I give you the last four rounds of the Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever:
That's small and hard to read, but it's filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins; if neither school has a graduate program, the higher seed wins.) You can get the whole thing as a 1.03 MB PDF.
I wouldn't bet any money on this prediction, if I were you: the winner ends up being #14 seed Cornell...
Obviously, this is not a serious prediction. I entered four serious brackets in various contests (my Facebook entry is probably visible to those who care). I'm basically incapable of divorcing my pool picks from my rooting interests, so I have North Carolina beating UCLA in all of them, basically because I like Roy Williams and Tyler Hansbrough.
It's not a completely ridiculous pick, but I suspect that the reverse is probably somewhat more likely. UCLA plays the same thug-ball that's taken them to the Final Four for the past two seasons, but this year they actually have a couple of guys who can score. They're still kind of painful to watch, though, so I can't quite put myself in the position of having to root for Kevin Love and his regrettable facal hair.
Other picks of note: I've spent the whole season listening to people talk about how the PAC-10 is the best conference around, which convinced me to pick a bunch of their teams to win. Naturally, this means that they'll flame out spectacularly, except for Arizona, who I picked to lose in the first round.
The Big Ten stinks. The Big East isn't all that great, but Pitt's coming on lately. In at least one bracket, I have them in an avert-your-eyes second-round game with Michigan State, and then the all-time-ugly Final Four matchup with UCLA, and I do believe those things could happen. I won't enjoy watching them, but they copuld happen.
The wildly overhyped match-up of great talents that will turn out to be a total dog: USC vs. Kansas State.
The game most likely to produce a future NBA owner: Stanford vs. Cornell in the first round.
I've live-blogged the first round a couple of times in the past, but I won't be doing that this year. First and foremost, typing on a laptop for long periods causes crippling muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder, and I'd rather not suffer that again. Beyond that, though, I have a bunch of work to get done before I leave town tomorrow afternoon.
You see, Maryland and Syracuse are playing each other in the NIT tonight. Those are the two teams that I root for, and they've never met since I started rooting for Maryland in 1994. This is a sufficiently weird and awkward situation that, well, I have to see it live, so I'll be driving to Syracuse to catch the game in the Carrier Dome.
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I haven't filled out a bracket since leaving grad school, but having attended a PAC-10 school, I observed that they tended to underperform in the tourney back then. In my picking strategy, I always lowered them one seed, and an additional one for every time zone they had to travel east, since the travel seemed to adversely affect them.
But except for Cornell, it's not an unrealistic Final Four. If only Brown or Penn had won the automatic Ivy League berth, Stanford would win that regional, and physics strength would be a decent predictor.
Which says something, although nothing very profound.
Most ridiculous physics mis-match in this bracket:
Pittsburgh vs. Oral Roberts
(But maybe I'm wrong - if the official timekeeper uses young-earth-creationist time, then each half of play would last, what, about a millisecond or two? One lucky three-pointer on the tip-off, and there goes the game.)
Toughest physics seeding in this bracket by far:
Cornell has to out-physics both Stanford _and_ Texas, and thus really deserves the win.
I'm disappointed that you did not post a pick for the NIT matchup between the Terps and the Orangemen.
It's probably more accurate that picking by school mascot...