My 11 year old brain cracked the code: How to create the perfect March Madness Bracket

We have finally made it. The most perfect sporting event from top to bottom is officially set. Every year we go into Conference Championship Weekend waiting to see that perfect piece of paper with 68 teams and the lines that connect them all: the lines that will decide the best team in the entire sport across the country for that season.

The odds of you getting a perfect bracket? 9.2 quintillion to 1. Written out, that is: 9,200,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. Thats a lot of zero's, 18 digits follow that 9 spot. Odds are, we aren't getting a perfect bracket for quite sometime if ever. Lets round up the US population to 330 million. If all 330 million people in the USA created a different bracket, the odds of someone getting it right would be 1 in 27,878,787,878. Thats a .000000000003% chance of someone getting a perfect bracket. The odds, evidently are against us, so quit wasting your time thinking about having a perfect bracket.

Every year we see a tweet go viral before the National Championship with someone claiming they had a perfect bracket written down on paper since Selection Sunday. They fill-out the bracket day by day and get their 15 seconds of fame on Twitter and have a 50-50 shot of guessing the Champion correct. Show me that person, and I'll show you a DAMN liar. Increasing their odds by quite literally 10 billion% the night before the championship game and claiming to have had the perfect bracket.

Enough with the mathematics. Filling out the bracket is all about the expirence. I would consider myself pretty decent when it comes to knowledge of CBB, however, unlike the majority of college basketball snobs, I know I won't be getting a perfect bracket, so here are the brackets that I produce.

I start off IMMEDIATELY after the Selection Show is finished and use my college basketball 'expertise' to fill in the brackets with my "Gut Reactions", thus my first bracket is created. This bracket is inspired by all of the teachers and professors who tell you not to ponder questions too long as you end up second guessing yourself, and guess what, just like on those tests and quizzes, I end up with a 50% correct picking rate with that bracket.

My second bracket is all based off of a coin. Yes, the very same way we decide overtime NFL games is how I decide to do another bracket. This is where the mathematics come back in to play. A coin, very likely has a chance to do just as well as I do when it come to a 1 in 9 quintillion chance, so I kiss the coin and flip it 63 times until a winner is decided. Evidently, it is preposterous to have #8 Boise State, #11 Virginia Tech, #12 UAB, and #16 (the winner of) Texas Southern/Texas A&M Corpus Christi in the Final Four with the play-in team being the champion, but hey, a 16-seed has advanced once, so why couldn't they advance 7 times? Imagine all 12,000 of those students throwing a party EVERY WIN? Winning the play-in game is great, beating a one seed after that is even better, and win after win (the winner of that game) that school will burn that city to the ground. Winnning the natty that the coin brought to them? A scene I would definetly like to be apart of.

I then move on to the "cooler mascot" bracket. The title is exactly what you think. I pick, in my opinion, which mascot has a cooler on court mascot. This automatically disqualifies mascots to the like of Smokey (Tennessee), Ralphie the Buffalo (Colorado), Bevo (Texas), etc. It has to be a mascot that actually attends the basketball games. If they don't have a man in a costume at the game, they don't move on. If two teams in the first round don't have a mascot, I pick the cooler living mascot (Smokey, Ralphie, Bevo, etc.) and they lose when they face a mascot that attends the basketball games.

With all of that being said, I would like to give a huge shoutout to the multi-time champions since I was 11 years old. Whenever Syracuse or Xavier make the tournament, they automatically win it all because their mascots are so hilariously dumb. Tigers? Eagles? Bulldogs? NONE OF THAT SHIT. The Orange (Otto), and the Blue Blob are the two greatest competitors in the "Cooler Mascot" bracket, and if this is how March Madness was actually decided, Xavier and Syracuse would be the two leading schools in National Championship Apperances by a country mile.

This season, however, neither school qualified for the tournament, giving a shot to a few new-comers: schools whos mascots are just a little bit better than everyone elses. Moving past the boring early rounds full of Bulldogs, Wildcats, Aggies, and different forms of birds, or state names, we move to the Elite 8, where we have TOM (Memphis), Tuffy the Titan (Cal State Fullerton), Zippy (Akron), Peahen (St. Peter's), Blaze (UAB), YoUDee (Delaware), WebstUR (Richmond), and Cocky (Jacksonville State).

The coolest mascots this season come down to the St. Peter's "Peahen" and UAB's "Blaze", with Blaze taking the cake. These out of the ordinary mascot's have nothing to do with a team on the court, coaching staff or story lines, rather which mascot I deem "cooler"...but also, shout out Jelly Walker @ UAB!

The most boring bracket of all is the bracket where you think you are a college basketball analyst and break down point totals, records against top 25 oppenents, and things of the sort (I happen to have about 12 of these brackets), but I won't be sharing them as they are boring.

The GrandDaddy of all my brackets, is the originally deemed "Mascot Kill" bracket, but since The Hunger Games movies has been more appropriately renamed. This bracket speaks for itself and is often difficult when teams such as Providence, Duke, St. Louis, and NCState/Nevada are in the tournament, cause I have to ponder life questions such as: what beats faith? what beats a devil? how many wolves are in a wolf pack? How this bracket works is you take the idea of the two things facing off. It's not the actual mascots killing each other, rather in the case of Gonzaga vs Georgia State, it is a Bulldog versus a Panther.

With that being said, here are the most difficult matchups in the Mascot Hunger Games Bracket this season:

• Georgia State Panthers vs. Memphis Tigers

• Vermont Catamounts vs. New Mexico State Aggies

• Duke Blue Devils vs Cal State Fullerton Titans (Elephant)

• Rutgers Scarlett Knights vs Texas Tech Red Raiders

• Duke Blue Devils vs Michigan State Spartans

• Norfolk State Spartans vs Baylor Bears

• Wyomig Cowboys vs UCLA Bruins

• Norfolk State Spartans vs UCLA Bruins

• San Francisco Dons vs Murray State Racers (Horses)

• Villanova Wildcats vs Michigan Wildcats - in these scenarios (two schools with the same mascot, the higher seed wins)

• Texas A & M Corpus Christi Islanders vs San Diego State Aztecs

• Iowa State Cyclones vs Miami Hurricanes
  

The Dumbest Mascots in this years tournament:

• The Alabama Crimson Tide (a stained football jersey can't beat anything)
  

The Mascots that really make things difficult:

• Iowa State Cyclones (A tornado loses to what?)

• Miami Hurricanes (A hurricane loses to what?)

• Duke Blue Devils (A Devil loses to what?)

• Providence Friars (A group of holy men loses to what? God is on their side...)

• UAB Blazers (A dragon doesn't lose...)

And finally the completed Hunger Games Mascot Tournament

There are literally a million+ different ways you could complete your bracket, but I challenge you to think of a very unqiue way to make your brackets. In short, please sink into the couch, enjoy 12 hours of basketball every day this weekend, and tear up these beloved sheets of paper while losing money on 18 year olds putting a ball through a cylinder.

HAPPY MARCH!

side note: FUCK THE NCAA!