No Harm, No Foul

Right now, we’re going to make two statements, both of them equally true. 1) We love the NCAA basketball tournament. 2) We hate the NCAA basketball tournament.

Although we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” usually reserve our love/hate emotions for Daisy Fuentes, we think that so-called March Madness well deserves our mixed feelings. After all, like all God-fearing Americans, we set up a little NCAA tournament pick-‘em pool in the office, and nervously await the results.

Without fail, dear reader, each year the pool winner is a female staffer—let’s just call her “Chip”—who knows absolutely nothing about college basketball. You know: The kind of gal who picks the teams based on their uniform colors. Is anything more infuriating than this? Well, Grover Norquist, of course, but that’s setting the bar awfully high.

Even though this year’s tournament is only a day old, we have the sneaking suspicion that our Color-Me-Beautiful entry will wind up winning yet again. Despite all the hours spent examining useless statistics like RPI (Roddy Piper Investing? Raging Prune Injections?), our brackets are already more busted than Todd Bridges.

And, quite frankly, we know exactly whom to blame. It’s those fancy-pants analysts on ESPN. Ah, yes: The stupid la-di-da experts who offer brilliant reasons why each and every team is going to win. Thanks a lot, you moronic jocks.

Oh, sure: Eastern Kentucky has a fabulous backcourt. Pick them over the Tar Heels. And Maryland just can’t handle raging Davidson. Yeah, right.

If you ask us, dear reader, Digger Phelps owes each one of us $5. His moronic choices swayed us, and now we feel like Jessica Simpson getting her SAT scores back. It isn’t pretty.

We suppose, dear reader, that the randomness of March Madness is part of the fun. After all, they say that you have something like a one in fourteen squillion chance of guessing all the picks right.

That sure beats the women’s tournament. If you’re not a complete dunce, you have pretty much a one in three chance of getting all the picks right. And, as we all know, watching the women’s tournament is about as fun as taking in Billy Packer stripping.