A Method to the March Madness

March is one of my favorite months. It has the best holiday in St. Patrick’s Day (really, can you get an better than a holiday that celebrates drinking and being Irish?) and the weather begins to get better. But most importantly, March is when one of the greatest sporting events known to mankind takes place: the Iditarod Dog-Sled Race.

I was just joking of course. Dog-sledding combines three of my least favorite things in the world: snow, dogs, and moving fast, so needless to say the very concept of dog-sledding offends me. I was actually talking about March Madness. For those of you who might not know what March Madness is (cough, cough, women), March Madness is the tournament that determines men’s college basketball champion every year. 64 teams compete in a single elimination tournament that goes on over the course of three weeks. This means that the national champion is determined by actual games, whereas the college football champion is largely determined by some sort of mystical entity called the BCS, which takes into account a team’s record, voter opinions, the alignment of Saturn, the migration patterns of Maine lobsters, and Liza Minnelli’s mood every morning to determine who gets to play for the title.

But that isn’t the only thing that makes the tournament so wonderful. During the first couple of rounds, there are up to 32 games to be played in a day. This means a lot of basketball games to watch, which takes time away from unproductive and unpleasant tasks, like work. And not only do we get hours upon hours of games, but they are always exciting. That’s because if a game becomes boring, the station simply switches to a more entertaining game. This is good, because we really don’t need to see some Ivy League school get blasted by a bunch of guys who have servants to take their exams for them.

And I haven’t even gotten to the best part of March Madness: the brackets. It’s tradition to fill out a bracket for the tournament, predicting the winners of each game. This is great, since normally gambling on sports is frowned upon (or at least that’s what they said when my friend and I tried to get an AYSO sports book going). But this is the one time of the year when everybody fills out a bracket, even people who know as much about basketball as French women know about shaving.

The crazy thing is that the tournament is so unpredictable that often the people who know the least about basketball often end up making good picks. Everybody has their own strategy for picking games. In fact, a lot of people I’ve talked to actually choose based on the school’s mascots. However, this can get tricky, since it is possible this year that the Minnesota Gophers meet the Richmond Spiders. I hate spiders, and I’m not exactly sure if I’ve ever had to think about how I feel about gophers. Also, what if the Syracuse Orange meat the North Texas Mean Green? They should make a law against giving your school a lame mascot, and a color is definitely a lame mascot. And don’t even get me started on what would happen if the Villanova Wildcats meet the Kansas State Wildcats, with the winner then meeting the Kentucky Wildcats (and yes, this is a possible scenario).

So you should follow my advice, because I am very consistent. The teams I pick are great. The only problem they have is they tend not to score as many points as the other team. My brackets normally tank worse than Nicholas Cage movies. This might be because I have a hard time staying objective. For instance, in the first round Florida plays Brigham Young University. I don’t really like BYU because they used to beat up Hawaii in football and I don’t really get Mormonism. (I mean, being married to one woman is stressful enough, but who is stupid enough to marry five? And they have to do this without the help of drugs). But I hate the University of Florida because Tim Tebow is the spawn of the devil. So for the Florida-BYU game I picked Penn State, because I don’t want either team to win. It’s these types of decisions that normally do me in, seeing as it will be hard for Penn State to win a game they technically are not involved in.

So I’ve filled out a bracket with a Final Four of Syracuse, Duke, Kansas and Kentucky, with Kentucky beating Syracuse in the final. But that probably won’t happen. I am more likely to steal a leprechaun’s pot of gold. Although come to think of it, I already did that today. But I might want to let him go, because there’s an amber alert out for an Irish kid who looks a lot like the leprechaun I have locked in the basement.