Sudden Realizing, Of Great Truth

So my brackets are done.  First the four foundational brackets, representing the four bracket humors of love (heart), hate (spleen), analysis (brain), and luck (rectum), as summarized:

Love - National Champ - Virginia
          Other Final Four - VCU, San Diego St., Wichita St.
          Sweet 16 Cinderellas - Dayton, St. Joe's, Tennessee
          First Round Upsets - Western Michigan, North Dakota St., Wofford

Hate - National Champ - Duke
          Other Final Four - Florida, Michigan St., Arizona
          Sweet 16 Cinderellas - Stanford, Memphis, Kansas St., NC State
          First Round Upsets - Stephen F. Austin, Harvard, New Mexico St.

Analysis - National Champ - Arizona
               Other Final Four - Florida, Virginia, Louisville
               Sweet 16 Cinderellas - none
               First Round Upsets - BYU, Tennessee

Monkey Poo - National Champ - Tennessee
                     Other Final Four - Florida, Iowa St., Oklahoma
                     Sweet 16 Cinderellas - New Mexico, UConn
                     First Round Upsets - Dayton, Xavier, Mercer

From here I then made 4 impromptu custom blends to submit to 4 online contests. A Love blend with prominent analysis aroma to ESPN; a spicy Hate/Monkey Poo mixture to Capital One; a bipolar combination of Love and Hate to CBS; and an predominantly analysis blend with just a soupcon of hate to the Washington Post.

All these of course were meant to be merely palate cleansers for the Perfect Bracket, the harmonious coalescence of Love, Hate, Analysis, and Monkey Poo in just the right proportions as to predict accurately all 63 games of the actual bracket, hence winning me $1,000,000,000 in the Warren Buffett/Yahoo/Quicken Loans Challenge.  That was the plan, at least, until I had an epiphany yesterday in the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library.  What if I had it backwards?  What if my job was not to predict, but to proclaim?  All the stat heads of the world keep telling us the odds of picking a perfect bracket are, if not astronomical, at least downright discouraging. A recipe for failure.  But what if a perfect bracket is not an accurate prognostication, but rather a statement of ideals, a Tom Joad's speech, a vision of how things should be, so clear, so powerful as to call itself into being.  That's the bracket I would make.  And if it turned out to be imperfect, to fail at predicting reality, well that was reality's fault, not mine.  And given the recent report detailing observation of gravitational waves in the background cosmic radiation consistent with inflationary theories of immediate post-Big-Bang universe expansion, which itself is consistent with the possibility of multiverses, then perhaps somewhere out there, is a universe where my perfect bracket predicts and proclaims.  And another universe where your bracket is perfect.  Good luck collecting that money from alternate universe Warren Buffett, though.
 
 
           

Late Night Thoughts Upon First Staring Into This Year's Bracket

1. If I were Louisville or Michigan State, I would be pissed. By giving these teams both a 4 seed, does the committee really believe the Cardinals and the Spartans are somewhere between the 13th and 16th best teams in the country?  Sure didn't look like it this weekend. More like 2nd and 3rd by my eyes. Maybe higher, because Florida looked a little vulnerable.  Sure, body of work and all that rot.  But given Louisville's weak non-conference performance and Michigan State's injury-driven February lull, I could see docking them down to 2 seeds, but 4 seems downright disrepectful. What a gift to coaches Rick Pitino and Tom Izzo.  As if they needed any help.

2. In related news, my two favorite teams in this year's tournament, #1 seeds Virginia and Wichita State, better gird their frickin' loins.  Assuming they can make the Sweet 16, they have the aforementioned thoroughly inspired 4 seeds potentially waiting for them.  And in especially egregious salt-rubbing, Wichita State would play Louisville in Indianapolis, less than a 2 hour drive for the Cardinal faithful.

3. Another 4 seed, San Diego State, would get to play Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games in Anaheim, which according to my calculations, is only the length of 84,480 giant heads placed end to end. Not that I mind that Arizona, the 1 seed in that region and one of my least favorite teams historically, would be at a disadvantage if that happened.

4.  Things I need to remember from previous years, in no particular order:

      A. Pick against Tom Izzo and Michigan State at your own peril.

      B. Never pick a team from the Beehive State, which is never to be mentioned by name but rhymes with "Foofraw".

      C. Teams from the Mountain West should not be trusted.

      D. Non-Michigan-State Big 10 teams are always overrated.

      E. As my brother's father-in-law once observed, there comes a time every year when the Syracuse Orange play like they hate their coach. The trick is figuring out when that will happen.

      F.  Teams coached by Rick Barnes, i.e. Texas, will always underperform, often in spectacular fashion.

      G.  Tennessee, also known as Team Knucklehead, will either make it to the Elite Eight, or lose to Iowa by 30. There is no in between for Team Knucklehead.

      H.  Gonzaga is always most dangerous in Cinderella mode.

      I.  The Basketball Gods will punish poor footwear choices.  Are you listening Virginia? Orange shoes are not your friend, they are the Devil's shodding.

    

Bracket Humor

With Selection Sunday looming and because of the additional incentive of Warren Buffett's Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, I have decided to resume blogging. For now, I plan to focus on the development and implementation of the perfect NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament bracket; whether this leads to further blogging on the panoply of topics that occupy my feverishly undisciplined brain or shamefully evaporates before the second weekend probably answers itself. Still, I can dream of being a productive polymath, and monkeys can dream of flying out of my butt. Wait. That didn't come out right.

This year, I have decided to give in completely to my incipient Ignatius J. Reilly-ness (hence the blog name) and center my bracket preparation on “theology and geometry”. Specifically, inspired by the Greek concept of the four humors, I postulate that there are four fundamental modes of bracket prognostication that connect to four bodily organs:

1. Analysis – picking the “best” teams – Brain
2. Positive Emotion – picking the teams you like – Heart
3. Negative Emotion – picking the teams you hate – Spleen
4. Luck – picking teams out of your ass – Colon

While in the past I have availed myself of all of these modes in various non-systematic amounts, what I always forgot what Hippocrates and Galen knew; the key was balance. In other words, my brackets were dyscrastic. No more. This year, I will create four separate “humoral” brackets, which I will submit to various contests, but for the Billion Dollar Challenge, I will attempt, through some mystical process as yet determined, to bring these four brackets into their proper balance. To me at least, the humorous possibilities seem manifold, especially at my expense. So I plan on blogging my way through.