Go Memphis!

I don't have any particular affinity for John Calipari and the Memphis Tigers, nor do I have any particular animosity for them. I do have a little bit of a soft spot for them because they don't play in one of the Big Six conferences, and because they've never won a national title. The Kansas Jayhawks have taken two, most recently in 1988. So in the absence of any other rooting interest, I'd probably be pulling for the Tigers tonight anyway. But if they should happen to win tonight's game, they'll win me $145 in one of the NCAA Tournament pools I entered this year.

Why did I pick Memphis? I just took a look at their record and schedule, and felt they were as good as anybody. I knew most of the national prognosticators were picking North Carolina, some were saying it would be UCLA, and a few were thinking Kansas, but very few were talking seriously about Memphis. Like most tourney pools, this one is heavily weighted toward the late games, and tonight's title game is worth 15 points (compared to 10 in the semifinals, 7 in the Elite Eight, and so on). Knowing that in a tournament pool with 44 participants, it was unlikely that I'd be able to stay ahead all the way through, I thought I'd take the unpopular pick and give myself a chance to leapfrog over some others if it should happen that way. And that's just the situation I've set up for myself. I'm currently in 8th place, 12 points behind the leader. But nobody ahead of me has picked Memphis.

I've entered at least one tournament pool every year since about 1990, and I've won them twice before. I was in college when I won in 1992, in a pool run by a couple of guys living in my dorm, but I never got the money because the morons told people they could pay later, and nobody paid. A co-worker and I were running our own pool in the late '90s, and I won that one in '99, when Connecticut defeated Duke in the title game. I used the same sort of logic in that one as I did this year, which was that everybody else would be picking Duke, so I made the less-popular pick. That strategy almost backfired then, because I was actually leading going into the title game and would have had it clinched early if I'd picked Duke. But Rip Hamilton and Jake Voskuhl's Huskies pulled it out for me.

I'm feeling pretty good going into tonight's game -- Memphis is a 2-point favorite in Vegas -- but Kansas is a darned good team. We'll see.