Like millions of other American workers eager to tread the waters of unproductivity in the NCAA office pool, my NCAA bracket is ready for the Big Dance. Everybody krump!
I did a humdinger of a job on this year’s bracket. In previous years, I relied on the vague understanding that the higher-seeded teams have a greater chance of winning as well as my own intuition: “Villanova must win, cause they’re from PA!… Bradley will lose, I never even heard of them… Seton Hall? Screw Seton Hall…” Surprisingly, my ignorance has faired me well, as I have always done better than at least half the office.
This year, to avoid the inevitable uninformed guesses (hmmm… Nevada or Creighton?), I decided to do some research. I studied the Times’ guide to “Cinderella” upset predictions, the Globe’s list of the strong teams, and various historic statistics about the tournament, like how no #16 team has ever beaten a #1 team. (Sorry, Jackson State… I admire your gumption, but I had to go with Florida.) The odds of picking the Final Four are 1 in 65,536, and the odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. And yet by using the same expert opinions that everyone else is using, my bracket bears resemblance to countless others (Final Four choices Florida, Georgetown, Kansas and Memphis).
But when it came time to pick the ultimate winner, I took my cue from an unlikely source. After finally seeing Capote, I started re-reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, which I first read when I was a 12-year old bent on exhausting all of the sophisticated reading choices at the Audubon Public Library. I don’t remember being so freaked out by it. Maybe age confers an empathy for humanity and instinct for self-preservation that teenagers don’t have. That grisly murder happens on the whim of psychopaths, that a family of four was menaced and slain for 50 bucks, that life is just so goddamned random has been haunting me to the point where I lay awake at night, contemplating the MADNESS.
So, in honor of the randomness of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the randomness that Truman Capote would go to Kansas to write a book about it, and the randomness that I would be hurrying to finish reading In Cold Blood so I could plug away at my NCAA Tournament bracket, I picked Kansas. May they triumph amid the randomness and the madness, and secure me office bragging rights.
