March Madness

Well, I'm sitting here posting stuff to craigslist.com in Mexico City for sale. We're trying to sell most of our big stuff to either repurchase in the US or buy something else that we like better. We don't want to have to deal with the risks of things breaking or getting damaged, and we don't like waiting for forever to get our stuff, either! So the less we have, the better it will be!

Anyhow, so I was looking at the news and I saw headlines about the annual college basketball event called March Madness.

Many offices, friends, networks, wards, whatever...participate and gamble in filling out brackets that list each of the beginning games, then it is your job to guess who is going to win each, who will be paired up for the next game, who will win that one and so forth until you pick the national champion. You are only given the pairings of the first game, it is up to you to determine which teams lose and which teams move on from there on out.

Lots of skill, thought, technique and knowledge goes into picking the winner of each bracket. It helps to be on top of sports news and know the coachs' styles and each team's strengths and weaknesses. If you are the person that wins the bracket, many times you win a prize. If you've gambled on it, you could win lots of money.

About 7 years ago while I was at BYU (yikes! Has it been that long?!?!?!), my home teacher was a guy named Chris Seifert who wrote for the BYU newspaper's sports section. He was truly a humble guy, but he proud of his Nebraska heritage. He said that in Nebraska, there's nothing to do except farm corn or play sports (and I would rather play sports than farm corn!), so you can't help but get into sports if you're a Nebraskan.

Anyhow, Chris and his roommates decided to organize a March Madness bracket selection for the BYU 149th ward. There was no charge to enter, this was purely for fun.

Each person who wanted to participate was given a sheet with the intial games and then we were to fill out the rest according to how we thought the playoffs would go. Many guys I knew spent hours filling out that sheet, analyzing the facts and weighing their opinions.

I on the other hand, picked my teams according to the limited knowledge I had. I also knew that sometimes the underdog is determined to be the top dog, so sometimes the lower seeds would beat the higher seeds. I also picked some teams because I liked their names. I didn't pick the winner, though so my technique must not have worked so well. I think I spent maybe an hour on it and I handed my sheet in to Chris and forgot about it.

Chris and his roommates kept track of everybody's results and at the end of March Madness, when the National College Basketball Champion was crowned, they tallied up the results. I'm not sure how the tallying worked but they had it down.

One night a few days after the end of March Madness, I got a knock on my door. Sports-writer Chris Seifert was standing at my door with a sheepish look on his face and a super-jumbo sized box of Whoppers in his hand.

I had won! Unbelievably, I with my almost random manner of picking my teams had bested all of the sports "experts" in my ward! Chris was a wonderful sport and he said that the prize was a box of whoppers for the person who committed the whopping feat of winning (yeah, corny but so what?)

So it just goes to show...you can't always trust the experts in stuff as volatile as the stock market, or March madness!