Bracket Busting, Again

The NCAA men's basketball final game is tonight, and if Villanova wins, Corrie will have kicked my ass again in the bracket-filling-in that we engage in each year. Many years I'll snake a few games ahead of her, or pick trendy underdogs that fulfill destinies, or end up with Final Four contestants, but she always seems to end up at the end of the tournament with eye-popping results.

One year, when we lived in Texas, Corrie won the tournament pool where I worked, beating out of GM who fancied himself a college-hoops expert.

This year an amazing amount of underdogging was undertaken. For the first time ever since the tournament expanded to 64 teams did a 16-seed beat a 1-seed, and that 16th seeded school, University Maryland, Baltimore County, is known as the Chesapeake Bay Retrievers:

Old pal Joey actually attended Loyola Chicago, so getting to watch that Cinderella team get all the way to the Final Four was pretty exciting. In one bracket, the spot in the Final Four was played between the 11-seed (Loyola Chicago) versus the 9-seed (Kansas State). For the first time ever, two 1-seeds failed to make it past the first two teams (overall top seed Virginia lost to the Retrievers in their first game, while fellow 1-seed Xavier lost their second game to Florida State).

Corrie and I typically fill out two brackets each, and then we fill out our "control" bracket, which just picks the favorite each time.

In one of my brackets I picked Arizona to win it all---they lost their first game. D'oh. Plenty of people picked Virginia to win this year---it seemed about time their methodical play style would finally yield tournament championship results. See how that worked for everyone?

So, amidst all this commercialized madness, all this generally awful enslavement and profiting off the labor and work of young people who have no rights to themselves or likenesses...the NCAA is a rickety structure that, as it stands now, is not a sustainable organization...

Anyway, amidst all this madness, and busted and burned down brackets, Corrie has a bracket with Villanova beating Michigan in the final game. SHE HAS BOTH FINALISTS!!!!

There was one year she bragged about how the White Sox would sweep way the Astros---it happened.

She talked trash to all the Trojan fans back in 2006, when Texas was set to play USC in the Rose Bowl for the college football championship, "Longhorns gonna kick yo' ass!" all through out the burgundy-sporting bar in San Luis. Because she's a girl, the USC backers who didn't know her didn't much say anything, and the guys who did know her knew it wise to temper their own responsive shit talking---because we all knew USC was the far superior team. Couldn't convince Corrie.

Of course Vince Young, in one of the college football games for the ages, crushed the hearts of the Trojans and Trojan fans everywhere. Corrie, coming back through the bar after the game, as the long faces mounted: "Told ya! Shoulda listened...maybe could have won some cash on that game!"

I don't mean to paint her as a sore winner, but most of those USC fans in SLO were a-holes and deserved that treatment

But, on occasion, she has some nearly supernatural knack for picking sports winners. See, it's just not often enough for us to have developed a sports-gambling vice.

Which is for the best.