March Madness: Make it your Own

Are you ready?  It's here.  March Madness is here.  Get your brackets filled out, start picking upsets, figure out who this year's Cinderella is going to be and try your damnedest to make those ESPN analysts look like fools.  Aside from the bracket master himself, Joe Lunardi, I really hate listening to any analyst talk about the tournament.  Their only goal is to come up with the most outrageous picks across the board on the off chance that it actually happens so they can sit on camera smitten, with the I told you so look.  I mean honestly, you can see egos grow exponentially during this time of year.

Personally, I always take twenty to thirty minutes with a bracket right in front of me and I imagine Will Smith is giving me the Legend of Bagger Vance pep talk.  This obviously sends me into a deep focus.  I jump into the bracket and just start making miracle picks.  

Of course, I think in the 15 years I've been filling out brackets I've only had one or two absolutely amazing brackets.  But that's not the point.  Every year I enter the Madness with the expectation that all of the games I've watched and all of the articles I've read will give me the power to pick perfection.  Everyone thinks they know enough to pick these games.  And then Butler / VCU happens.  And then George Mason happens.  Don't worry about the analysis that twenty people between ESPN / CBS / TNT are trying to sell you on.  Come up with your own picks based on your own knowledge.  It's going to get you to the same place those so-called gurus are trying to get you to ... a mediocre bracket most years with a pretty good bracket once every 10 years.

Enjoy the Madness; embrace the Madness. Try to predict the unpredictable. Don't worry about who the public thinks is the favorite; don't worry about who told you what; don't worry about what some system based on 100 factors told you the outcome was going to be; just sit down and remember ... "It's just you and the field" (... of 68).

Blogger's Note:  I have added a link to the only bracket I'm going to fill out this year in the "Links to check out" section to the right.  I'll try to convince Kramer and TheRealLinsanity to add their bracket's before Thursday.  As far as picks go for the tournament, I plan on picking only B1G games the first couple of rounds.  Once we reach the Elite 8, I will pick every single game from that point forward.  Good luck my fellow degenerates!