The First NCAA Basketball Bracket of 2023
Uncriticizable and probably correct
If you’re like me, you can’t predict the future (and if you’re like me that bums you out). If you’re like me, you have a healthy appetite for gambling, and if you’re still like me you don’t want to needlessly jeopardize your pride. At the risk of alienating anyone or overcomplicating things too early let’s list off a few more ways you may be like me:
- You have general sports knowledge and awareness but you’re far from an expert. Your main focus is soccer. You used to know a lot about baseball but now you’re more of a casual fan.
- You find college sports fun but can be overwhelmed by the scope. Too many teams to keep up with!
- You often feel the need to prove yourself, or at least to look like you somewhat know what you’re talking about.
- You recognize that you have no competitive advantage when it comes to college basketball knowledge.
- You recognize the absurd odds of correctly predicting even a handful of events, let alone a 64 (68 technically) team single-elimination knockout tournament.
- If, having found no edge, you are forced to accept defeat, you feel inclined to protect your ego in a creative (read: obnoxious) way, so as to still technically partake in the fun, but without the inevitable shame of human error.
Uh oh, you’re a lot like me! On the bright side, you woke up the morning after the NCAA men’s basketball championship game having correctly predicted the winner, but on the other hand your bracket was kind of a bust. Getting the tournament winner right didn’t have much to do with expertise — after all, you are a 29-year-old…actually, what are you? Have you figured out what you do yet? Or who you are? Perhaps not, but we know for a fact that you’re not a college basketball pundit, you just happened to have a hunch this time, which is not a sustainable strategy.
You cannot brag about your bracket because despite picking the correct winner it is mostly full of failure, and because bragging about a bracket isn’t something you would do. Joining the chorus of so-and-so’s just isn’t your style. Sure, some so-and-so’s stand out a little — maybe they got really, really lucky, or maybe they know what they’re talking about. You don’t have the discipline to know what you’re talking about and you used up all of your luck on that $200 scratch-off win in 2019.
All of these factors — wanting to be included yet wanting to stand out, wanting to win yet not knowing what you’re doing, wanting credit yet not deserving it — upset you, and remembering that you’ll have to do this all again next year makes you anxious.
So you resort to your old ways, to your smarmy and smug avoidance, so you can have your cake and eat it too. You conjure up a way to remove the element of human ignorance, to remove the inevitable failure that luck will bring in spite of sporadic aptitude and insight, to create a fun story for yourself that allows you to both remain a part of the narrative and stand out in rebellion, and to cross something off your to-do list about 11 months early.
You decide to submit your 2023 NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket before anyone else in the world. Congrats on your win-win, by the way. 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.
While most will wait for the bracket to actually, you know, be announced, you’re not bothered by that technicality. The shape is there. The trends are there. It’s all cyclical and it’s all random. You don’t know why you’d be betting on any given team in the first place, so don’t even give them the satisfaction of your faith. You bet on the space they’re assigned rather than the team, and in doing so you can safely continue not caring or knowing anything.
You are still leaning on luck, yes, but this time completely devoid of emotion or bias. You cannot be accused of overestimating one team and underestimating another. Your choice to pick the team with the fun name or colors or mascot won’t be derided if it tanks, nor will it be unduly lauded if it succeeds. You put a few seconds of thought into which seeds might advance and you move on. You do not bet on people, and why would you? People are nuts. You think you understand people, but you certainly can’t predict how they act, let alone in a situation as strenuous and unnatural as a basketball tournament.
And you ask that others play along with you. You encourage them to follow your lead and try your technique. It’s not a revolution you’re after, just a reprieve from the mundanity by way of a completely different yet mostly the same type of mundanity. While you can offer no monetary prize for what ends up being the best early bracket, you believe in this new system regardless, and you’re happy with yourself, for some reason. You’re actually going to hurt your shoulder trying to pat yourself on the back like that, and you don’t need another injury — not with your hamstring still bothering you, at least.
And finally, because you really can’t help yourself, you taunt the poor fools whose brackets will be less successful than yours…you know, the people who researched and cared. They could have just guessed. Hell, they might have just guessed. But you guessed earlier, and on your own strange terms, and in your head that means something.
