I’m not going to pretend that I know more than the average college basketball fan who has been disheartened by a crappy program. However, I will say that the two rules I employ for picking brackets have worked out beautifully thus far.
No. 1: Pick two No. 12 seeds to win. Montana delivered for me with its victory over Nevada. I’ve picked Texas A&M to defeat Syracuse for the other one, which doesn’t make me very popular around these parts. I could also see Pitt dropping its games, because the Panthers never look very impressive in crunch time. But underestimating them has burned me before.
No. 2: The Missouri Corollary. This rule helped me out big time last year, when I picked Kansas to lose to Bucknell in the first round, and favored Gonzaga to lose to Texas Tech in the second round. Basically, the rule is that any team that embarrasses itself against Missouri during the regular season will embarrass itself in the tournament.
So what happened this year? Well, Missouri, a team that dropped games against powerhouses such as Sam Houston State and Davidson, defeated Oklahoma in Norman. Accordingly, I picked Oklahoma to lose against Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and that the Sooners did.
Kansas was a tough pick here, because they too lost to Missouri during the regular season. But it was 1) a double-overtime loss in Columbia, 2) while Missouri was playing marginally well under Quin Snyder, and 3) before Kansas’ new guys really got into the mix. I consider the Jayhawks too different of a team to use the Mizzou Corollary against them, so if KU loses in the first two rounds, this tool will be more powerful than even I realized.
I have LSU, Villanova, UNC and Memphis making the Final Four, with Memphis defeating UNC in the championship game.
But then again, had I known before the
Xavier-Gonzaga game that the Musketeers had a player named Stanley Burrell, I
probably would’ve picked them. There
would’ve been something fitting about his team winning the Oakland bracket,
considering he used to be a batboy for the A’s.