March MADness

Every year is the same. I get excited for the NCAA tournament and spend a couple of hours researching the teams, reading what the experts are predicting, and carefully making picks only to watch my bracket go down in flames and some girl that doesn't know the "board" from the "paint" take first place. In speaking with other college basketball fans, I've realized that this is a common-place occurence. The less one knows about basketball, the greater chance he or she (probably she) has of winning the pool. While I don't know that I'll ever fully understand why, I've come up with some theories.

1. Team Loyalty

No matter how well I know that BYU is going to lose in the first round like they do every year, I cannot bring myself to make that prediction. In fact, I have a difficult time predicting a BYU loss in the final four! Could it be that others suffer from the same problem? Loyalty to their team drives them to make picks that they otherwise would not have made? And this doesn't just affect the games that BYU plays in or would have played in. I'm also picking the teams that BYU played during the season to win their games. Meanwhile, Ms. Ooh-Look-at-Me-I'm-in-First-Place doesn't care who wins and is not plagued by that handicap.

2. Top Seed Pickers

If you have never seen either team play, what's the only clue that you have as to which team will win? Well, let's see. This team is ranked higher than that team, so they must be better. Unfortunatley, most of the time that's the way it turns out. The best evidence for this theory is the fact that in the final four, when the top seed-pickers have to choose between four #1 seed teams, they fall apart. They have no idea who to pick and the rest of us start to catch up.

3. Predicting the Upset

Real basketball fans (in other words, those of us that are naive enough to think we can actually predict who's going to win because we're so basketball savvy and smart) pride themselves on predicting upsets. Everyone is going to pick #4 over #13, so if I pick #13 and they win...that'll be something. It's too tempting. And we always pick the wrong #13 and they get blown out even though the experts raved about how underrated they were.

4. The Basketball Gods

Lounging in his Lay-Z-Boy in front of a giant plasma TV atop Mount Olympus is the god of basketball. He despises pathetic mortals like myself that attempt to predict NCAA tournament winners. And so he guides last-second desperation shots through the basket to send San Diego and Western Kentucky into the second round. And he wants more fans for the game of basketball, so he inspires clueless people who don't care about the game to make those picks so they get a kick out of winning and start to enjoy the game.