Bracketology

There was a big thing a few years back about creating NCAA type brackets of everything. Which seems dumb and not even that funny.

I may just be bitter because once again my bracket is totally fucked. I have Kansas winning it all, which is obviously a terrible idea, because the history of Kansas is not so swell, plus they just barely escaped Davidson, but none of that even matters because I have Kansas beating Duke in the final game.

My brackets always wind up totally screwed up. Some of it's because certain schools like Cincinnati (which I did not know I did not know how to spell until just this past moment) and Indiana and Oral Roberts and Cal in those freakish years it makes the tourney (as I like to call it) suck me in. And then, and this is the second thing, the bracket takes on a life of its own. You've picked, let's say, Oral Roberts to beat Pittsburgh, and Cornell to beat Stanford (by the way, only one of those examples is from real life) and all of a sudden you find yourself staring down a situation where Xavier is your obvious choice for national champion, although this year I really should have picked Xavier to go all the way -- I would be better off right now.

My brackets represent to me, in their history of tragedy, my failed quest for sports legitimacy. There are currents in the air of sports that I just don't feel. I didn't think Kobe Bryant would be that good. I didn't think there was anyway the Dwayne Wade-led Heat would win the NBA championship that year. And my brackets always suck.

But I would just like to say, that for all the griping about the BCS computers and their arbitrary and random selection process, that it's not like brackets always lead to such great decision making either. Head to head competition, not always as sensible as it looks.