Think you've got a foolproof NCAA bracket? Think again

March Madness: I Feel Sorry for You and Your Silly Little Bracket

Oliver Lee Bateman has a warning for all the March Madness bracketologists out there.

Yeah, I really do feel sorry for you. Think you’ve got the inside dope, don’t you? Confident that you’ve got all of your ducks in a row, huh? No way Kentucky’s going to let you down, is there?

Well, I’m here to tell you something very important: none of this matters. I don’t care whether you’ve got a subscription to kenpom.com or Basketball Prospectus. It doesn’t make any difference how carefully you’ve crunched the numbers on Statsheet.com. Even having Dick Vitale on speed dial won’t guarantee victory.

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I can write this with absolute confidence because I’ve been participating in these pools since the early 1990s and I’ve won only once, during my senior year of high school. ONCE IN FIFTEEN YEARS. Years of fruitless study, of memorizing starting fives on forgotten teams like the ’98 Valparaiso Crusaders and the ’02 UNC-Wilmington Seahawks…all for naught, and all because I’ve kept having really good feelings about Notre Dame (note to anyone reading this: never, ever pick the Notre Dame men’s basketball team to win a postseason game).

So this year I’ve made a bunch of brackets that consist exclusively of my picking the higher seed to beat the lower seed, with Kentucky winning the whole shebang in a 73-72 rematch of their earlier game with UNC-Chapel Hill. My chances of winning the “national contests” are still about as good as winning the Powerball, but at least this time I won’t feel like garbage when I lose to the person who hasn’t wasted his or life paying attention to this stuff and has instead picked all of his winners based on where their school colors fall along the color spectrum.

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However, if you must lay money on a sleeper, go with Lamar. How could a bunch of kids whom Pat Knight ridiculed in one of the most virulent (and thus most viral) press conferences of 2012-2013 not want to win it all for their awesome coach? It’s got the potential to turn out exactly like the plot of the legendary baskeball comedy Juwanna Man, except not at all.

Comments

Jamie Reidy says:

March 21, 2012 at 11:48 am

OLB, I was so freaking pissed on Friday night, when poor decision making and sloppy ball control rendered me unable to comment, “Don’t pick Notre Dame, HUH?!” In the sports book of a Vegas casino, fired up on bourbon and the Irish…ARGH. Hated admitting you were right. Good call.

Oliver Lee Bateman says:

March 21, 2012 at 5:38 pm

I called 26 of the first 32 games correctly. One of the misses? Notre Dame-Xavier, of course. But that was a nonsense “lane violation” at the end of that game.