March Sadness

Junior finds himself sinking to bottom of bracket pool

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Gianni Harvey-Montgomery

Junior Bobby Palomin is an avid sports enthusiast as well as editor of the Valley Ventana staff.

Bobby Palomin, Editor

The NCAA Tournament is one of the most exciting sporting events that takes place yearly. A tournament in which powerhouse established schools and small unknown underrated schools meet up to play college basketball in a tournament is appropriately called March Madness. The tournament begins with a field of 64 teams and is a total of six rounds leading to the national championship.

Every year I create a bracket and have a group of about 10 other people that I play with in a pool who also pick brackets. Every year I go into the tournament with my bracket picked and full of hope with the anticipation that this year I win my pool by picking the most accurate bracket.

But every year about the Sweet 16 (16 teams remaining in the tournament; it’s pretty self explanatory), I usually find myself in last, full of disappointment at just how inaccurate my bracket ended up.

What frustrates me every year isn’t the fact that my bracket is completely busted by the second weekend of the tournament. It’s also not the fact I watch so much college basketball and put so much thought into my bracket and end up in last. It’s that others in my pool simply pick off of uniform color or team logo and usually end up winning the whole thing.

That’s why this year when the champion I had picked (and No. 1 overall seed) Villanova fell to a No. 8 seeded Wisconsin team in the round of 32 in the tournament, I was compelled to rename the tournament from March Madness to March Sadness.

It seems every pick I made this year has ended up wrong and has left me frustrated but, for some odd reason, still watching the tournament with unrelenting attention.

While others may be celebrating a Gonzaga victory or a Xavier upset over powerhouse Arizona, I’m sitting back watching my bracket go down the drain. It’s through all this that I realized picking the right bracket is purely luck, and well, maybe, I’m just that unlucky.