03/21/24

3/21/2024

Want to get away from it all? The daily grind, the tough-to-solve challenges, the folks who bug you, the recurring insoluble problems?

For a few weeks there’s a possible solution: it’s March Madness time.

The brackets are out. Sixty-eight men’s college basketball teams, and 68 women’s teams, make up The Chosen Few who start down the yellow brick road toward ultimate victory in the NCAA tournaments.

Congratulations if your favorite team made it in. Sympathies if it didn’t. But in or out, you can still make your selections for winners in each round, and if you wish, try to lord it over your good buddies who do the same thing.

The start of March Madness is much like Opening Day of the major league baseball season. You take a deep breath, envision your team sweeping all competitors before it, and imagine what it will be like to watch your heroes cut down the nets when they prove victorious in the Final Four.

Well, maybe it’s not quite like Opening Day. In baseball, all teams are eligible to win the World Series at the start of the season. In March Madness, your team is already out of luck if they didn’t make the cut of 68.

 But you can get that exhilarating rush all the same, by filling out your brackets and anticipating the first round of games.

For many years now our extended family has conducted a brackets contest. Whoever chooses to enter will fill out a brackets form and forward it to me: I get to be the scorekeeper. The brackets will come in from all over, including Austin, Raleigh, and Phoenix. After each day’s round of games I tote up each competitor’s score and email the updated total to all entrants.

There is probably an unlimited number of ways to handle competitive scoring for March Madness brackets. We do it by ignoring the few “zero round” play-in games, and then starting the scoring with Thursday’s first-round games.

In our particular competition each first-round win counts as one point. That makes for 32 possible first-round points, since there are 64 teams competing (after the play-in games are done).

Then those 32 winning teams compete in the second round, and we give two points for each winner in that round. That means there are 16 second-round winners, with another 32 points possible points.

By now everyone will have missed an alarming number of picks. My personal target is to score 24 of the possible 32 first-round points and maybe 16 points in the second round. I rarely achieve that goal, but it’s something to shoot for.

Scoring continues in that fashion: three points for third-round winners, four points for the fourth round, and five points for each of the two Final Four winners. Then we give 10 points for picking the eventual NCAA champion.

There’s no money involved – it’s more than enough to win bragging rights over everyone else for the next 12 months.

We will have around a dozen family members competing this year. One of the beauties of the contest, if you’re not a deep-dive college basketball fanatic, is that there are always enough upsets to keep you competitive for several rounds even if you’ve made what the others think are some really dumb picks.

There are times when the supposed experts among us have to eat a sizable plateful of crow. One year I battled it out with Ozzie, Dave and Erin’s golden retriever, for last place.

Every year I reason with myself that the greatest experts at March Madness are the NCAA selection committee members, who decide the seeding for the 68 competing teams. How could I do any better than simply pick the higher seed for each first-round game?

But when it comes time to fill out my brackets, I will always decide I know better than the NCAA committee members which team will upset the favorite in a particular game. It’s always a huge rush when I’m right on those games. Usually I’m wrong.

This year, as in past years, we’re doing the men’s brackets only. I expect that’s because, even with the tremendous current interest in women’s basketball thanks to Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes, we don’t know much at all about 90 percent of the other women’s college teams.

I hope that in a few years we’ll be well versed enough in women’s hoops that we can do both men’s and women’s brackets.

Anyway, by the time you read this, our family coven will be intently watching the results of March Madness 2004, with no doubt a little trash talking on the side.

And for Hawk fans like me, let there be no doubt: we’re all Cyclones