For every great office, there is an office pool come March. A test of brute strength, statistical analysis and, more than anything else, a test of pure luck. At its most, college basketball is thrilling and heartbreaking, and college basketball pools are both of those emotions taken to extremes. Here now is the 2014 Tuesdays With Horry NCAA Tournament bracket pool.
AP Photo/The Wichita Eagle, Fernando Salazar
With a 68-45 drubbing of the Missouri State Bears last Saturday, the Wichita State Shockers capped off an undefeated regular season, the first since the Jameer Nelson-led St. Joe’s Hawks went 27-0 in 2004. The Shockers have lived up to their name, rising to #2 in the AP poll and sending waves throughout the country. This team is carefully constructed, with Gregg Marshall as its puzzle master, and it just might have the formula to be able to take the Missouri Valley Conference to the top of the mountain for one shining moment.
Sports are so arbitrary when you really think about it. It’s just a collection of athletes, exhibiting an arbitrary set of skills, governed by an arbitrary set of rules. You can throw a ball through a hoop? Good. You can throw it through a hoop behind this line? Even better.
It’s the arbitrary nature of sports which leave me finding them rather meaningless at times. When a man throws an oblong ball and another man catches it, the action doesn’t directly affect anything in the outside world. Wars are still fought. Diseases still kill. A ball passing through space doesn’t alter race relations or alter prejudices. It’s just an object traveling through space.
Tuesdays With Horry 