It’s that time of year again— time to fill out your bracket for your lab’s March Madness pool. If you don’t live in America and/or have no idea what I’m talking about, well, I’m sorry.
Here are some tips on how to pick which teams are going to win, and emerge victorious in your lab’s NCAA March Madness pool:
-Did anyone in your lab/scientific circle go to that school as an undergrad? Do not pick that team to win.
-Either your lab or the lab next door has an old technician who reads the newspaper every day at lunch. Just pick whatever teams they did.
-Does the name of a team include the name of a state? Pick that team to win.
-Do not create a random bracket generator using Matlab/another programming language to pick your teams. You’ll think it’s a cool idea until you realize that people take the March Madness pool seriously.
-Fact: the higher the ratio of blondes/brunettes at any college, the more likely it is that the team will succeed. If you don’t know the ratio at that particular institution, estimating based on the B/B ratio of the state in which the college is located is a good first approximation.
-In every department, there’s guaranteed to be at least person who went to Duke. Find that person, and copy their bracket entirely, except for any game that involves Duke.
A few years ago a Yank tried to set this up in the lab I was in (in Finland). There was some polite interest, but not much more – about the same interest as there is in the US for the ice hockey world championships.
Or the FIFA World Cup, for that matter. Some pockets, but little more. Sigh. In my grad student lab, there was a pool. I chose teams entirely randomly, and did not progress very far – but neither did the impassioned sponsors of the pool.
Same here. But it was charming how some of them actually bet that the US was going to be on the final, and even win it! A nation of idealist, they truly are… ;)
Also, if the college’s team is named after a popular brand of Condoms, a fierce set of folks from a small European country with a strong economy, or an industrious animal that digs burrows, include them. It is also prudent to take at least one team that is in the bottom 5% of the standings. They don’t call it March Madness for nothing.
Oh, and in the upcoming American Le Mans race at Sebring, pick Audi. That is all.
an industrious animal that digs burrows
Go, Naked Mole Rats! Longevity! Longevity!
Oh, wait.