Northwestern and Duke have given us the best March Madness memes so far

Before any of the March Madness games tipped off last week, I suggested that you should fill out your bracket based on which teams are the nerdiest. Duke would put up a good fight, I reasoned, but ultimately their soon-to-be bankers would be no match for the capital ‘J’ Journalists that Northwestern boasts, and the Wildcats would win it all.

NEWS FLASH: I was kidding. If you did adopt this strategy, your bracket is now buried six feet under a mountain of disappointment, wounded pride, and stupidity. I mean, your bracket is probably buried under all of that by now anyway, because that’s what happens during March Madness, but hopefully it’s not because you took my idiotic advice.

It turns out that while nerds are really good at things like reading books, owning calculators, acing exams, and taking your job when they graduate in a few years, they’re not super great at basketball this year. Vanderbilt, Duke, Princeton, Northwestern, and Virginia Tech — which I would argue were the top five seeds in the nerd department — all lost to much more jock-y, cooler schools.

You know what the nerds gave us in place of wins, though? Incredible internet. There are few things more satisfying than roasting people who will someday employ you.

Surprisingly few memes came out of Vanderbilt’s and Princeton’s losses in the first round, even though both blew one-point games by missing buzzer-beating threes. You’d think nerds would have been smarter in those situations and just go to the damn basket, but they weren’t.

No, my friends, it wasn’t until the Round of 32 that the beautiful internet showed up. As Northwestern fell to Gonzaga, CBS’ broadcast bestowed Crying Braces Kid on us:

The kid is the son of Northwestern’s athletic director, Jim Phillips, according to Yahoo. As CBS kept zooming in on this picture of agony, the internet perked up its collective head, cracked its knuckles, and began meme-ing the shit out of him.

I kind of felt bad for this little guy, mostly because I feel bad whenever I realize anyone is about to get roasted by the web, unless that person is the president of the United States. The moment you notice someone is about to become a meme is like spotting a tsunami before it breaks. You see the waters ebb, the wave swell, and the white crest of foam head towards that one poor soul in the form of “that feeling when” jokes.

I tried to assuage my guilt about chiming in with jokes of my own by reasoning that Crying Braces Kid will probably go to Northwestern and become a sportswriter, which means that one day he’ll get to write an incredible essay about what it was like to become a meme.

Even better than this orthodontized (it’s a word, OK?) kid were the posts that flowed as South Carolina upset Duke in a stunning game Sunday night. The only thing the internet loves more than a good-ass meme is a good-ass meme about a hated sports team. Duke star Luke Kennard got mad at a ref after he fouled out of the game, and it was like internet joke lighter fluid. The Privileged White Guy jokes set the place on fire:

Kennard wasn’t the only one who got dragged across the coals. Coach K’s red face got memed, too.

As much as I love the jokes, I can’t shake the feeling that there is something a little questionable about the entire satirical force of the internet focusing its roving Cyclops’ eye on one college player. I know, I know — when you’re a high-profile athlete, this is what you have to expect. And everyone hates Duke. And Kennard will probably make millions of dollars in the NBA at some point. I just still have a little bit of empathy for the guy, sue me.

As for turning Braces Kid or Crying Piccolo Girl into #content, it always feels naggingly questionable to me (she said hypocritically, having jumped on that bandwagon). A meme is, at its heart, a raw display of emotion that gets turned into a joke and riffed on. And when the subject is an innocent — a random human in the stands or pep band who happens to cry in the wrong place at the wrong time — using them for jokes can feel worse than doing so to a rich public figure.

But, then again, if you go to a sports game in 2017, you know ending up all over people’s Twitter timelines is a risk you run. And the internet is generally such a dark place these days that an in-good-fun meme is a real ray of light.

When it comes to capitalizing on the faces of guys like Coack K, however, I’m not conflicted in the least. Here’s a dude who has made bajillions of dollars coaching unpaid players and doing whatever it takes to win (hello, Grayson Allen’s one-game, “indefinite” suspension). He is college basketball’s eternal villain, and if anyone should have thick skin by now, it’s him. A Coach K internet barbecue is one no one should feel bad about attending.

I’m sure we’ll have many more great memes as the tournament progresses, but this weekend, the nerds were the hosts of the roasts. Their teams might’ve dropped like flies, but the jokes they gave us as they fell were A+.