My Brackets

What on earth do I, your scrivener and host, know about basketball? I've been too short and too slow to be a significant player in this game since I was 15. I can't play with the big guys. I think I can jump about 27" off the floor. I don't think I can reach the rim. But I do want to toot my own horn. I have mastered, to some degree, the complicated business of predicting the outcome of all of the games in the NCAA tournament. And so I offer you my bracket, which, I think, will get even better as the rest of Friday unfolds.

Compare me, if you will, to the President's very conservative bracket, which picks North Carolina to win it all. That's just silly. I picked Syracuse to win. I want a number 3 seed to win; I like Syracuse's chances better than Missouri, which has a long, long history of choking in the Sweet 16. To be blunt, so far, I'm doing far better than Barack Obama at this game. Right now, he's had 8 incorrect choices; I've had only 3. And the 3 I had were, well, odd.

I will explain my errors. I thought West Virginia wouldn't choke the way they did. I picked Big-10 Minnesota over Texas, more because I hated Texas, owing to the previous administration, than because I had confidence in Minnesota. That was a bad, emotional choice. And Butler lost to LSU. That game to me was a total toss-up; anybody could have gotten that wrong.

Stay tuned to the tournament. By Sunday night, my picks may be a total shambles, as they were two years ago. But there's a chance, a slight chance, that I'll still have 14 or 16 teams in the running.