[Mick]

One year we had a new Japanese structural engineering graduate join the firm, she knew nothing about basketball, let alone the post season tournament, she really wanted to learn about American culture, so she entered the office pool, smoked everybody.  Her methodology was how cute the uniforms were that the cheerleaders wore.  Then the Super Bowl came and once again she smoked everybody once again. She got the correct score, which she arrived at by the jersey number of the cutest player on each team.  

That's what she told everybody. What she didn't tell you was that she had access to the Fugaku supercomputer, and used it to make her predictions...

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The people who pick by color or cool sounding mascots always win our pool.

Three of us teamed up this year and turned our stochastic rainfall model into a massive tournament Monte Carlo simulation using a matrix of power indices for teams rather than historical rainfall distributions. Played the tournament 100,000 times on three machines starting the Monday after Selection Sunday. Houston was the expected winner over Alabama. The remainder of our Final Four consisted of Marquette and Gonzaga. I'm sure in the rush to enter the matrices we did something stupid like move the decimal place a la Michael Bolton in Office Space.....

I'm rooting for SDSU v. UCONN in the final for the Marin angle, with SI (Darrion Trammell) beating Marin Catholic (Joey California).  Also no team located west of the 100th Meridian has won a title since Arizona in '97.  I don't think I would watch an intra-swamp-state battle on Monday.

ACC did continue its 40 plus year streak of having at least one team in the Sweet Sixteen, so Da U has some worth this year.

Ironically, that was my final four. Though I had to pick Alabama. . . .

Sadly, I did the same, right down to the Alabama pick.

[Mick]

One year we had a new Japanese structural engineering graduate join the firm, she knew nothing about basketball, let alone the post season tournament, she really wanted to learn about American culture, so she entered the office pool, smoked everybody.  Her methodology was how cute the uniforms were that the cheerleaders wore.  Then the Super Bowl came and once again she smoked everybody once again. She got the correct score, which she arrived at by the jersey number of the cutest player on each team.  

That's what she told everybody. What she didn't tell you was that she had access to the Fugaku supercomputer, and used it to make her predictions...

---

The people who pick by color or cool sounding mascots always win our pool.

Three of us teamed up this year and turned our stochastic rainfall model into a massive tournament Monte Carlo simulation using a matrix of power indices for teams rather than historical rainfall distributions. Played the tournament 100,000 times on three machines starting the Monday after Selection Sunday. Houston was the expected winner over Alabama. The remainder of our Final Four consisted of Marquette and Gonzaga. I'm sure in the rush to enter the matrices we did something stupid like move the decimal place a la Michael Bolton in Office Space.....

I'm rooting for SDSU v. UCONN in the final for the Marin angle, with SI (Darrion Trammell) beating Marin Catholic (Joey California).  Also no team located west of the 100th Meridian has won a title since Arizona in '97.  I don't think I would watch an intra-swamp-state battle on Monday.

ACC did continue its 40 plus year streak of having at least one team in the Sweet Sixteen, so Da U has some worth this year.

Ironically, that was my final four. Though I had to pick Alabama. . . .

Sadly, I did the same, right down to the Alabama pick.