You should fill out your March Madness bracket based on which team is the nerdiest

You’re probably going to fill out a March Madness bracket. You’re either going to think really hard about it or you’re not going to think about it at all. But fill it out you will, because if you don’t, you’ll have nothing to talk about with your coworkers for the entire month of March.

There are a few tried and true strategies for tackling brackets. The most common way to predict who’s going to win a basketball game is to figure out which team is better at basketball and then guess that team will win. You’d think that if you filled out your bracket this way, you’d have success.

The problem is, however, that THIS IS MARCH!!!!!! And by “THIS IS MARCH!!!!!” I mean “you never know what’s going to happen, because you need to factor in injuries, stunning upsets, and that little thing we like to call ~*~*LuCk~*~*.”

If you’re going with the THIS IS MARCH!!!!! logic, you’re better off just picking random teams. I know from experience: One year I filled out a bracket entirely based on which uniforms I liked more. I came in second and won a bunch of money. Everyone in my pool (which consisted of the entire basketball team at my alma mater Colby College, which is not, and never will be, in the tournament) who researched their brackets for hours was mad at me.

This year, however, there’s an obvious hack to the bracketology: Do it by nerdiness.

I say this because there’s a shit ton of nerds in the tournament this year. We’ve got Princeton, Notre Dame, Virginia Tech, and (drum roll, please) Northwestern. In case you didn’t know, every sportswriter in the world except for me went to Northwestern. That’s a fact. You can look it up.

So, without further ado, here is a bracket that I filled out based on nerdiness. I will track the success of the nerds as the tournament goes on and occasionally let you know how all of our nerds are doing. This will include updates on how many books they’ve read and problem sets they’ve solved during downtime between games.

I’m going to walk you through a few of the toughest nerd decisions I had to make here, because I’m sure a bunch of you are gearing up to “WELL, ACTUALLY...” me.

Neither of these schools are super nerdy, really, but I went with Vermont. There’s something inherently nerdy about covered bridges and maple syrup, seeing as they are things that nerds typically like. And Vermont has both of them.

This is the toughest matchup in the nerd bracket. How do you choose between a bunch of pre-hedge fund managers and future presidents of universities and capital J journalists? In the end, Journalists won out, because, I’m sorry, but have you seen Spotlight? Those writer’s khakis are way nerdier than bankers’ suits. And yes, I know that many bankers went to Northwestern and many Journalists went to Princeton, but this blog post is about oversimplifying and gross generalizations, so don’t even bother @-ing me about it.

(As a nerdy journalist — lower case j — myself, please know that I am making fun of Northwestern people with love. I’m mostly just bitter, because I knew my grades weren’t good enough to get in and I had too many detentions on my record to even bother applying.)

This is tough because Wake has a play-in game. But, at a certain point, you just have to choose, so I did, and I chose Wake. And then I decided Wake was nerdier than UCLA, a decision with which some of my colleagues don’t agree. But I know some real capital N Nerds who went to Wake, and UCLA has a lot of computer people, I’m pretty sure. Since computers are going to own us all day, I don’t want to start by angering the people who make them. Wake it is.

I don’t know enough about Saint Mary’s, but I know Arizona is, like, the least-nerdy school on the planet. So I made an executive decision. I also decided not to Google anything about Saint Mary’s, because when it comes to March Madness, it’s always better to go with your gut than to look stuff up.

This was also a really tough call, because a lot of my best friends went to Duke and they are the definition of nerds. But a lot of my friends also went to Northwestern, and they might be even nerdier. Also, there’s the fact that Northwestern’s mascot is literally a Nerd. Not many people talk about this, but they’re literally the Northwestern Nerds. So I really didn’t have much of a choice. They’re going to win the whole dang nerd bracket because they’re the nerdiest.

Anyway, as the old Norse saying goes, “Nerds: Gotta love ’em!” May the best nerds win. We’re all rooting for you because we’re all going to work for you someday.