For the past 4 years, a friend has organized a basketball pool for friends and family. Some know and care a lot about basketball; others of us, not so much. In the past, methodologies for choosing winners have involved a cat named Sparky and a dog named Pauly, 19th century memoirists from Southern religious colleges, and the inimitable logic of my friend's cousin ("UNC always wins. Schools with funny nicknames ('La Tech') win. Anything associated with televangelists loses."). This year, Casper and the Dillo have entered brackets. We are doing the women's playoff. Here is how the process went down:

The methodologies were both complex and random. For Casper's, the left side of the bracket was filled out this way: I had a men's bracket and read out the matchups on the left side of the men's bracket. She made her picks. I then translated the choices to the women's bracket based on seed numbers. She did the right side of the women's bracket directly, again by me reading aloud the matchups. (At once point she said, "why are they playing over and over?") As you will see, she is once again a strong contender for the Illustrious Titles "most wrong in the first round" and "topping out on points first."

For Dillo's bracket, I attempted to have him point to the teams he chose. This did not work. So I used my magical maternal mind-reading skills and divined his intentions. The left side of the bracket was filled out by translating seed numbers from the right side of the men's bracket. The right side of the bracket was done in the normal fashion. (Why yes, I had a problem with printing out the wrong brackets. Thanks for noticing.) I think Dillo actually has some chance of winning. I will note that his overall choices for the winners included "AIRPLANE!" and "BUS!" but I manged to figure out that he meant "UNC" and "MARYLAND" by this.

We entered the 2nd annual "I don't know much 'bout sports" NCAA tournament pool. This year was the women's bracket. I filled one out based on a combination of random, seed numbers, and teams I'd heard of. Casper filled hers out by dint of me reading each first-round matchup aloud, and her picking which team she wanted. There were a lot of first round matchups, so from that point I took over and just had every high seed take each matchup. This ended up stranger than it might sound, since Casper had a strong tendency to pick the lower of the two seeds in the first round.

Here's how we're doing so far:
"Most Incorrect Picks in the 1st Round goes to CASPER, who picked the losing team in 25 of the 32 games, well surpassing the 50% mark and in fact being more accurate in predicting losing teams than was anyone else in picking winning teams." She has 7 points. She has Duke winning, which does have some chance of coming true.

I am currently in 2nd place, with 23 points, but I am one of two current leaders who have all my elite 8 still in. Not that I remember who I picked.

I love clueless basketball pools! I actually won last year!