![\"i-58489bd7a19a469b2b812d3010c1812b-Physbracket.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-58489bd7a19a469b2b812d3010c1812b-Physbracket.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI give you the last four rounds of the Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That’s small and hard to read, but it’s filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs<\/a> of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins; if neither school has a graduate program, the higher seed wins.) You can get the whole thing as a 1.03 MB PDF<\/a>.<\/p>\n I wouldn’t bet any money on this prediction, if I were you: the winner ends up being #14 seed Cornell…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Obviously, this is not a serious prediction. I entered four serious brackets in various contests (my Facebook entry is probably visible to those who care). I’m basically incapable of divorcing my pool picks from my rooting interests, so I have North Carolina beating UCLA in all of them, basically because I like Roy Williams and Tyler Hansbrough.<\/p>\n It’s not a completely ridiculous pick, but I suspect that the reverse is probably somewhat more likely. UCLA plays the same thug-ball that’s taken them to the Final Four for the past two seasons, but this year they actually have a couple of guys who can score. They’re still kind of painful to watch, though, so I can’t quite put myself in the position of having to root for Kevin Love and his regrettable facal hair.<\/p>\n Other picks of note: I’ve spent the whole season listening to people talk about how the PAC-10 is the best conference around, which convinced me to pick a bunch of their teams to win. Naturally, this means that they’ll flame out spectacularly, except for Arizona, who I picked to lose in the first round.<\/p>\n The Big Ten stinks. The Big East isn’t all that great, but Pitt’s coming on lately. In at least one bracket, I have them in an avert-your-eyes second-round game with Michigan State, and then the all-time-ugly Final Four matchup with UCLA, and I do believe those things could happen. I won’t enjoy watching them, but they copuld happen.<\/p>\n The wildly overhyped match-up of great talents that will turn out to be a total dog: USC vs. Kansas State.<\/p>\n The game most likely to produce a future NBA owner: Stanford vs. Cornell in the first round.<\/p>\n I’ve live-blogged the first round a couple of times in the past, but I won’t be doing that this year. First and foremost, typing on a laptop for long periods causes crippling muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder, and I’d rather not suffer that again. Beyond that, though, I have a bunch of work to get done before I leave town tomorrow afternoon.<\/p>\n You see, Maryland and Syracuse are playing each other in the NIT tonight. Those are the two teams that I root for, and they’ve never met since I started rooting for Maryland in 1994. This is a sufficiently weird and awkward situation that, well, I have to see it live, so I’ll be driving to Syracuse to catch the game in the Carrier Dome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I give you the last four rounds of the Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever: That’s small and hard to read, but it’s filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins;… Continue reading March (Physics) Madness<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}