Dispatches from the Courtside…A Feel Good Story
NCAA Basketball Championship Picks
By James Ellison for RedHottLocks.com
Everyone I know seems to be rooting for Butler. It is the ultimate “feel good” story, a true David versus Goliath tale. Butler, home of some 4,200 students, located six miles from Lucas Oil Stadium, a team with a smothering defense and an anemic offense, a team that no one had going this far. Duke, a perennial basketball powerhouse, coached by Mike Krzyzewski (and yes, I had to look up how to spell that God-Awful name – how did this guy get past 1st grade, having to write that at the top of all of his papers?) of Olympic Dream Team fame, a team with 11 Final Four appearances and 75 tournament wins under Coack K. One team has the pedigree. I told you this was a feel good story, right? Duke is at -340 to win, and they are seven point favorites. Well, Duke wins. And covers. No problems. Now here’s why, and that’s the feel good part.
Every year myself and Circus Dave fill out brackets here at the office. And every year we split a bracket. The bracket we split is the Mascot bracket. The premise of the Mascot bracket is simple, all you do is figure out which mascot would win in a fight to the death. The Mascot bracket locked up the office pool Saturday night when Duke beat West Virginia. It doesn’t matter who wins the championship game. But the Mascot bracket predicted Duke, and that’s why Duke will win. I know it’s not the most scientific analysis, but I’m not one to mess with fate. And the only thing that can beat a blue devil is a black devil. Way back when Kansas fell to the mighty Northern Iowa Panthers (and a panther would kill a jayhawk, right?), it seemed that Ohio State had the inside line to the championship game. Until we learned that a bulldog can eat a buckeye and survive. Turns out the Volunteers pruned that buckeye tree instead, and hey, the Mascot bracket isn’t perfect. Across the great divide, the West Virginia Mountaineers were predicted to go pretty far. We’ve all seen Next of Kin. Swayze, Neeson, and Paxton were three brothers who could take down almost anything. And let’s not leave out the Michigan State Spartans. But this isn’t Sparta, and they’re not fighting Persians. Kentucky Wildcats and Kansas Jayhawks. Those are the teams that most people had in the championship game. Neither team made it there, exactly as the Mascot bracket predicted. The feel good part of the story comes in when you look at how the tourney played out, and how many “expert” brackets were busted. Go Duke, and go Mascot Bracket! Now you have to ask yourself: can a Bulldog beat a Blue Devil?
