Move over midterms, make way for Madness

By: Eri Goodman

Posted: 3/13/08

March Midterm Madness is over here at Hopkins, so let the basketball March Madness begin. On Sunday, the NCAA Selection Committee for the Men's Division-I college basketball tournament will pick the 65 teams that will compete in the single elimination competition to determine the national champion. Shortly thereafter, millions around the country will try to guess the winners of 64 games, with a list of schools ranging from the well-known to the relatively obscure.

March Madness, as it has been called for decades now, manages to capture the hearts and minds of people everywhere, not just sports fans. American companies stand to lose billions of dollars in lost wages and productivity from workers who spend more time deciding which mid-major's backcourt could potentially upend an ACC powerhouse's than working on TPS reports.

Many feel there is no skill involved in picking a winning bracket and that it is completely luck. But I, as an avid basketball fan who has placed in the top two in every pool I have entered for the last three years, think that there is a science to the Madness. Below are a few bracketology tips which should come in handy come Sunday.

1) Pick Your Own Bracket.

I know that many of us are tempted to base our picks off professional analysis and create mimic brackets of so-called "experts." But if everyone in your pool has virtually the same bracket, when an upset happens that "experts" cannot foresee, the smart bracketeer who went against the grain will come out on top.

Another key is not to take advice from friends or family, who may actually know less than you do or could be throwing a smokescreen at you in an attempt to make you pick an almost surefire loser. I learned the family part of this at an early age. When I showed my dad the first bracket I ever filled out, which had Bucknell, a 14-seed, defeating Kansas, a three-seed, my dad harshly criticized the stupidity of the pick. Going on his confidence, I switched, making Kansas the victor and then having them ride that "automatic" win into the elite eight. Sure enough, Bucknell defeated Kansas 64-63, and I was left shaking my head as my new elite eight pick Kansas was sent back to Lawrence.

2) George Mason is not this year's George Mason.

Most of us remember the then 11th-seeded George Mason's magical run to the final four in 2006. That was a truly fantastic feat in its own right, but the GMU Patriots, who are automatically in this year's NCAA tournament as the winner of the Colonial Athletic Association tournament, will not have a repeat of that magic.

In fact, I'm convinced that that no team will be this year's George Mason. The reason for this lies in the NBA rule change, which affected college hoops starting the season after GMU's Final Four run, which forced the phenoms set to go straight from high school to the NBA to spend at least one year in college. Most of these players are now at powerhouse, big name basketball schools including Memphis, Oklahoma, Duke, Gonzaga, Indiana and UCLA. These schools will all make the NCAA tournament, and frontloading at these schools makes the odds of making a deep tourney run for a school like GMU, Siena or Austin Peay, two other automatic bids with likely low seeds, that much smaller.

3) Superstars = Superflops

It may seem easy to think that the top player in the nation could lead his team to the title. But recently, that has been proven false. With the exception of 2001, when Shane Battier led Duke to the title, the team of the winner of the Naismith Award for the nation's college player of the year has not taken home the championship trophy since 1992. In fact, in the 15 tournaments since 1992, the team of the Naismith winner has only made the championship game once and only made the final four two other times. While this year the player of the year award is up in the air, with Kansas State's Michael Beasley, North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough and UCLA's Kevin Love being the frontrunners, it may be a safe bet for now to not have any of those three teams winning it all.

4) Screw the Ivy League.

Many students at Hopkins do not necessarily like the Ivy League, for reasons which I don't need to explain. Each year the Ivy League's regular season champion gets an automatic bid to March Madness.

This year's winner was Cornell, making it the first year since 1988 that a non UPenn/Princeton team will be in the tournament. Since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, an Ivy League team has only made it out of the first round three times, and never past the second round. The only guarantee in life is death, but you can be pretty sure Cornell will not advance past round two and probably will watch the second round of games from the bleachers.

5) When in doubt, go with the animal.

It would be hard for me to go back through every tournament game and determine the origin of each mascot, but in a sampling of all the final four games since 1985, there has only been one year where no teams with animal mascots were in the final four, and just under half of all final four teams in that 23-year span had mascots which were animals. Thus, if need be, it may not be a completely stupid option to pick the Belmont Bruins over Duke or UNC.

6) Anything can happen!

Nothing else really needs to be said. This is what makes March Madness so special, that anything, truly anything, can happen.