Just in case you are a living defiance of the opinions of some and immune to the solipsist fallacy (“I do not care, therefore NO one cares”) and are interested in having more than a common person’s interest in the quite probably exploitative and morally questionable national collegiate basketball tournament (perhaps you’d like a chance to beat the President like we ALL did last year) or maybe you’re looking forward to your handsome, frameworthy, certificate of victory (Sabino, I just remembered that I still owe you yours for your victory last year…and the socks–sorry!), but amn’t quite sure how to go about making your choices because you haven’t had any time to follow the college cagers this winter (owing to the spectacular weather), fret not. There’s help on the way.
First a clarification–the Realist’s post implied that the tournament had started already; not so! The play in rounds were last night, but those don’t really count. The first round games start at 11a on Thursday, so you have until then to fill out your bracket. Two steps are required. First, if you don’t already have one, you need to register for an account with cbssports.com–click on “Register” on the right side; it just requires an email address and you make your own password. Once you’ve done that, click here or do a search for “Harold Lounge” on the CBS site and enter “hl2012” as your password. Fill out your bracket and let the smack talking begin.
Who should you pick? Ah, an entirely different question. Here are some options for picking:
~Slate’s bracket help provides the chance to pick by colors and mascots only.
~The Wall Street Journal provides a blind picker with nothing but information about the team’s play this year, so you are not biased by reputation or other irrelevant factors, then when you’re done it shows you all of your picks.
~Slate also has some advice about how a hedge fund manager would pick.
~Or maybe you’d like to take a stand on principle and pick according to the schools’ academic stats using Inside Higher Ed’s analysis. It’s all good.
Make your picks and take your shot at the title and at joining the list of Champions!
2007 Champion: Jennifer Armendarez
2008 Champion: Jennifer Armendarez
2009 Champion: Someone
2010 Champion: Dave Richardson
2011 Champion: Chris Sabino
h/t to Realist for setting up the Bracket this year; thanks!
The Harold Lounge 
It is so disheartening to see my efforts last year to “think outside the box” and to “challenge conventional wisdom” and to “re-think existing paradigms” met with such derision and scorn. Is the lesson I should take away that it is more important to win than to innovate? That our ability to win a game defines our relative standing in life?
If so, then Game On! I have made my picks, a slave to conventional wisdom. And when I am triumphant at the end of the tournament, I will have learned the greatest lessons possible. Conformity beats creativity. Weird isn’t wonderful. The rewards from not taking a risk are greater than taking a risk and being ridiculed. And yes, that greatest lesson of all, winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.
Somewhere in a giant pile of paper I have an elaborate analysis of last year’s picks that I intended to publish as a “window into the mind of our (then) new President” that ranked the pickers in terms of their likelihood to pick an upset (both round by round and overall) and when I did it, I was expecting to find you going with the chalk the most, which wasn’t true at all–you ended up right in the middle of the pack, as I recall, in terms of upsets chosen (though you did get noticeably more conservative as the rounds progressed). I think Realist was the farthest outside of the box (ironically, again), which maybe accounts for the last place finish.
If I ever find it, I’ll put it up.
And you can never go wrong by me quoting/paraphrasing Lombardi.
Oh, one other thing. You posted your picks on the site for the “Harold Lounge Braggin’ Rights Bracket Competition” which is what we used last year, what you were probably invited to do (by CBS) and what we would be using if the Realist hadn’t beaten me to the set up. Unfortunately, the Realist has everyone signing up on another bracket called “Harold Lounge 2012 Bracket.” So…if you want to see your standings against everyone else you, umm…well,…you kind of have to…umm….re-do them. ahem. sorry about that.Never mind! I see that they cross posted it for you, or, more likely, you did it in the right place and they cross-posted it to the bracket that we’re not using…ah, very good, very good. Carry on. Nothing to see here.Unless of course you want to test your conformity bracket against your “creativity” bracket…Thanks PhiloDave for picking up my slack with regards to the instructions I submitted (I guess it demonstrates I was really being real honest about being out of touch with the college games this season) and for clarifying the process by which all could join.
h/t to you and may you do well with your picks!
Enjoy kids. Glad to have you on board Don. I’ve got all my hopes in your picks so don’t let me down 🙂
I’ll see what else we can do with the free services available at cbssports.com
Women’s NCAA Rifle Division-1 Championship recent history (or her’s, as I keep saying);
Alaska-Fairbanks in 2008
West Virginia in 2009
TCU in 2010
Kentucky in 2011
TCU (again) in 2012
I met the news team from UAF’s student newspaper ‘The Sun Star’ at the College Media Advisers Conference last year in Times Square (first time there, thanks Mrs. Turner!).
They all kinda laughed when I introduced myself…