Chalk it up to March Madness

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I would like to say I could chalk up my blown-to-pieces NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket to what we call the craziness of March Madness.

But my grandpaw always taught me to be a man and admit the truth. So I will admittedly chalk it up to my plain, old-fashioned stubbornness and stupidity.

By now, you can guess that the word ‘chalk’ is the common theme here.

You see, every year I fall for the same things over and over come tournament time, and just can’t bring myself to pick much of anything other than what the real gamblers and experts in Las Vegas call chalk, or in other words, the P5 teams that are supposed to win.

And once again this tourney, I did the same thing.

You would think that I would have learned by now. I mean, I watched Tennessee lose to Loyola-Chicago on their famed run to the Final Four with Sister Jean providing all sorts of spiritual help needed from above last season.

And how about when I was a kid and Jimmy V and the Cardiac Pack shocked Phi Slamma Jamma and Houston in the finals in 1983. Just two of the countless examples.

But for some reason, it’s very seldom that my mind can get past the seeding numbers. If a team is seeded higher by the NCAA committee group, I tend to take it as gospel.

The current tournament saw me turn a nose up to the likes of Liberty, Buffalo, Murray State, UC Irvine, and a few others.

And guess what? The last laugh is on me, as those teams blew up my bracket.

It’s really a fascinating thing to behold when a supposedly responsible adult male can turn from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in an instant due to the buzzer sounding to end an NCAA collegiate tournament basketball game. One second I’m throwing something at the television because the equivalent of a Scottish Highland Dirk has been plunged into my bracket, and then the next I’m celebrating a small, no-name school ‘upsetting’ a P5 school and erasing my chalk.

So young ones out there, a little life lesson from Don. Don’t be afraid to get rid of the chalk. There’s a reason chalk boards have become obsolete.

Do your homework, take a chance, go out on a limb, and pick some of these lesser name schools.

Odds are, you will be much more successful in the 2020 NCAA Basketball Tournament than I am right now in the current one.