I didn’t even make it home Thursday night before these adjectives started running through my thoughts.
It’s busted.
It’s crushed.
It’s pulverized.
It’s kaput as in utterly finished, defeated, destroyed and hopelessly outmoded.
If you follow college basketball at all, I’m sure you know that the dismal words above can only describe one item during this crazy month in which we’re living — my NCAA Tournament bracket.
Several friends from my college days in Arizona and I have been doing a bracket competition for longer than I can remember. Some years I do decent. I think I even won our bracket game a couple of times.
More recently, however, I find myself on the losing side.
This year’s bracket will not be a winner nor will it be a runner-up. There is no chance that it will even come close to winning third place in our annual competition. In fact, it might finish in last place below my friend’s 7-year-old son’s picks. Now, I’m in 18th place out of 23 friends.
If I could go back and fill out this year’s bracket again, I’d come up with a way to let my 3-year-old golden retriever Santiago and my 5-year-old Bernese mountain dog Alicia make the picks. They certainly would have put together a better bracken than yours truly.
My CBS Sports app tells me that I am in 1,744,916th place as of Sunday evening. Last year at this time I was in 941,446th place. Last year nearly 1 million people picked a better bracket than the one I selected … and that number has increased to almost 2 million people this year.
Aaron Rodgers 2 has only made seven bad picks at the time I put this column together — three in the east region, one in the midwest region, and three in the west region, according to my CBS Sports app.
Like me, Mr. Rodgers 2 had No. 1 seed Purdue winning several of its games. I’m still shocked about that upset even though the Peeper family always has cheered for the Hoosiers.
Unlike me, however, Mr. Rodgers 2 had the foresight to predict that No. 15 seed Princeton would upset No. 2 seed Arizona in the first round.
I thought the Wildcats would make it to the championship game, where Arizona would face Houston. My final four predictions included Arizona, Purdue, Houston and Kansas. Ultimately I predicted that Houston would win the national championship.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Not even close. Three of the four teams I selected to advance to the Final Four didn’t even make it a week.
The biggest heartache, however, was Arizona’s loss to Princeton.
I’ve been an Arizona Wildcats fan since I lived in Tucson in 2004 while taking journalism, Spanish and education classes at The University of Arizona. To see the Wildcats back in the tourney this year as a No. 2 seed following their No. 1 seed ranking last year had me optimistic.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to view their round one game on Thursday, as I was helping chaperone a dodgeball event at school. A student broke the news when he ran up and showed me a screenshot on his phone following ESPN’s breaking news that Princeton had stunned Arizona by defeating the Wildcats 59-55 in the first round.
At first, I thought he was playing a joke on me. Before I could ask, several other students ran over to us to share the news as well.
March Madness at its finest.
I’ll be submitting this column before the Hoosiers play Sunday night, but the hope here is that Indiana now goes all the way. Time to dig out my crimson and cream colors to cheer on the Hoosiers.
Next year, however, I’m going to turn to Santiago and Alicia to pick the teams that I put on my bracket. There is no way they could do worse than yours truly who is in almost 2 millionth place.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
