How to Beat the Brackets
by Bob Cook
At this time of year, someone from your office, dorm or cellblock is passing around a smudged copy of the NCAA men's tournament bracket, imploring you (or in the case of the cellblock, threatening you with a shiv) to fill out the paper and send in $10 for the annual pool.
The challenge before you: From 64 games, pick the winner of each contest, all the way to the final. It's not as daunting as you think.
You may say: "I don't know anything about basketball. I don't even know what a basketball looks like." Don't worry. You can still win your pool, if you follow this sage advice. I have great experience — in about 20 years of entering pools (I started young), I've won once! But I've watched other people win and studied their technique. So here are a few ways to ensure that, even if you don't know Gonzaga from Winthrop, you can clean up in the pool over those know-it-alls who drop phrases like "pick and roll" and "Dickie V" just to make you feel like a girl (even if you're a boy):
- Pick every No. 1 seed over a No. 16 seed. No. 16 has never beaten No. 1. This would be like the guy who plays 2nd Man in Car winning the Oscar over Denzel Washington.
- Choose the team with the meanest nickname. Duke Blue Devils, good. Penn Quakers, bad. If you can't figure out which team is meaner, use the nicknames to create a fighting scenario, like a collegiate version of rock-paper-scissors. For example, the Wisconsin Badgers against the St. John's Red Storm. The Red Storm sounds mean, but Badgers can just burrow a hole
and watch it go overhead. Therefore, pick Wisconsin.
- If the nickname game confounds you, try the team with the meanest color. Red and black are good, teal and turquoise, no way. Missouri may be the lower seed, but its black and gold is much feistier than Miami's Floridian blue and red.
- For Notre Dame vs. Charlotte, in which both teams wear green and have similarly historically ornery nicknames (Fighting Irish vs. 49ers), remember that God has abandoned Notre Dame football and has moved onto basketball.
- The team with the fewest headbands will win. Headbands: they're so 2000!
- Teams with 6-foot white guys whom announcers insist on calling "heady players," or "hard-working shooters," or "the ones who do all the little things that don't show up in the boxscore," and all those other euphemisms for 6-foot white guys, don't last more than a game or two.
- There will be one low-seeded team, usually a 12 or 13, that inexplicably makes it into the final 16. Because you know nothing about basketball, you will pick that team, thereby driving crazy every Direct TV addict in your vicinity.
- A Bob Knight-coached team will be gone by the second round. Remember, that team is now Texas Tech, not Indiana.
- If nothing else, pick whatever college you attended (assuming you went to college) to win the whole thing. At least you won't be in conflict, wanting your school to lose so you can win $100. Then again, if you hated your school, if it was the kind of place where the RA always seemed to be over in a minute if he or she smelled clove cigarettes or sensed a member of the opposite sex in the room, if the professors were all blowhards who spent more time trying to hit on you than teach you, if your fellow students were merely a bunch of glorified redneck Greeks who thought stuffing jellybeans up a freshman's ass and making them run outside with their cheeks tightened, lest the jellybeans fall out and the offending pledge has to eat them, then feel free to pick against it.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
