The Iron Yuppie

ESPN Bracket Pages

Well there you go. Is there any thing sweeter to hear than March Madness is here? I may be 'coming down with something’, or 'getting ready to work offsite', or 'not be present', or ‘falsify company sick notices', or 'lie about working on days when I'm actually sitting in front of the TV on my fat ass watching 32 straight games of basketball on CBS uno through ocho thereby stealing from the company which has graciously decided to employ me' (Note: just kidding! [No he's not. -Ed])

Anyhow, I haven't been watching AT ALL this season, which is a distinct change from my life of a few years ago when you could be sure I'd be planted right in front of the tube for Big Monday, Super Tuesday, etc on ESPN. I barely have enough time for the TV I already watch! What do they want from me? My question is do I get to “follow” my perennial team Duke who I have been following for at least 18 years, despite my lack of passionate following in this or any recent season. My brother (smart, funny and generally very nice guy) has long said that as long as you feel the pain of a team’s loss when they lose, they get to be your team. Ok, but what if you don’t feel their pain during the regular season because you haven’t been keeping up?

In addition to these weighty matters, my brother and I got into a discussion about the odds of picking every team. The odds work out as follows:

• Every game = 1 in 9 quintillion (2^63)
• Every game except the 1-16 match ups which you feel are 1-100 shots = 1 in 600 quadrillion (99^4 / (2^59 * 100^4))
• Same as above except you now say that 2-15 and 3-14 match ups are 85% locks = 1 in 8 quadrillion ((99^4 * 85^8 ) / (2^51 * 100^8))
• CA Lottery = 1 in 41 million

Jeez, winning the lottery seems like a piece of cake (comparatively). You’d think that the bookies would take advantage of this. You could offer $1 gets you $1 billion odds on this and make out like a bandit! If it increased betting by an order of magnitude, who cares if you increased the payout by a few orders? No one's going to win it anyway!

There is a mental process which I always go through when picking that always makes me feel weird. I go through and agonize over every pick, whether or not St. Mary’s is going to pull the upset over So. Illinois or which 5 seed is going to lose the 12 seed (it’s always one and usually more). But then the games are played and I make many mistakes and I look at my selections and say “ACK, I was going to pick them, I cannot believe I was so stupid!” But the mind plays around with memory… I bet I was actually not going to pick them. In fact, I bet I was probably super confident of my choice. If this sounds like you, try a little experiment for me. On a separate sheet of paper from your picks, write why you decided to pick each one in a way that allows you to reveal these picks as the games are played, one at a time. You have ~48 hours to do so; that’s plenty of time to write down 63 sentences. Think of it as a little time capsule to yourself in the future. Try and capture what you were thinking, how secure you were in your pick and anything else you’d like to tell the “you” of 48 hours/96 hours/one fortnight more wisdom than you have right now. Then, as each game’s outcome is revealed, uncover the information you wrote to yourself about that game. I guarantee you find the process enlightening.

D