from the bigdumbHoosier Archive
Fear of the Cat
Every year at NCAA tournament time we play a little game here at Becknell and Lucas Media (all two of us - an appropriate staffing level for a dot-com, as it turns out). Like everybody else we fill out our NCAA brackets before the first tip-off, and keep tabs on the outcomes. The winner of our little game gets basketball-guru bragging rights for the next year. [editor's note: Luddites don't gamble, because a machine is almost always involved, and machines will always cheat a human, if at all possible...it's sort of a corollary to Murphy's law.]
I've watched more b-ball than makes any sense at all (I refer to my 43" Sony as the "RBV" for remote basketball viewer), so I like to think I'm pretty good at this game, despite that fact that the Becknell has beaten Lucas in this game the last three years. This time around I got the office bragging rights, and so it's 3-2, her favor for the past five years.
But I'm still a bigdumbHoosier-loser, because I can't beat "the cat". Remember the cat? Yes, the same one who always walks off with Tic-Tack-Toe games. In this case "the cat" is again an imaginary third player in our game. In this case the Cat picks all the favorites.
Think the NCAA tournament selection committee does a poor job? Prove it! Beat "the cat". I dare you. Here's how our game works; try it in 2002.
Fill out your brackets first. Then, fill out one for the "the cat". It's easy. The better seeded team always wins. That gets you to the final four with all the number one seeds. Then refer to the RPI to pick the winners of the games in the championship round.
Scoring works like this. Each player gets one point for picking the correct winner of first round games, two points for picking the winner of second round games and so on. Picking the champion gets you six points. Of course, the only way to beat "the cat" is to correctly predict upsets, but if you go wrong early it can really burn you later, and "the cat" will be smiling like one from Cheshire when you haven't any teams at all in the final four where the big points come in. I had a big lead over "the cat" in the first round this year, and felt pretty smug about it. That lead disappeared before the final horn.
