March Madness

For me, March Madness means muffled screams from Mom floating up the basement stairs. I remember hoping the neighbors didn’t hear because, even though we could have easily explained that she was down there watching college basketball and that she got really worked up about it, we still would have been looked at with suspicion.

I don’t share my mother’s passion for college hoops. I understand the game, I enjoy watching it when it happens to be on, but I don’t go mental for it. And I certainly don’t follow the teams well enough to be able to fill out the Championship bracket this time of year with any sort of expertise. But every year I can’t help but want to be a part of the group. So I fill out my bracket and send it to my mom and she sends hers back and Eric tracks them, along with the brackets of all his family and friends, in order to see who has the most points at the end of the tournament and that person wins exactly zero dollars. It’s all about bragging rights, even though we can never remember who won last year.

I believe in chaos theory over Cinderella stories or the dominance of those historically great basketball programs like Duke or UCLA. I believe that no matter how many regular season games you watch, no matter how many stats you crunch, you can never truly predict the outcome of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament…it’s nearly impossible. Last year something like a million people posted their brackets online on ESPN’s site and only two, TWO people out of that million picked all the winners of all the games. No no no, studying college basketball teams is not how you win. There must be a different way.

Last year I pit school mascots against each other. The tiny, gentle jayhawks from Kansas surprised the hell out of me by besting the much larger and stronger tigers from Memphis. Sounds like an Aesop fable but it really happened.

This year I went with alumni fist fights. I spent three hours online researching each of the 64 schools in the first round; making notes of well known alumni from across various disciplines, taking into account worldwide fame and longevity, and allowing the most famous alum to rise to the top. Using the NCAA predetermined match-ups in the first round, I then imagined the alums (each at their peak physically) into a boxing ring and made them fight it out.

Here is my bracket:


For those who can’t read it, which should be all of you, let me just run through some highlights for you:

-Don Knotts was less-than-gentlemanly with Erma Bombeck
-Wink Martindale distracted Paula Abdul with something shiny, giving him the KO edge
-Hunter S. Thompson’s inability to feel physical pain allowed him to outlast Charles Lindburgh
-Gene Hackman took a bite out of bakery mogul Duncan Hines
-Madonna taught Strom Thurman a painful lesson
-Geraldo Rivera kicked Karl Rove’s ass, I think it was the moustache

I had Bruce Lee going kung fu crazy on Shaquille O’Neal in the final round, with finesse and speed beating power and size. Unfortunately my alma mater the University of Washington and LSU were both knocked out in the second round. One of these days I’ll hit on the perfect formula.

Next year I’m going with a College President swimsuit competition.

gretch