Bracketology 101

This is the only month where it is perfectly acceptable to display a little Madness. In fact, it is necessary for keeping your sanity. Going crazy for your team is a prerequisite to dance. The crazier the fans gets, the better chances that team has to make it to Detroit.
Or, if you are like the millions playing along at home, you have 2 days, 13 hours, 19 minutes and 28 seconds before the First Round tips off. So, like the standardize tests, make sure you fill out your bracket(s) accurately and completely with a #2 pencil before you go over it with a Sharpie and turn it in to your preselected pools.
A tournament system is the only way college sports should be, not the flawed BCS system NCAA football has. Let’s not shift focus because this is only about the bracket.
CBS’s Selection Sunday with Greg Gamble, Clark Kellogg, Seth Davis, Jim Nantz and Billy Packer broke down The Selection Committee’s choices. Yet, coaches, players, the Around the Horn panel, PTI, SportsCenter experts and anyone else following NCAA basketball will always be unhappy with the committee’s rankings, placements and snubs. You cannot please everybody all the time. In the end they are just numbers – whether it’s 1 or 16 – and those rankings get into the heads of the players developing inferiority complexes hindering them from performing to their potential. On the other hand, when an assigned low seed gets hungry and makes their way round-by-round through the tourney it adds an interesting plot twist.
So I got to thinking, what else - using the March Madness Bracket ideology - could use some spicing up?
(Jeopardy Think Music (the original, not the new remix version) playing)…
Follow me: April is officially National Poetry Month right? What if there was a bracket scenario where the top poems, the top 64 off all time competed for the bragging rights as the best poem ever?
But who would be on the 10 Member Selection Committee? Would it be the 10 greatest poets of all time, of this generation or the last 10 years? Or would they be the 10 greatest poetic scholars from only the most scholarly institutions of higher learning?
How about leaving expertise out of it and let students be the judge? Well that is just what the sixth, seventh and eighth grade teachers did. Students picked their favorite 64 poems – be it famous or original – recited them and voted to advanced them through the bracket to determine the Twenty-09 champion.
Brilliant!
In the next few weeks a winner will be decided. Stay tuned for the results.