NCAA Tournament

            I have been up to my eyeballs with schoolwork this semester. I have tried to work harder so I can rise to the level of effort that graduate school requires.

            One casualty is the annual tradition of filling out an NCAA tournament bracket. Or in my case, six brackets. It seems like everyone does it, and it’s great fun trying to figure out who will win, and who will pull off the upset. But this year, the First Lady and I did not fill a bracket out for the first time in many years. Speaking for myself, I just didn’t have the energy for it. Besides—the more I try to analyze things, the more I look at statistics and what not… the worse I seem to do. We were in a basketball pool during the season and it was the same thing. When we tried harder to analyze the teams and schedules, we fell further and further behind.

            So we didn’t fill any brackets out this year. The thing is, watching the games has been just as compelling as it has always been. As an added bonus—our brackets weren’t ruined when Iowa State lost to UAB. They would have if I’d filled one out, since ISU looked really good in the Big 12 Tournament. In addition, who really looks at their picks after the second day of the tournament? If you’ve entered an online group, do you really care anymore once your bracket is blown up? I don’t.

            Only two teams I care about made the big dance—NMSU and Georgia. The Aggies because the campus is in Las Cruces, some of my old stomping grounds. UGA because, well, I go to school there and we had season tickets and had a great time. Neither side won their first-round game, so now it’s a free for all. I’m trying to care about North Carolina, since the wife roots for them (she has an MBA from UNC). It’s difficult, and I just don’t give my heart away that easily. But I’m working on it.

            It’s actually kind of nice to not really care about any of the teams still alive—no emotional attachment means no stress.