Numbers don't lie

You know those people that they show on the early audition episodes of American Idol? The ones who are so committed to being a pop star, but are just plain terrible at singing? And Randy says, "Dude, that was terrible," and the kinder lady-judge says "Singing just isn't for you, sweetheart," and they're devastated, because it's the only thing they've ever wanted to do?

Well, that's me when it comes to filling out NCAA Tournament brackets. I LOVE March Madness. It's one of my favorite events of the year, sports or otherwise. And I used to think I was good at picking the winners, though I probably never really was. My futility reached its apex this year. I filled out 20 brackets this year, and here are the pitiful results:

On sites that let you create a bunch of entries, I use one as a baseline, where I pick zero upsets and see if any of my other brackets can do better than the selection committee. I filled out five bracket on Yahoo!; my baseline bracket finished in the 72nd percentile of all entries, but the best of the other four was in the 58th, and two of them were below the 20th.

Those four entries were all in groups with other people from church or work. My final placement in the groups: 5th out of 7, 9th out of 11, 11th out of 11, and 18th out of 20 (one of the two I "beat" in that group was someone who created an entry but didn't fill out their bracket). Pretty, pretty embarrassing performance.

I entered 10 brackets on ESPN; the baseline bracket finished in the 82nd percentile. I had one other entry that matched that performance, but six of the others finished in the 14th percentile or worse (with one in the bottom 1.5%). Yikes!

On the CBS site you can only submit one entry, and they don't give percentiles, but over one million people did better than me, and my final score was about one-third that of the winner. I finished in the 23rd percentile on my lone entry with the Deseret News. And finally, Fox Sports lets you enter three brackets. No percentiles given here, but it appears I had one awful bracket, one average one, and one that was actually pretty good (around 25,000th place out of what was probably around 350k entries). But that's a pretty poor silver lining when stacked up with the other results.

Some might argue that I'd do better if I didn't fill out so many brackets, but on these multi-pick sites I always fill out the first one the way I would if it was the only one I was doing, then tweak things from there on the others. So the truth is, I'm really, really bad at this.

All this number crunching made me a little sad, but then I thought of number munching, and that made me happy. If you're around my age, I guarantee the above picture and this video will make you smile too. No matter how bad I do, I will continue to fill out as many brackets as I can. I'm already looking forward to next March. Just 11 months away!