THIS...IS...uh...Tar Hee?

Here's what's awesome about the NCAA basketball tournament (from the layman's perspective): not one person knows what the hell he's doing. But we all fill out our brackets anyway, because we like anything that isn't our job or family. Also, we like money.

I additionally like to pretend that I am preternaturally knowledgeable; this is in fact my primary motive to participate in no less than four different bracket pools every year. Truth be told, I have not held an unadulterated interest in college basketball since around the time that Christian Laettner was selected to the USA Dream Team and Shaquille O'Neal joined forces with the Fu-Schnickens to implicitly protest as much in the form of high-speed rhyming verse. (Have Laettner or Shaq turned pro yet? And what of the Schnickens?--them homeys was fresh.) Regardless, my near-total ignorance never fails to hold zero influence in my decision to settle in at the computer with minutes to go until the bracket-submission deadline and initiate the half-assed "research"--this guy on CBS Sportsline says this, but this other guy on SI.com says a different thing, but green is my favorite color, etc.--that determines my faux-educated picks. Yes, I want to win my bracket pools, but my greater desire is to appear as though I've accomplished as much as a result of some Rainman-without-the-deficiency-style supersmarts (like, if Dustin-Hoffman-in-Rainmain had seen into Tom-Cruise-in-Rainmain's alternate-universe future as Jerry Maguire and partnered their souls).

You know how I would have achieved that goal this year (on 1 out of 3 brackets in 2 out of 4 pools) (and then had a much easier time coming up with a title for this post)? If Michigan State had defeated North Carolina in the championship game on Monday night.

Alas, things went the other way, apparently because the Tar Heels were a vastly superior basketball team to the Spartans.

How the hell was anybody supposed to know that?