Dawgs Dance, and Why You Will Lose Your Office NCAA Pool
They did it. Praise whichever deity you believe told Husky QB Jake Locker to come back for his senior year. After a season of doubt and anxiety the UW Men’s basketball team scored an automatic bid into the NCAA tournament, with a rollercoaster 79-75 win over the Cal Bears in Saturday’s Pac-10 championship game.
Fears they might get snubbed by the Selection Committee had they lost are long forgotten. The win earned them a #11 seed in the tournament’s East region (which, naturally, is playing first and second round games in San Jose), against the #6 seed Marquette Eagles on Thursday afternoon. (The Gonzaga Bulldogs, incidentally, got the #8 seed in the West region, and play their first game in Buffalo. We suspect the minds behind the regional labeling went to WSU.)
Now as the Dawgs focus their attention on Marquette, we channel ours to the irresistible, daunting and improbable challenge of filling out The Bracket.
Much like the annual Running of the Bulls in Spain, the office March Madness pool is a time when everyone dives into something they know nothing about for excitement, spectacle, adrenaline rushes, and pride - minus the risk of buttockal skewering (unless you are involved in a really, really messed up pool).
Because admit it, when making picks, most of us couldn’t tell you what the hell happened in college basketball this season. And inevitably, two types of people always emerge.
First, there are the expert wannabes. They’ll pore over team capsules and head-to-head matchups. Scour past tournament brackets, analyze things like RPI, shooting percentages, and possibly consult an abacus. They pick, because they “know”.
Then, there are the people that win the brackets. Every. Frickin. Year. These are the ones who, somehow, transform their lack of expertise into an apathetic Zen, which gives them some frustrating freak ability to see the future.
The lesson: embrace ignorance. Otherwise, ultimately you will lose to the guy who let a Ouija board pick his bracket, before it came to life and killed him. Thus, following standard runner-up rules, your money will instead go to the blonde in marketing who picked Pitt to win it all, because she is so in love with Brad Pitt.
As for the real competitors in all this, the Huskies, the national consensus after some time to soak seems to be mixed as to whether they can upset Marquette.
And to those people picking against the Dawgs, we say screw you and your abacus. Thursday, get ready to Bow Down.
