Seven Red

I have not watched an entire college basketball game all year. In fact, I haven’t watched a complete basketball game in probably a few years. Here are the results of my brackets for the NCAA tournament, with the coming week’s games excluded:

All in all, not bad, I’d say. I could still have a complete sweep of the Elite Eight at this point, supposing all goes the way I thought it would (which I guess gives away three of my picks for the next round). But 24 out of 32 for the first round, and 13 of 16 for the second? Is that good? I don’t even know. It’s a little over 77%. It seems alright to me. I did better than most NY Times sports columnists.

I’m not a big gambler. I like playing poker, but even then, I play “tight,” which means I don’t gamble a lot. I’m alright with that. I never gambled on sports, and apart from a little sidewalk game we played growing up (called Cee-Low), I never really liked dice. But when I was growing up, all my friends bet sports, and one summer it was particularly out of control, with bets into The Book on hockey, on baseball, ridiculous. It does make the games more interesting, however, when you’re watching with people who have money down on them, and you’re wtaching not the raw score, but the spread. One thing I learned from this was that The Book is mostly right. That’s the principle here. In the East and South brackets, the 1 through 4 teams end up in the Sweet Sixteen. In the Midwest and West brackets, the 1 through 3 teams end up in the third round, with only minor variations after that: Purdue as the fifth ranked team gets through, and then you have the anomaly of twelfth-ranked Arizona getting in after the blow-up of Wake Forest. Lesson: The Book is mostly right. The key is to pick and choose the slight variations where The Book is wrong – harder in the first round than overall. But I did manage to pick a few even there (Maryland over California, USC over BC, and – my triumph thus far – Western Kentucky over Illinois). I picked Portland State over Xavier as a kind of wacky upset, but that effed up my East bracket. If I had kept to the principle, I’d be in better shape. The 8-9 match-ups are you-pick-ems, and I won some (Siena over Ohio State) and lost some (Oklahoma State over Tennessee). Note that both these games were extremely close, with Siena winning in the last three seconds of double-overtime, and the Oklahoma State-Tennesse match-up decided by only two points (74-72). Like I said, you-pick-em. Now, of course, it gets harder, since 1-4 and 2-3 match-ups are all kinda like 8-9 match-ups. This is where people who know far more than I do come in with injury reports and player-on-player match-ups, and all the other stuff that leads The Book to be mostly right. We shall see.

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