 2006 | sport, tv

I don’t watch much, if any, NCAA basketball during the season. I rarely even know what team is ranked #1. But come March I always feel the need to fill out the tournament brackets. The weird thing is that I could really care less about basketball. This hurts my bracket-filling-out-ability because I know very little about which teams are playing well and may win the tourney versus the teams that are lucky just to be included. Sure I know a few schools like Duke, North Carolina, UConn, and Kansas are usually good…but when did Memphis and Villanova start playing well enough to bring them #1 seeds?

Come tourney time I still don’t make an effort to watch the games; I just want to know the final scores so I can see how I did with my brackets. I guess the only reason I keep doing it year after year is because I never do awful. What’s my definition of awful? Awful would be getting more picks wrong than correct in the first round. Awful would be having none of your Elite Eight picks making to the Elite Eight. I enjoy the brackets because there have been a few years when I actually pick the correct team to win it all, and I always have at least one pick in the final four. Bracket picking is all luck really.

There are other fun things about the tourney besides checking your own brackets. The most fun is watching sports presenters on tv or reading columns by the pundits that turn out to be wrong. How can it not be fun to watch some idiot say in the pregame chats “there is no way team A can beat team B” only to see team B lose by 20 points? Then there are the times when a pundit will write a column about “why Team C doesn’t deserve to be in the tourney” only to then watch Team C win the whole tournament. Yes it’s fun.

Brackets are also fun because you can tell exactly how people around you are doing with their brackets. For example, pretend the person at the desk next to yours fills out brackets. At the start of the tournament they will probably be checking scores every chance they get. If the tournament gets into the Elite Eight and they are still checking scores, one could guess that said person is doing well. But if the tournament gets to the sweet 16 or Elite Eight and said person suddenly stops checking scores it would be a wise guess that their picks got knocked out and their brackets are full of crossed-out picks. At this time the person who doesn’t fill out brackets can walk past and ask with a smile “so how are the brackets going?” only to get a look of disgust in return.

So whether others think it’s dumb or not, I enjoy filling out brackets each year. The first night of the tourney is over and I’m 13/16. Oh well. At least I didn’t have any of the three that I missed getting past the 2nd round.

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