Look It Up. Did This Last Year, Too.

Pick Jeremy’s 12-5 Upset!  South Dakota State, Yale, Chattanooga, or Little Rock?  Vote Now!  

It's March Madness time again!  The time of the year that people either pretend to know everything about college basketball, or boast about the completely arbitrary way they selected their brackets.  Fortunately for all of you, Jeremy is a whimsical hybrid of these techniques.  He brings remarkably sparse knowledge of basketball with a sliver of name recognition, and mixes it all with a little crowd-sourcing to create a one of a kind bracket that...well...never wins anything.  

Right you are!  My knowledge of college basketball is roughly zero.  I don't follow the sport, nor any of the teams.  I don't know who's good, who's favored, who uses a zone defense, or if any team has a 7 foot tall guy named Sergio again.  I know that to win a college basketball game, you have to have good ball movement, run the floor, make your free throws, and score the basketball.  I learned these things from sports commentary, but not necessarily what they mean.  

As a fun aside, here's the bit about scoring the basketball:

A couple tournaments ago, I was watching a sports commentary program on TV for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture.  There was one commentator who was providing his opinions on every game for a region of a bracket, from the play-in game all the way to the Final Four.  He provided some name drops and vague references to coaching styles and skill levels, which was all well and good.  But, his primary input to determining game output was the greatest piece of sports commentary I've ever heard.  Absolutely every game he described was going to be won by the team he picked because, and I'm not making this up, "they really know how to score the basketball."  Every.  Last.  Game.  

I'm really hoping there is some deeper meaning to this, because I like to think that everybody on the planet who has ever heard of basketball knows how to score the basketball.  You put the ball through the hoop.  The team that puts the ball through the hoop more times than the other team generally wins.  There are nuances there, actually, what with free throws counting for one point, and the three-point shot being in play.  I'd actually like to see a breakdown of game scores versus the number of times the ball actually passes through the hoop.  It's my own little version of Money Ball.  Maybe I can make millions by figuring out that the team which scores the most points in basketball wins the most games.

Anyway...I know precious little about the NCAA tournament.  The extent of my knowledge deals with the brackets and seedings rather than the sport or the teams themselves.  I know that a #16 seed has never beaten a #1 in the first round in the entire history of the tournament.  Number 2 seeds get upset very rarely, the 8-9 is a toss-up, and the winning percentage follows an almost linear progression between the two, depending on seed.  

Except for the #5 seed.  

For whatever reason (and it's entirely mental at this point), the #5 seed is cursed.  The #12 seed upsets the #5 seed at a statistically anomalous rate.  As such, it's quite common for people to pick 12 seeds to upset 5s in their brackets.  I always do.  And I always let the People decide which.  

So, for the remainder of the day, my Facebook, Sametime Status, Blag, and whatever other social media I have available will be devoted to allowing people to vote on which 12 seeded team I will advance to the second round in my bracket.  Everything depends on you, so vote now!