Spring Break
Picking the tournament champ a different way
Kevin Meacham
Issue date: 3/19/09 Section: Sports
Today is the single greatest day in sports. The first day of the NCAA Tournament is 12 hours of continuous basketball stimulation. It's also the point at which most of our carefully considered brackets are rendered completely irrelevant.
Whether you pick your bracket based on watching hours of game film and reading 20 different Web sites for analysis, you'll be kicking yourself in 10 hours for not picking that 5-12 upset. So why trouble your mind with the frustration of deciding between LSU or Butler? Instead, do what I do: rely on complete randomness and the mystical power of The Daily Campus' Magic Bracket-Picking Hat.
For those who may not remember, DC alumnus Dan Olender turned haphazard guesses and utter statistical improbability into a fake science. As I did Wednesday afternoon, he put the names of all 64 teams into a hat and pulled them out randomly, one-by-one.The first team picked in a given matchup advanced to the next round.
The archives show that Olender picked 16th-seeded Central Connecticut State (lost in first round) to reach the 2007 Final Four. Last year, his national champion, Stanford (lost in Sweet 16), knocked off George Mason (first round) and West Virginia (Sweet 16) to take the prize. This is the type of analysis that could be literally called priceless (because nobody would pay anything for it).
That having been said, maybe that's just his poor mojo.
So I resolved to defy the odds and randomly select a bracket that might have a chance to win some money, and perhaps help some of the good people at UConn. The results, done under the supervision of assorted Daily Campus staffers, are as follows:
First Round
The first round went rather smoothly. Top seeds Pittsburgh, Louisville and North Carolina left the hat in short order, keeping my hopes alive.
But, since this exercise is a coin flip, some negatives made themselves apparent early on. Robert Morris and Morgan State, the 15th seeds in the Midwest and South regions, respectively, each were selected prior to Michigan State and Oklahoma, their heavily favored first-round opponents.
Whether you pick your bracket based on watching hours of game film and reading 20 different Web sites for analysis, you'll be kicking yourself in 10 hours for not picking that 5-12 upset. So why trouble your mind with the frustration of deciding between LSU or Butler? Instead, do what I do: rely on complete randomness and the mystical power of The Daily Campus' Magic Bracket-Picking Hat.
For those who may not remember, DC alumnus Dan Olender turned haphazard guesses and utter statistical improbability into a fake science. As I did Wednesday afternoon, he put the names of all 64 teams into a hat and pulled them out randomly, one-by-one.The first team picked in a given matchup advanced to the next round.
The archives show that Olender picked 16th-seeded Central Connecticut State (lost in first round) to reach the 2007 Final Four. Last year, his national champion, Stanford (lost in Sweet 16), knocked off George Mason (first round) and West Virginia (Sweet 16) to take the prize. This is the type of analysis that could be literally called priceless (because nobody would pay anything for it).
That having been said, maybe that's just his poor mojo.
So I resolved to defy the odds and randomly select a bracket that might have a chance to win some money, and perhaps help some of the good people at UConn. The results, done under the supervision of assorted Daily Campus staffers, are as follows:
First Round
The first round went rather smoothly. Top seeds Pittsburgh, Louisville and North Carolina left the hat in short order, keeping my hopes alive.
But, since this exercise is a coin flip, some negatives made themselves apparent early on. Robert Morris and Morgan State, the 15th seeds in the Midwest and South regions, respectively, each were selected prior to Michigan State and Oklahoma, their heavily favored first-round opponents.
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