March Madness is upon us. Of course, you already know this if you keep up with college basketball. I don’t. But what tips me off is that yesterday, I received my annual invitation to participate in an online “Tournament Challenge” arranged by a friend of ours. I look forward to this challenge every year because it gives me a chance to engage in a little friendly competition where I have a chance to do well, even though I have absolutely no right to. The process is simple: Log on to the web-site, predict who will win each game and fill out your brackets accordingly, then sit back and watch what happens.

Here is how a true NCAA fan might go about completing his brackets:

1. Research - the first step begins long before March. The key here is to watch as many NCAA regular-season games as possible. Note the strengths and weaknesses of each team, the coaching style, any lingering injuries that might hamper tournament advancement, how each team plays on the road vs. at home, etc.
2. Expert opinion - carefully study articles and blogs written by those who have watched more games than you have, and who know basketball inside and out. Observe their thoughts on potential upsets. Listen for any inside information they might have stumbled across, such as a conflict that might tear apart a high-seeded team.
3. Historical trends - keep in mind that 14 of the last 16 NCAA champions were either a 1- or 2-seed. The lowest seed to ever make it to the Final Four was a #11. Use these and other historical facts to make your winning predictions.

I’m sure there are more tips, but those three pretty much exhausted the little basketball knowledge I’ve retained from my college days when I actually watched college basketball games. Now let me tell you the principles I use in filling out my brackets. Feel free to use them yourself:

1. Know what a “seed number” means. The smaller the number, the better-ranked the team. So, pick mostly the better-seeded team in the first round.
2. Have fun with upsets. Of course, the better team can’t always win - that wouldn’t be fair. So pick a few underdogs in your first round as well. Pick these however you’d like. Perhaps you like the sound of “Winthrop” better than “Tennessee” - go for it. Or maybe your cousin went to Texas A&M and you feel they should beat Syracuse just on principle. Pencil them in for a win.
3. Once we enter the second round, the process becomes a little more esoteric. From here on, primarily go with your gut feeling, which is based on (among other things):
   • The sound of the school’s name
   • The school’s proximity to areas of the country you enjoy visiting
   • Whether someone you didn’t really get along with went to that school
4. Keep in mind Murphy’s Law. Not everything can go your way, so occasionally, if you feel a strong pull to pick one school, choose the other. Just because.
5. When in doubt, flip a coin.
6. Make sure the team you choose to win the whole thing has a name you like. Or possibly uniform colors you like (difficult for me, since I don’t watch the games and have no idea what colors their uniforms are).

Simple, no? The best thing is, I did very well last year - out-lasting several more seasoned basketball fans. I’m not sure if they were very amused, considering that they don’t think I take this challenge “seriously.”

Oh, but I do. I put a lot of thought and work into filling in my brackets. And I don’t let anything muddy the water. Just last weekend, my husband flipped to ESPN during a game and I had to leave the room. He asked if I didn’t want to stay and watch, so I could be more informed before the tournament. But I patiently explained that watching a game would interfere with my process. What if the coach irritated me, but I like the region where the school is located? What if the team looked awesome, but my high school nemesis attended that school? Nope. I couldn’t let silly things like performance wreck my carefully constructed bracket-filling techniques.

Crazy, you say? Well, it’s not called March Madness for nothing. I figure someone’s got to uphold the “madness” end of things.

This post was one of the first I ever wrote, originally published on March 14, 2006. I’m re-running it today, in honor of the fact that I just filled out my brackets yesterday, using my time-honored method, of course. Let the madness begin!