So I was signing in to listen to Sirius online (subject of a future post) the other day when I noticed that they've posted the NCAA brackets filled out by some of their celebrity jocks. Whether they really do some sort of awesome intra-Sirius $5 office pool pitting Barbara Walters, Handsome Dick Manitoba, Tony Hawk and Vincent Pastore against each other with 300 dollars or so at stake, or whether it's all just an easy way to promote their March Madness coverage, I don't know.

Looking them all over, the most interesting entry, by far, includes match-ups such as "Fuckeyes vs. Mormons," and pithy team abbreviations like "Chair thrower," "Twerps," "Farmers," and "Elvis." There's also the big blue ring left by a glass/bottle of something put down on the sheet. Nice. You mean people drink while participating in this? I couldn't imagine.

So you're asking; is it the work of Deepak Chopra? Jim Cramer? Baba Booey? Lynn Samuels?


















Of course, you need look no further than Outlaw Country's Mojo Nixon. Duh.

It made me think. I haven't done a bracket by hand (for anything other than keeping track myself) for years now. Since I'm no longer in high school/not working in an office, I've done the million-zillion-people-in-it ESPN one for years, and got into a Facebook pool among friends this year, which I'm happy to say I'm leading (there's that jinxed.) It makes all the sense in the world, for everyone, to do these things online. It's easier to fill out; click and go. It's a million times easier for whoever's running the show to figure out who's winning the damn thing - that wait until 7th period to find out who was winning your pool really sucked.. You can even, as Dan Shanoff shows here, capitalize on the aggregated data from hundreds of thousands of entries to pick according to hive-thinking. You may not win the whole thing, but you're likely to put in a very, very strong showing. Not to give away any great secrets, but this is exactly what I did. And so far, so good.

Still, as Mojo shows us here, we'll be missing a little something special when the last xeroxed tourney sheet, like handwritten letters and cash before it, goes the way of the dodo, and you can't scratch "Fuckeyes" in for OSU anymore.

Labels: March Madness, Sirius