March Malarkey: The 2003 NCAA Tournament
by Flak Staff

In a country where many spend their daylight hours in windlowless cubicles or offices with views of parking lots, the NCAA tournament is as good a sign of spring as any. Rather than walking in the park, spotting the first robin, retiring the rain gear or feeling jubilation at the sight of melting snow, it's pondering whether Duke will get the first-round bounce it deserves that accelerates our heart rates and sets the tone for a summer of good times.

Every year, office workers go gaga on "Bracket Monday," when some office sports geek passes out a sheet of white paper with a 64- or 65-team tournament bracket written on it. Spring has sprung, and the pencil-and-paper ritual is an early signpost.

Also sucking people into March Madness' magic is the office pool's reinforcement of our world's unpredictability, as well as the principles of equality on which America was founded: You can spend hours — no days — honing the perfect strategy — carefully breaking down the winning percentage of 15-seeds playing against 2-seeds east of the Mississippi on odd Fridays — only to be beaten by your human resource manager's clueless dart-throwing monkey of a brother who picked Coppin State over South Carolina in 1997 simply because Coppin State instilled in him some kind of word-association nostalgia for his childhood penny collection.

This uncertainty has only been compounded by the increasing stream of defections to the pros. Back in the day, vast knowledge of college basketball allowed a handicapper to pick winners more easily. But the best teams just aren't what they used to be, adding bizarre rhythms to the once simple and predictable Big Dance.

Thus, the Fates of the NCAA tournament are more fickle than ever. They can bestow their charms upon the most knowledgeable, best-equipped handicapper who seems to possess all the tools to win the pot. Or they can reward some ignorant, pimple-faced IT intern who's never so much as dribbled a basketball, let alone developed anything resembling a coherent strategy to pick a winner. All is fair and everyone is on equal footing in bracketology, which is more than one can say for love and war.

To that end, we've kickstarted Flak's own NCAA pool. Our basketball savants (and our pimple-faced IT interns) have scratched their heads and put pen (or, more commonly, the more temporary pencil) to paper to come up with their own lists of who will win and why. Our methodology varies from the painstakingly scientific to the wildly whimsical.

After each round, we'll check in to see which methods win out, using a 1-2-4-8-16-32 scoring system (1 point for a correct first-round pick, 2 for a second-round pick, etc.). As we do this, keep in mind that the approach that wins out this year is likely to be useless next year.

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)