The guys at the office I worked for a few summers ago used to tell the story of Elaine Warner, a lawyer in capital cases who had dominated the 2002 NCAA office pool. One year, Elaine had spontaneously entered a bracket in the office's annual March Madness tournament. Although she was the gambling type, Elaine was not the sports type, usually spending most of her lunch break throwing virtual quarters into Internet slot machines, not checking box scores. So, when she put her name into the 200-plus-person pool, everyone had expected quick elimination.
But four weeks later, Elaine proved to be her own little Cinderella story, the only one in the entire office to have a near perfect bracket by the championship game. How had a college basketball neophyte like Elaine plotted her brilliant picks to win it all? She had constructed all of her selections based on uniform colors. Specifically, she had gone through each match-up and chosen the team that used primary colors. If two opposing teams had primary colors, she had chosen based on aesthetics and creativity of the uniform. This method led her to a Duke-Arizona championship game, with the Blue of the Devils beating the Wildcats not only on the court, but also on style.
Elaine's story speaks less to what makes a uniform pleasing to the eye and more to the unpredictability of the men's college basketball championship tournament. Every year, people all over the country construct college hoops predictions through various modes of analysis, many more peculiar than uniform color. The more traditional entrants painstakingly sift through statistics, pull names out of a hat, analyze historical trends, weigh team chemistry and star players or rehash rivalries and adrenaline-filled upsets. Some of the more anomalous methods involve setting up hypothetical mascot match-ups - who would win between a Terrapin and a Boilermaker?
To be frank, I was so out of the loop this year that by the time March rolled around that the only thing I'd heard in the realm of college basketball was the drama over player of the year and tangential updates via Duke friends on the perpetual priggishness of J.J. Redick. So, instead of spending hours online trying to catch up on sports current events, I created my own addle-brained solution to the madness of March: vowels.
Please bear in mind that this seemed like a perfect quirky idea in the middle of my modern culture and media class on semantics. At the very least, "vowel representation in team names" seemed like a more intellectual solution than uniform cut and color. Since I was already behind the curve in 2006 NCAA knowledge, I had nothing to lose, making it a fun experiment in testing the true fickleness of the college basketball tournament.
The first rule went something like this: If the name of the team, as listed on the bracket, started with a vowel, it automatically lost. The second rule: If the name of the team had a higher ratio of vowels to consonants, it automatically won. The third rule: If two teams that start with similar letters are playing each other, the edge goes to the team with more rarified consonants. The fourth rule: All rules are off for the championship game.
The result of my lexical hypothesis? I should have stuck with secondary colors. The first rule got a little complicated almost immediately, as the bracket I was using had Connecticut listed as UConn. Discounting number one UConn to Kentucky in the second round seemed somehow imprudent. The problem was easily resolved by finding a new bracket. The second rule, unfortunately for me, placed Iowa and Ohio State in my final four, and by the end of the weekend my name had dropped from third to 22nd in my pool. The third rule created a dilemma between Gonzaga and Xavier, ending with an instinctive decision that X is a more exotic letter than Z, a decision that worked out about as well as Bob Knight in anger management. Free will gave me UConn as the champion, along with seven-eighths of my pool.
Moral of the story: With an infinite number of faulty and fanciful ways to pick your teams, don't frame your brackets around the alphabet. Use colors, use mascots, use the number of seconds between Dick Vitale's screams, but don't do bracketology by the letters, or you'll end up with Marquette and Nevada in your Elite Eight and 20 dollars less in your pocket.
Kate Klonick '06 referred to the University of Arizona as the Spartans in the unedited version of this column.
