How to Deal with a Busted NCAA Bracket

In the middle of the most exciting four-day weekend in recent memory, you tipped over your Abita Root Beer and the nacho cheese. Your NCAA bracket, patiently researched and completed, is now covered in a gooey coat of rotel dip. You lovingly scrape away the damage to find....devastation. Kansas to win it all? Villanova to get past the first weekend? Good Ali Farokhmanesh, Batman!

So you wish you had left the bracket beneath that cheese varnish, where you could estimated having all sixteen teams left. Now the manager in your office that picked Michigan State “because I drove a Ford in college” and Cornell “Go Poison Ivy League!” is looking like a sports Nostradamus.

I would be lying if I told you I hadn’t heard stories like yours before. The Great Sports Fan Brought Low is one of the most cliched and common theme in all of sportswriting (see Bartman, Steve; Jack Nicholson in Wolf). Let me offer some advice. To complement that advice, I’ve chosen some quotes from Yogi Berra, the great major league catcher who had more home runs than strikeouts in a season five times. Like Berra, take the long view: there’ll be more hits than strikeouts in your picking career. I hope.

Put it into perspective

"Slump? I ain't in no slump... I just ain't hitting.” -Yogi Berra

Look on the bright side. You didn’t unveil your bracket to national coverage in the White House Map Room.

Barrack Obama’s bracket is devastated right now. He predicted that the Kansas Jayhawks would win it all and Villanova as a Final Four team. Today, he is ranked 106,679 in ESPN’s rankings.

Of course, Obama will find it a lot easier to put a positive spin on his weekend. The President also took some time to watch a health care bill, pass a House of Representatives vote. It’s been a seemingly unreachable ambition of Presidents, Republican and Democrat, since the Roosevelt administration. That would be Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1908).

Become nostalgic

"Ninety percent of this game is half mental."

Think back on all your past achievements. The game-winning shot in a pickup game in the seventh grade, or that improbable touchdown pass you threw in Madden.

No one can take away the year you picked twelve of the last sixteen, and that was after Duke broke your heart by losing on a buzzer-beater. When colleagues spoke about your picks, it was in hushed tones, as if they were witnessing firsthand the Aurora Borealis. Now, your bracket has the stench of a loser, and you’ve become the Augur Winless.

Then again, you can always learn something from this year’s shortcomings.

There’s Always Next Year

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

There’s 355 days until you get to pick your bracket again. You’ll experience some triumphs and defeats. You’ll grasp some life milestones, like 1,000 days worked or 500 checks cashed in. In the meantime, it’s important that you keep your focus on what matters: next year’s bracket.

Do some soul-searching. Why favor the “chalk” so much? There seems to some favoritism given to Big East schools on your bracket. Gauge how teams began the year (Northern Iowa was ranked 28th overall, in some polls) and how they ended it (Villanova’s slump), but don’t fall into traps where you entirely disregard the potential represented by the former or the impermanence of the latter.

Start researching early. Rarely are you going to think, while filling out your bracket, “I wish I knew less about University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.”