I’m typically both a creature of habit and a glutton for punishment, which I suppose is why I still continue to make it a priority to have some stake in March Madness. Even if these days it’s purely emotional, and a far cry from how much of a big deal it once was for me.
There was a time when I had significant funds and a vast array of co-workers who would personally walk down to my office and encourage me to drop a couple of simoleons on a bracket pool. At my peak, I’d do that just before taking a four-day weekend jaunt to Las Vegas along with some equally addicted fans and friends to watch the first two rounds. It was there that I discovered the joy and eventual financial pain that a dizzying array of prop bets would offer up, goaded into it by my more affluent and determined friends who would spend the halftimes of each quartet of games hurriedly scanning the array of tote boards surrounding our sportsbook seeking something they saw as a way to make up for what was looming to be yet another series of losses. With their significant others off on shopping sprees in the overpriced mall, their urgencies grew as the weekend unfolded. At the time, I had no such encumbrances, so they couldn’t quite grasp my reluctance to go along with them. My simple answer was my dedication to my “sheet of integrity”.
That’s a terminology that was popularized by my own personal addiction, the sorely missed ESPN morning drive team of Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic. Like clockwork, they’d make a REALLY big deal about the dos and dont’s of filling out brackets–after all, their fan base was all the more similar to my friends than not. For the benefit of you young ‘uns, there’s always Wikipedia to fall back on for context:
“Sheet of Integrity” is a phrase coined by…Greenberg[20] describing a single bracket entry created for wagering on the NCAA basketball tournament. Greenberg held the belief that if a person wishes to enter multiple pools, they should do so using the same picks for each entry. Conversely, Golic had no problem with choosing different winners for each entry he submits, stating “I want to win the pool and win the caaash!” The two had a good-natured debate on this difference of opinion each year from 2000 to 2014.
Being much more a Greenberg than a Golic, I held true to that personal creed. Besides, I’d long since been soured on my chances of actually winning “caaash” in the first place. The closest I’ve ever come before and since was the year that Connecticut came out of nowhere to claim the title in a year when my FOX Family colleagues contributed more than 100 entries to bring the winner’s pot to well over $1000 and I was one of three entrants who had picked the Huskies to win it all. But because these brackets have a point system where successful early round predictions often determine one’s fate, all I got from that call was a third place overall finish and a pyrrhic victory. The winner was an assistant who rarely watched any college hoops and admitted she made her picks based upon some sort of personal attachment rather than any inside info or “Bracketology” nuggets. I picked UConn because I had watched a lot of their Big East games and correctly predicted Tate George would have the run of his career. The woman who won the caaash liked how cute the mascot was.
To those at different points in their lives it’s as big a deal as ever, as IRISH STAR’s Tom Malley man-splained yesterday:
Americans are expected to legally wager an astonishing $3.3 billion on the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments in 2026, as March Madness prepares to take center stage over the next three weeks…According to new data released by the American Gaming Association, an industry lobbying organization, Americans will legally wager the $3.3 billion between now and the start of next month, marking a 54-percent increase over the last three years. “March Madness is the highlight of the college basketball season and fans are gearing up for a month of tournament action,” Bill Miller, President and CEO of the AGA, said in a statement.
Not that I needed Miller to remind me of that. Take a look at what ESPN mornings looks like these days with Greenberg now serving as the Whoopi Goldberg of sports on his tedious football-centric GET UP! and Golic long gone to the obscurity of the remnants of FanDuel Sports Network. Violators? You bet.
These days, there’s no such massive pool for me; the only competitive one I’m in has at the writing a sum total of three entrants. We’re “competing” exclusively for pride. And there’s no printed sheet for me to refer to obsessively as I’m sadly nowhere near Las Vegas. I’m at least forward-thinking enough to confine my passion to websites and apps. For posterity and consistency, here’s my picks.
It’s hardly the most outrageous array of calls; picking Duke to go all the way is a conclusion I’m way sure more than three people are making in any pool besides the one I’m in. If I’ve learned anything at all from my experience, is that there will definitely be a few double-digit seeds that will advance–the challenge is correctly selecting which ones do so. I’ve got the likes of South Florida toppling Louisville, High Point eliminating Wisconsin (not alone in that one, kids) and my personal Hail Mary, Kennesaw State upending Gonzaga. I have a couple of friends who live near their campus. What can I say other than if that logic worked for my one-time colleague, it might just work for me. I do encourage those of you who are taking their own shots to follow this sort of logic; just not necessarily the specific choices. You might find another team mascot even cuter than a Husky.
And since my work schedule is quite heavy this week during a great deal of the first two rounds’ windows I won’t be paying the kind of attention I once did to all that’s unfolding. I’ll be following the action when I can on my phone, just like an awful lot of the FanDuel and Kalshi-addicted generation does. With my screen of integrity a swipe away to set me straight.
Courage…