So, it's March; the time that tries men's and women's souls. I speak not of the war—excuse me, the skirmish, the undertaking, the conflict, the adventure, the Weekend at Bernie's, whatever the administration is calling it this week. But I speak of March Madness, when suddenly the entire country utters "bracket," a word that rarely comes up in casual conversation the other 11 months of the year.
Actually, what you hear most is "busted bracket." You make so many wrong picks in the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament that you're out of it by Sunday night. So the way I see it, filling out the entire bracket is a frustrating waste of time.
You could try a blind draw. The perfect number for a blind draw pool is eight players. People who don't follow the sport love the blind draw because they're convinced that other people in the pool are doing all sorts of magical research, not understanding the first rule of sports prognostication: nobody knows anything. One year I was actually on the college basketball beat for Sports Illustrated and still finished last in my family pool. One of my grandsons beat me by making his selections based on mascots and school colors.
In the blind draw, each of the eight players gets eight teams. But, and this is important, before doing the blind draw, divide your picks into eight categories; 15 and 16 seeds together, 14 and 13 seeds together, etc., right up to one and two seeds.
That means that though the draw is blind, every player is guaranteed to get either a one or two seed. Believe it or not, it usually works out fairly equitably, and the people who don't follow the sport feel they have a fighting chance, which they did to begin with.
But a better idea is the way I currently run our family pool, which also takes into account seeding and rewards taking a chance on lower seeds. It's about points. First off, it's three pools. One for each weekend. The first weekend, the one coming up, is for the Sweet 16. Your challenge is to pick the 16 teams that will make it to the second weekend.
Now, to make it easier, divide the bracket into couplets of games. The ones on the top of the left, that's Duke versus Sienna and Ohio State versus TCU. That's a couplet. There will be 16 of them. You'll be picking three games for each couplet with one team advancing from each couplet.
For the sake of argument, let's go to the Lehigh line because I'm recording this just a few blocks from the Lehigh campus. It's the middle of the left side if you're looking. Let's assume Lehigh wins its play-in game on Wednesday night and meets Florida, a number one seed. Should Lehigh beat Florida—oh, CJ McCollum, where are you now?—the Mountain Hawks would get one point for a first round victory, plus the 16 points from its seed. The other game in its couplet is Clemson vs. Iowa. Let's say Lehigh beats Clemson after beating Florida, so they would get three points for a second round win, plus it's 16 points for the seed.
It sounds complicated, but it's not, and a winner is declared after the first week. And then you reconstruct the pool with the team teams that are left. You have a Final Four pool, and also a Finals pool.
But look, maybe you like the traditional idea of filling out the whole bracket, and maybe this is your year to turn into Nostradamus and go for that perfect bracket. You should know that the odds of picking a perfect bracket are, and I'm not making this up, one in 9.2 quintillion. There has never been a perfect one. The longest a March Madness bracket has stayed perfect is 49 games. So I would urge you to try the point system and get three chances to be a winner. Don't go bust on the first weekend.
