Brackets
The NCAA tournament will crown a champion tonight, but odds are, your bracket is long since busted. That's OK. There are more important things.
I filled out my first NCAA tournament brackets when I was 11. I was in the fifth grade. A year later, I ran my own pool -- just a few friends, $1 per sheet. The pot was probably $17 total. Going into that tournament, I knew who Christian Laetner and Larry Johnson were and, beyond that, I had nothing to offer but dumb luck (which, as we all know, is the crucial ingredient to winning these things).
But that was 1990. UNLV-Duke. Bo Kimble. Speedy Morris's LaSalle team. Nolan Richardson's Hogs. Kenny Anderson leading Georgia Tech to the Final Four. It was a great year to get invested in college basketball.
Back in those days, you needed to wait for the Monday newspaper to get a copy of the bracket. I'd cut it out in the morning then have my mom drive me to the local office supply store so I could make copies. As the tournament played out, I'd go through a stack of sheets, grading each one by one, to calculate winning entries. It was a lot of effort for something I had no shot of winning.1
I took a break from the grunt work of running a pool for a few years in the late aughts, but by the spring of 2011, I'd been drafted back into service. I was covering the Philadelphia Phillies, and a bunch of beat writers were wasting time in the press box in Clearwater, Florida, talking hoops. The consensus was, we needed a pool, and since I was in my first spring training covering the team and thereby the newest person on the beat, the job fell to me. Insert Al Pacino "Every time I think I'm out..." gif here.
Now here we are, 15 years later, and I'm still running that exact same pool. It's named the "Philly Media Pool" despite the fact that only about a half-dozen Philly media folks are still involved (and most of the folks in that press box in 2011 aren't covering the Phillies anymore). But the name of the pool or how it got started isn't really important in the same way you don't often remember exactly how you got to be friends with someone -- it just sort of happens over time, the origin story eventually feeling like an anachronism after so many years of better stories shared.
That's how a good tournament pool works, I think. You pick up new entries over the years. Others drop away without much thought. The people who stay involved, year after year, come to view it as something of a family reunion every March.
Take this year's pool. We ended up with 110 sheets, filled out by about 80-some people. There are folks from those Phillies days -- Jayson Stark's whole family joins in, and my eventual replacement on the beat, who now covers the Cubs, submits three sheets every year. But the rest... it's a damned carnival of characters collected over decades.
The guys who'll finish tied for first this year (they both have Florida, but also with an insurmountable lead over the top sheet with Houston) are a friend of friend who I played softball with in 2002 and a neighbor from Charlotte. Here’s our text exchange before he entered his sheet.
Him: "Since I do not really follow this and when I do play, I always lose terribly, should I bother?"
My response: "Gambling on things you don’t understand is the American way."
Truer words have never been written.
The rest of our top 20 includes the mayor of a mid-sized city, a doctor who I went to college with and once witnessed using a Margarita as a condiment during a steak dinner (among many other stories that would concern any of his patients), my college roommate (1997-2000), my grad school roommate (2004-2005), and two people who I do not actually know but somehow have a sheet entered anyway. Oh, and Ryan McGee. He always weasels his way into a good time.
The guy in last place, God bless him, is someone who used to read my old Georgia blog back in the day and has loosely stayed in touch over the years. The last time I saw him in person was over lunch in New York City in that summer of 2011.
The site we use retains the names and email addresses of everyone who's participated over the years, even if they're not doing it this year, so it's easy to skip a year and rejoin the next. Our list includes three folks who've died since we started, including the wonderful Edward Aschoff, who I miss dearly each year when I sent out invitations for the pool again.
And there are a couple guys who, if they weren't a part of that very first pool I ran back in the sixth grade, certainly joined in soon after -- guys I've known essentially my whole life, and who have the same types of horrifying stories about me I have about my doctor friend.
I haven't seen some of those guys in quite a while. Most of the folks from that Phillies spring training press box, I haven't seen in more than a decade, I'd bet. There are folks I worked with at nearly every job I've had since grad school, and most I haven't seen since we stopped working together.2
There's an Eagles beat writer in the pool whom I had to message to remind him to pay his $10 entry fee.3 I noticed the last message I'd sent before that one was from March 2024, asking for the same thing.
It's a funny thing to look back on, really. At one point or another, nearly all of these 80-some people were fixtures in my life -- coworkers, roommates, drinking buddies, guys I'd be huddled around a TV with to watch the actual games in March Madness. But so little in life remains static, and the older we get -- with kids and grown-up jobs and mortgages and PTA meetings and deadlines and weddings and funerals -- the easier it is to lose track of people and things we thought would always be with us. Life is a rushing river, pushing us ever further downstream.
And so, we burnish the bonds of what remains of our friendship in all the ways 2025 offers -- replacing bowling nights and barbecues with text chains and Instagram posts and, yes, an annual entry in a basketball pool.
I think that's the biggest reason I love March Madness so much now. I've never filled out a bracket with the hopes of winning, and I don't skim a dime off the top for running the pool each year.
For me, that bracket is as much a time machine as anything. I get to share a text message or an email with someone I didn't realize I missed. I get to remember folks who I cared deeply for who aren't here any longer. I get to look back and think about good times with old friends -- friendships that may not be what they once were but now serve as a sort of mile marker, a memento of a different time in my life -- from high school, when I thought more about playing basketball than writing about it, or from my first reporting job, when I'd churn out 30 pieces a week and survive on cheap beer and Little Caesars hot-n-ready pizzas. And then, each year, I add a few new email addresses to the distribution list, too, knowing that, at some point down the road, I'll be glad for the chance to reconnect with those folks, too.
There's talk every year now about changing the tournament. Maybe more teams are added. Maybe the big conferences break away. Maybe there's some hefty number of guaranteed bids for those big boys if they stay. Growth is everything, after all. The tournament is really no different than our lives -- the pull of time drags us onward no matter how much we want to cling to the past.
I just hope that wherever the winds of change blow college basketball, it's not to a place that diminishes this small thing -- these perfect brackets, laid out in idyllic symmetry, first on the agate page of my hometown newspaper, now on the flickering screen of my laptop, converging from four corners to a centerpiece that crowns a champion. It's a beautiful thing to sit back and look at, really. It's order in a chaotic world.
But more than that, those brackets are a road map for me -- tracing a path back to the madness of nearly every March of my life, whether gathered around a rabbit-eared portable TV during a church youth group lock-in when I was in eighth grade or around the bar at Frenchy's in Clearwater back in 20114 or in front of my TV with my two kids now.
The $10 I donate to the pool isn't in hopes of winning the jackpot on that first Monday in April. It's the price I pay to board a ship that will take me back upriver, back to the ports I've inhabited over the years and the people who've made each stop worth the visit. It's worth every penny.
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Last week’s very low-key newsletter netted us 15 subscribers. I’m no mathemagician, but if we follow that trend line, we’ll cross the 1 million subscriber mark in just a little over 1,282 years. So, we’ll really be enjoying the good life in May 3307.
In any case, here’s a reminder to subscribe — FREE TO ALL! — and perhaps if we really get rolling we can trim that deadline back a century or two.
CFB’s best RBs
In last week’s newsletter, I linked to Adam Rittenberg’s top 15 QBs.
This week, ESPN’s writers voted on the top 10 running backs, which you can find HERE.
The only teams with players on both lists:
Baylor: No. 15 QB, No. 10 RB
Texas: No. 12 QB, No. 8 RB
Georgia Tech: No. 9 QB, No. 9 RB
Penn State: No. 2 QB, Nos. 2 & 3 RBs
I’m pretty confident Louisville would crack a year-end tandem list though. Miller Moss will put up big numbers in Jeff Brohm’s offense, and the tandem of Isaac Brown (No. 5 on the preseason list) and Duke Watson at RB is ludicrous.
FSU LOL
Breaking news: Florida State was tragically bad last year.
Just how bad though? The folks at CFBNumbers dug into the details and… the basic takeaway is that there is no real comparison for the fall from 13-0 to… whatever the hell that was in 2024.
My thought bubble: This either portends a long, dark slog back that won’t come close to reaching the finish line until systemic changes are made or last year was such an absurd aberration that just a normal regression to the mean (along with some small upticks in coaching and performance) would get FSU back to seven wins.
I’m on record here as being incredibly dubious of the Thomas Castellanos decision — particularly given FSU’s QB development history — but at least he does one thing well (run) and that’s one more thing than anyone on FSU’s offense did last year.
Coaching salaries
Our local Axios (in a piece about Bill Belichick) including this graphic last week.
I doubt the names are shocking to anyone (and, of course, this includes only schools with publicly available data), but to play devil’s advocate for a moment here…
Day probably would’ve been fired under the old four-team playoff model after losing to Michigan for the fourth straight year.
Lanning has never won a playoff game.
DeBoer just coached Alabama to its worst season since 2007.
Riley is 15-13 in his last 28 games.
Deion’s only win over a ranked opponent was vs. TCU in his first game at Colorado (a TCU team that finished the year 5-7).
Belichick has never coached a college game.
Norvell just went 2-10.
And that’s not even getting into Sark’s time at USC or Kirby Smart’s program fielding its own NASCAR team or the myriad complaints about Dabo’s stubbornness…
Obviously the upside case for these guys is strong, too, which is why they’re on this list, but boy, it’s a good reminder that there’s not a lot of Nick Sabans out there.
RIP Val Kilmer
Rather than read an obit of the actor, I cannot more highly recommend this 2020 profile from the wonderful Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the time she spent with Kilmer and how fascinating, smart and pleasant he was.
This week's Wikipedia rabbit hole
Did you know: Paramount+ is currently streaming old MTV Unplugged episodes? It's worth the free trial to at least watch a few of the great ones, including what I would consider to be the best live TV performance by any band ever, Nirvana's Unplugged.
As a result of this, I found myself listening to a bunch of Nirvana last week and, as I often do, I get to wondering about some mundane detail of a band or a song and then go to Wikipedia for more information.
This week, I wanted to learn more about the often overlooked fourth member of Nirvana, guitarist Pat Smear.
Smear joined the band in 1993 for their final tour and was not actually a full member for the recording of any of their studio albums, though he is a fixture of that Unplugged performance. His first appearance with the band was actually on "Saturday Night Live." He then became one of the original members of Foo Fighters before leaving that band for an extended time in the late '90s/early 2000s before returning to the Foos in 2005.
Anyway, all that is prelude for the following top 5 facts I learned about Pat Smear (real name: Georg Albert Ruthenberg) via his Wiki page:
5. At the age of 13, Smear left home to join a commune.
4. His first band was the Germs, formed in LA with high school classmate Darby Crash on vocals. Like his future Nirvana frontman, Crash committed suicide. The Germs put out just one studio album, but gained significant notoriety after appearing in Penelope Spheeris' documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization" about the LA punk scene.
3. The original drummer for the Germs was a woman who went by the stage name Dottie Danger. Her real name? Belinda Carlisle.
2. While Smear said he left Foo Fighters in 1997 largely due to exhaustion from the relentless touring schedule, the rift was exacerbated because he was close friends with Dave Grohl's wife, Jennifer Youngblood, whom Grohl was divorcing at the time.
1. Smear worked as an actor in the 1980s, appearing in "Blade Runner," "Howard the Duck" and an episode of "CHiPs." He also was in the movie "Breakin'" -- a musical about breakdancing that somehow included Christopher McDonald (aka Shooter McGavin) in its cast, and you should really read more about that, too. On set for "Breakin'," Smear met a young actress and singer named Courtney Love, who he later worked with on a few Hole tracks and who introduced him to her husband... Kurt Cobain.
Anyway, tell me you wouldn’t read a Pat Smear autobiography? Dude’s lived an interesting life.
That’s it for this week. If you found any of this worthwhile, however, please consider subscribing.
I didn't win one of my own pools until 2003 when, ironically, I took first place only because no one involved had Syracuse winning it all. Go Orange.
An exception being Coley Harvey, who I somehow worked with at the Macon Telegraph before I started this pool, then again in Tallahassee, and again now, as he's a super fancy TV guy and I'm still an ink-stained wretch.
My first pool, in 1990, was a $1 entry fee. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $2.50 today. So we've really jacked up the cost since then. Stupid tariffs.
Get the blackened Super Grouper sandwich.