It's Madness!

This time of year always reminds me why I don’t spend more time covering sports.
Like millions of Americans, I filled out a bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament that started last week. Actually, I filled out four. Each one was slightly different, and yet, improbably, after just four days of games each one was somehow equally wrong. I picked upsets that didn’t happen and didn’t pick the ones that did. I picked a team for the national championship game that lost in the first round. I’m not sure how it happened, but I think I might have picked one team that didn’t actually make the tournament and another school that I don’t think even has a basketball team.
None of it was pretty, but none of it was particularly surprising. I have a history of poor performance in tournament pools. My family has held a friendly competition since 1993. I have won just once, and I have the lowest cumulative score over the 14 years of the competition. And while my brother holds the honor of recording the lowest single-year score, I have the next-lowest score. And I’ve gotten it twice.
(A quick side note here: I just rattled off a whole lot of statistics about a competition that has been going on since I was in high school. I am able to do this because my father has tracked every year’s bracket in an Excel spreadsheet. He can tell you how any individual family scored in a given bracket, how many points a family member scores on average, even, I think, what each family member tends to eat while watching games. My dad’s kind of a dork.)
I’ve developed a reputation over these years of competition. It’s what my brother, as he looked over my picks for this year, called my “crazy-ass” upset pick. It’s a proud tradition that dates to the year, early on in the competition, that I picked Ball State to go to the Final Four. For the record, this year’s “crazy-ass” pick was 14th seed South Alabama over third seed Florida. For the record, Florida will come to the Metrodome this weekend to play in the Sweet 16. For the record, South Alabama won as many games this year as Ball State did the year I picked them. In other words, the Vegas sports books are not clamoring for my services, although they might like me to place a few bets.
I don’t know how to explain such consistent poor performance. I try to pay attention to college basketball. It’s one of the few sports in which I have more than a passing interest. I consider the brackets carefully. I try to play things safe with the occasional crazy-ass exception. And yet, year after year, I end up with a bracket that might as well have been filled out by a blind hermit who has never seen a basketball game and is unfamiliar with the entire bracket concept. Even the year I won my family pool was one of the worst years for scoring overall. This might start to get discouraging after a while.
There’s always next year, though, and I can feel my luck starting to turn around. I think South Alabama is going to bounce back strong.