Women have the brackets down

The NCAA men's basketball tournament is upon us, and everyone seems to care. Why you might ask? Because there is money riding on these games.

We all have office pools, or pools amongst friends, or maybe we decide to enter 75 different bracket pools online. However, if we men are smart, we let our girlfriends, wives, mothers, favorite waitress, or whatever other woman is in our lives fill them out for us.

Some how, some way, the ladies have mastered the annual bracket pools. How, you might ask? What college basketball ingenuity do they have that we don't?

The answer is none really. But what they do seem to have is a fearlessness to pick whichever team they feel is going to win, and that seems to work.

Many women pick the teams using a similar method that you or I might use picking lottery numbers. A common way of picking lottery numbers is to use the digits that make up the birthdates of yourself, your friends and your relatives. Based on most state lotteries, however, the probabilities of winning this way rarely works.

Many women also tend to pick schools based on who they know, similar to the common lottery strategy, but for the brackets, this strategy sometimes works perfectly.

Last year when Indiana, Maryland, Kansas, and Oklahoma were all in the Final Four, most of us were screwed because we had Duke in our brackets, but the Blue Devils lost to Indiana.

Many women get by the upset bug by picking colleges in which maybe a friend or relative went there, or something else common to them geographically. One of the worst incidents of this that I have experienced was when the much mundane playing style of Wisconsin made it to the Final Four in 2000. It was from a friend's mom, who was taking our pool by storm. She said, "I picked Wisconsin to make it to the Final Four because the furniture I bought recently is from Wisconsin."

The furniture she had is from Wisconsin!? And that is why she picked them?! Well, it worked out very well for her monetarily, I should add. In order for myself to capitalize on this newfound strategy in the following year's pool, I checked where the furniture that I have was made. It was made in freaking Canada! That didn't help me out very much, although I do recommend Canadian beer to anyone.

For the few weeks leading up to the tournament the many college basketball enthusiasts, and those looking to capitalize on "tax free" income dollars are all surveying the action. We are looking for an edge on who might be a sleeper, and who might get upset. Arizona and Syracuse are two of those teams. Little do we know there is a Valparaiso or a George Washington University or a Detroit-Mercy Titan team ready to slap us in the face and make us wonder why we watched SportsCenter and listened so intently to what Dick Vitale and Digger Phelps had to say in the first place.

And, thankfully, Temple is not in the NCAA tournament this year. Every time they are in the tourney, and happen to be a team that barely made it in and has low expectations, their coach, John Chaney, leads his team to the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight every time. When this team has some expectations on their shoulders, they flounder. The Temple Owls can be the devil when it comes to your brackets it seems.

So it's obvious that you and I want to cash in this year, therefore, I have a way for all single guys out there to do so. Just use this pickup line, "Hey (darling, baby, buttercup, sugar foot or whatever you prefer), will you be my date to the Big Dance and fill out some brackets for me?"