Of the thousands of readers who submitted NCAA tournament picks on the New York Times online site, I am currently ranked 8928th. This is a tremendous improvement over yesterday, when I was ranked around 15,000th.
Considering that I've never filled out a bracket before, 8928th is not too shabby. It's hard to believe, but apparently there are thousands of people out there even worse at picking college basketball tournament winners than I am. In making my picks, I employed the English Alma Mater Method: if one of my English department colleagues graduated from a contending institution, I picked that team to win. Marquette, Louisville, Temple, and Ohio University let me down really early, but my Purdue colleague is still in the game--and let's not forget that I earned my M.A. from the University of Kentucky.
Of course I was a UK student for two and a half years without ever attending a basketball game, nor have I actually watched any of this year's games, although we do listen to the Ohio State games on the radio, which, for me, is similar to not listening at all. Basketball on the radio sounds like what you'd get if you locked an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of basketballs, microphones, and buzzers.
No, I don't care about basketball games as games; I care about whether the final score will lift me above 8928th place. The Times has promised an iPad to whoever comes out on top. They don't say what sort of prize they've reserved for 8928th.
2 comments:
Boiler up! Yippee. So--you've got a chance. A kid whose been 100% right so far chose Purdue as the winner. Unfortunately...he based that on pure sentimentality (his bro's schools) whereas everything else was picked according to mathematical probability...
Update: As of this morning, I've moved up to 1261st place. How can this be? How can so many thousands of people be worse at picking winning basketball teams than I am?
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