I’m in a bas­ket­ball pool on the pop­u­lar social net­work­ing web­site Face­book. This is for that big bas­ket­ball game that ends up with the Final Four. As you can tell, I’m not much of a sports fan. I enjoyed the sports I was in, when I was in them, and I guess I don’t mind watch­ing some sports on TV. Really, I’m the last per­son in the world qual­i­fied to pre­dict who will win this big bas­ket­ball thing. Maybe if I was psy­chic or watched bas­ket­ball, then I would be able to rely on the sport­man­ship (or the psy­chic ether) to make my picks. As it is, I’m left to my own devices.

Back dur­ing foot­ball sea­son, David enlisted me to help him make his weekly foot­ball picks for a sim­i­larly run foot­ball pool. Why he chose me, I’ll never know, as I am no more qual­i­fied to pick foot­ball teams than I am to pick bas­ket­ball teams. How­ever, I did my best to help him. The way that pool was set up, you pick which team would win a par­tic­u­lar game (you can only pick one of the two teams who are play­ing, but I worked around that) and then a rat­ing for them. The rat­ing was gen­er­ally a ran­dom num­ber. Often I tried to give mul­ti­ple teams the same num­ber and would have to ask David what num­bers were left. I’m sure this engen­dered his con­fi­dence in my scheme.

My method for pick­ing the team that would win was slightly dif­fer­ent. He would read me the town where the team was from. This was a good method, since I knew pretty much all the towns or states. I was then ask for the mas­cot, because a town isn’t enough to gauged a team’s phys­i­cal worth. The men­tal­ity behind pick­ing mas­cots is that a team named “The Killer Machines” will play bet­ter than a team named “The Del­i­cate Rose Petals”. (NOTE: This method assump­tion doesn’t work if one team is “The Bears” and the other team is the “The Anti-Bears”. In this case, “The Anti-Bears” will prob­a­bly play bet­ter, even if they sound like eco-friendlly panzies.) The method, while quite com­mon sense, doesn’t appear to realy sports fans to be worth­while (at least, no one’s ever said, “That’s a great method! I’m going to use that!”).

For the record, one week, we took first in the pool. This method works! (at least once)

This method can have it’s set­backs. What if the mas­cots are the same species? What if they have entirely dif­fer­ent habi­tats? What if one is human; does human intel­li­gence play a part? These are ques­tions not eas­ily answered, and it is really per game that one must make that call. I would spend won­drous hours, eyes closed, watch­ing Titans (building-sized statue-monsters) bat­tling waist-deep in the ocean against a rout of super-inteligent, lazer-armed dolphins.

I’m apply­ing a sim­i­lar method to this bas­ket­ball pool. My first method of elim­i­na­tion between teams has been which has more fans in the Face­book group devoted to the sports team. If it’s 783 fans to 37,922 fans, then I have my win­ner. If the dif­fer­ence is less than 50% of the less pop­u­lar team’s fans, then I go to the mas­cots. It had been going just fine. I quickly and eas­ily (and hap­pily) cranked out my picks for Mid­west and East divi­sions. (By the by, a “ter­rapin” is a tur­tle.) It had been going just fine until I had Vil­lanova Wild­cats ver­sus Ken­tucky Wild­cats, with the fan base being approx­i­mately 3,200 ver­sus 5,800.

UPDATE: I just ran into Stand­ford Car­di­nal ver­sus Louisville Car­di­nals in the South. This one is easy, though, because one car­di­nal is noth­ing against a flock of car­di­nals. Louisville gets the pick.

UPDATE: I just fin­ished the pick process. Duke made it pretty far, not just because they’re a good team, but because the Devil can con­trol the minds of ani­mals. How­ever, not know­ing what a Tar Heel really is, and assum­ing it can­not be pos­sessed by Satan, I had UNC for the big win.

I’m floored. I guess this is why they made coins. What are your meth­ods for pick­ing pools? Want to share your own tour­na­ment picks?