Thursday, March 17, 2011

My Daughter, the Bracketologist


It's that time of the year again: March Madness. A time where school, job, and sometimes family take a back seat to the bracket. Many of us, I'm sure, have spent an hour or two trying to figure out the perfect bracket only to find out later today and tomorrow our bracket was as accurate as your office's curmudgeon is during one of his rants.

This year, I decided to take a different approach.

I still spent too much time on a bracket destined to give me nothing but heartbreak, but I decided to recruit someone who didn't really didn't care, and, in fact, most likely did not even know what was going on around: my two-year-old daughter.

She took all of the "science" out of it. The only thing she knew about college basketball is whatever was absorbed while she played with her toys during BYU games (and that was pre-Davies suspension, so how credible is that knowledge?).

We went through every game in the first round, and I held out both of my hands and gave her the match-up, with each hand representing one of the teams. Brilliant strategy.

Brilliant, that is, until she got tired of picking hands that had nothing in them. So we moved on to using two blocks - both red, both cubes. That also went well...until she found a blue block and decided to put it in the middle.

Then when I took that one away, assuming we were cleaning up, she would grab both red blocks at the same time and give them back to me. Foiled again!

I decided that, as a last resort, I would grab two character from her barnyard gang, and use them. While she did grab another one to join in on the fun, I was able to use these to finish out her very bracket.

Certainly, she has a lot of upsets picked that are, quite frankly, indefensible, but she ended up with a pretty coherent Final Four, with Ohio State winning it all.

What's the more pathetic thing: that I spent well over an hour filling out a bracket with someone who had neither an interest in it nor an idea as to what was even happening or that her bracket, even with the prediction of the first #16 to beat a #1 and other ridiculousness, might still beat plenty of people in my ESPN group: Jimmer and the Fredettes?

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