Bracket Busters

Today we talked about discernment. I have been trying to use discernment all week, particularly as it pertains to filling out my bracket for the NCAA Men's College Basketball tournament.

Each year I try to listen to the experts, research the teams and pick the winners. Millions of people create brackets on ESPN trying for the same thing, all going into Thursday morning believing they could be the one. After the first game, I knew I hadn't found discernment. Notre Dame 50, Old Dominion 51. That was all I needed to see to know I was in for a long day.

After the first day of the tournament, only four brackets in America were still perfect. After day two, none existed. It hurts me to say this, but after Saturday's games — a horror for those of us that bought the hype about the Big East and Kansas — my bracket looks a lot like my math homework used to look — layered in red ink.

One of the things that's always struck me as frustrating about college football and basketball, to a certain extent, is how people misread the strength and ability of "top" teams. There isn't a lot of interconference play, so critics and pundits don't get to seek how the "top" teams in different conferences matchup against one another. Then, those top teams spend most of the season playing against teams in their own league. In the case of a conference like The Big East, if pundits believe the top teams in the conference are great and they play a lot of close games and have upsets against other teams in the conference, the assumption becomes that all the teams are really good. If a team is perceived to be part of a weak conference and the same thing happens, they are perceived to be having an off year. But is that really true.

Often, the regular season results are deceiving. That's why we get so many lopsided BCS games. But in the Men's college basketball tournament, that's what results in upsets. Heading into the tournament, the collective wisdom was that The Big East had the best teams. They also earned eight tournament bids. The PAC 10 and West Coast Conference were perceived to be weak, earning just two bids each. What happened, five of the eight Big East teams have been eliminated as of the writing of this blog (I expect more will fall), while the PAC 10 and WCC went 6-0 the first three days of the tournament.

How does that pertain to discernment, one might ask. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'm just a little sad that my bracket was destroy. But maybe the point is this — true discernment is aided by relying on personal experiences, but it also requires you to look outside your bubble and collect as much knowledge as possible. It's taking all the information available and making the best choice, not the most obvious choice. Had I done that I might have ridden Washington and Northern Iowa instead of Kansas (which past experience has taught me tends to fall apart in the clutch). Hopefully I'll remember that next year.