From There to Here

My bracket is pretty crappy right now, but I’m hoping I can hold on.

I’ve got a few things going for me:
• I didn’t have Georgetown, nor did I have Duke, in my Final Four. A good number of people in my bracket did.
• I picked 11 of the 16 Sweet Sixteen teams correctly, and there can’t be many people who picked even 13 correct (assuming no one took Davidson, WKentucky or Villanova, they’d have to pick everything else perfect).
• My final four of Texas, UCLA, Kansas and UNC are all alive.

Basically, you need to pick the winner, as that game is worth 50 points, almost double the 30 points you get for picking the semifinal winners. So if UNC wins, I have a real shot. But here’s the deal.

For me to win:
• Louisville needs to beat Tennessee.
• Texas needs to make the Final Four.

If those two things happen, I think, by looking at the teams ahead of me, I have a decent shot. Even if Louisville loses, I can still probably take it if Texas makes the final four and falls to UCLA, then UCLA falls to UNC, but it’ll be much tighter. Eh, I enter these things every year, AND (as Bill Simmons says) IF GAMBLING WERE LEGAL, I would enter them for money and I would never win. I did enter a “free” (what’s the point?) bracket last year with about 40-50 current and former DFP people. Of course, that one I end up winning. And I didn’t even pick the final game right.

We’ll see what happens. Maybe I’m in better shape than most (I didn’t have GTown or Duke), but still there’s a long way to go.