The NCAA tournament tips off in a few hours, and if you’re anything like me, you still have no idea how to fill out your bracket.
I had no idea how to fill out my bracket, so I asked my 3-year-old daughter for help.
She’s pretty high on Penn.
Look man, these things are hard. Sure, it helps to get expert advice (including from lots of folks right here at SB Nation), it helps to have watched a bunch of basketball games, it helps to crunch the KenPom and the KPI and the RPI and the OMGBBQ data. But at the end of the day, some directional school you had no idea existed three weeks ago is going to ruin everything, and Andy from Accounting is going to win your bracket pool.
If we already know where the conventional road goes, why not try something unconventional?
So I asked my daughter, Penny. She’s three.
We sat down together, going through the matchups one by one. Then, drawing on a mixture of her deep basketball knowledge, her opinion of the school’s mascot, their color scheme, and whatever else going on in a three-year-old’s brain, she picked the entire bracket. Let’s face it. It can’t be that much worse than what we’d come up with, right?
So here’s what she came up with.
A few notes here:
* Let the record state that my daughter has Ohio State advancing, and Michigan losing to Montana in the first round. I’ve probably failed to teach my daughter a lot of correct lessons, but damn it if I didn’t already find a way to teach her that Ohio State is good (like the spot), and Michigan is bad. Hopefully that’s on an elementary school standardized test somewhere.
- The Final Four? Tennessee (who has a good dog as a mascot), Butler (who also has a good dog as a mascot), Penn, and North Carolina.
- I was a little surprised to see how enthusiastic she was about rooting for Penn, who she picked to go all the way to the championship game, before remembering that Pen is her nickname at school, and she thought I was talking about her. Go Quakers, I guess.
- UNC has the same school colors as her daycare. Hard to top that baby blue, I guess?
- “Purdue’s man looks scary”, which is why she picked Cal State Fullerton in the first round, which, to be honest, seems like impeccable logic to me.
So there you have it. Buy stock in Buffalo, Butler, and Alabama but pick the Tar Heels to win it all. You never know. From the wisdom of babes, and all that.
See More:
