My March Madness Bracket, the Perils of Trying to Be Clever, and the Perils of Not Actually Being That Clever (But Still Trying to Save Face and Probably Doing a Fine Job at That, All Things Considered)
I did something I don’t love doing: I reread something I wrote hastily and unenthusiastically a year ago. 11 months ago, actually. Two days after the 2022 NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship Game.
I woke up that day with the idea and burped it out in about 20 minutes. If I think about something for too long I tend to either talk myself out of it or get bored of it so often the only way to actually do something is to, as I say, burp it out.
Ok, to be fair I didn’t read all of it — I read the first few paragraphs and got sick of it because sometimes I’m not in the mood for myself. I often am — those are the good days — but on the days when I’m not it’s best if I read some of my actually good prose, which this piece is not. But whatever, I read some of it.
The premise, way back in April of 2022, was that I was creating the world’s first bracket for the 2023 Men’s NCAA basketball tournament (which I believe to be true). In doing so I was protecting myself from all judgment and all shame; I could remove any pressure to pretend to know more than I do…in fact I could remove any pressure at all, checking this task off my list 11 months early and getting the opportunity to be smarmy and smug about it.
Yesterday (3/12) the 2023 tournament bracket was released. You know me, I love being relevant, so before work I took a quick glance at the bracket I made last year, which I’d completed by arbitrarily picking seed numbers based on pretty close to nothing at all, and saw that the champion I’d picked was the #3 seed from the midwest region: Xavier University. Congrats to them. I tweeted my congrats to them. Customarily nobody noticed or cared.
Then I heard that some friends of mine are putting a bracket pool together, which is not something I’ve done since maybe high school. Of course by now I’m feeling unique ownership of this 2023 tournament (remember, I published the world’s first bracket) and I can safely submit mine, smarmily and smugly. I quote myself (I have just revisited the piece, still not reading all of it, but looking for my rationale):
“Think about it: if you get a lot right, that’s pretty cool and random! If you get a lot wrong, of course you did! If your results are all very average and more-or-less resemble literally every other bracket, that’s because no bracket results are impressive or embarrassing or special in and of themselves. The bracket is a game our shepherds give us each spring to keep us busy, a game we adopt as a symbol of community and potential fortune. But you — YOU — are too cool to be lured by those virtues, so you play your own, lonely games.”
My bracket is complete and I am safely too cool for all of this shit. (But will still play along and pay $10 for the chance to get very lucky and have what would be intolerable bragging rights (wish me luck))
I go to the pool website to submit my stale, emotionless bracket. I have my copy from 2022 on my desktop and click the corresponding teams. I’m almost done entering everything when I think, ‘Wait, didn’t I tweet a congratulations to Xavier Men’s Basketball for being my pick to win (and by that token the world’s first pick to win)? This bracket has Gonzaga winning. Did I fuck up?’
I did fuck up. I have no idea what bracket template I found online last year but whatever it was it doesn’t have the proper regional placements relative to this year. (The actual bracket has the regions, starting with the top left and moving clockwise, as follows: south, east, midwest, west; I, somehow, found a bracket with the regions lain out as follows: west, south, east midwest.) When you’re not actually invested in your own work, as I often feel, this can happen.
All of my credibility, all of my coolness, all of my smarminess and smugness — it all got thrown out the window with this realization. What a fool I can be. What a dumb, dumb, moron.
But whatever, a stupid little hiccup like this has never stopped me from continuing my ways and it won’t now — if anything it’ll push me to create even more unwanted content to prove in bad faith that I am fallible but also still kind of right and untouchable and, as I once put it, too cool for all of this shit. The only person I have any obligation to engage with, for what it’s worth, is me.
Backtracking, I realized I had no* (*some) choice but to create THREE brackets to salvage the integrity of this “experiment.”
- The first bracket would be exactly as I filled it out last year, transposing that bracket over this one, disregarding the mislabeled regions: match top right to top right, bottom right to bottom right, etc..
- The second would be transposing the regions as I filled them out to where they ought to be on the bracket: moving my top right quadrant to where it’s supposed to be, which in this case is top left, etc.. Because I made the mistakes I did I was left with two final four matchups that aren’t supposed to be able to meet until the final, so this bracket requires something I’d sworn off 11 months ago: actual decisions, at least when it comes to the last three games of the tournament.
- The final bracket would be entirely comprised of what I’d sworn off 11 months ago: actual decisions. Since I’m already abandoning the plan due to dumbness and oversight I might as well make it a more interesting experiment by comparing the two previous brackets to one I filled out myself as a dumb, oversightful guy.
I can now present to you three brackets: two variations of the world’s first* 2023 tournament bracket, and one of my own present day selection.
I look forward to selectively showing off a fluke victory or two from any or all of these brackets, but I won’t sweat it if not. I am, after all, too cool for all of this shit.
Burped out on March 13, 2023
