March Madness is one of the great American sporting events. In both the men’s and women’s tournaments, 64 teams are thrown into a bracket where anybody can beat anybody. For some schools, March Madness is their chance to gain much-needed national attention through an unlikely upset. For others, making it to The Big Dance is nothing out of the ordinary. Besides its unpredictability, March Madness is also a top-tier sporting event due to its ability to have all different kinds of people invested in the results. People who have never watched basketball and people who intensely follow the regular season alike watch tournament games and fill out brackets.
Sane people who don’t pay attention to college basketball until March usually fill out their brackets based on seeding and vibe. For example, sometimes you can just feel that a 13-seed is going to upset the favored 4-seed. However, some people pick their winners based on much stranger criteria. Here are some examples from Garfield students who don’t like fitting in.
Daisy Quirk, Garfield’s own self-crowned champion of hobby horsing, a niche ‘sport’ where people jump over hurdles while riding fake horses, chose her winners based on which mascot would win in a real-life fight. This year’s tournament features some behemoths: the Oakland Golden Grizzlies, the North Carolina State Wolfpack, and the Iowa State Cyclones, to name a few. Her toughest decisions were the Texas Longhorns vs. the Colorado State Rams and the Clemson Tigers vs. the Baylor Bears. She went with the Rams and the Bears. Her picks are relatively normal until you get to her final pick. Her selected winner was the St. Peter’s Peacocks. When asked how she expected a peacock to take down a full-sized grizzly, Quirk simply stated, “Those feathers are scary.”
Somehow, that doesn’t take the cake for the strangest way to pick a bracket I encountered. Recent middle-schooler Reginald Fitzwilliam, who goes by his middle name, Bartholomew, or ‘Bart’ for short, said that he has lucid dreams almost every night, which means he can affect what he is doing in his dreams. In the days leading up to the men’s and women’s tournaments, he dreamed that he attended every game. When he woke up, he recorded the results. “It was an interesting experiment, although I won’t do it again,” Fitzwilliam said. “It was tiring.” In the men’s bracket, he had San Diego State over Purdue. In the women’s bracket, he had UConn over Oregon State. “That was the best game,” he said. “Paige Bueckers hit the game-winner.”
Will you use either of these strategies next March?
