Zasparillo

Ah, March Madness: the glorious three days of the year that are followed by weeks of March Sadness after some plucky 11 seed turns a whole quadrant of your carefully selected bracket masterpiece to shit. If you’re like me, you have tried various strategies over the years to pick a bracket, THE BRACKET, solid enough to win your pool and let your coworkers know that while your hoop game may not be impenetrable, your knowledge-of-the-hoop game definitely is. From higher level stats to obsessive sports blog surfing to literally just letting your three year old niece pick based on team color schemes, you’ve tried every tactic. But to no avail.

Fortunately this year, I have developed a very scientific process for picking a bracket that will 100% win your pool*. The strategy behind it is proprietary, but it’s loosely (if not entirely) based on which team mascots would win in a battle.  I spent a concerning amount of my childhood playing Pokemon behind my book during class silent reading time, so I’m somewhat of an expert in fictional creature match-ups.

So, without further ado, I present your 2016 NCAA Mascot Bracketology. Enter your pool using this as your guide and I guarantee you will dazzle both your friends and foes with your mastery of the bracket and knowledge of the glorious sport of basketball.

*May not actually win your pool.

SOUTH REGION:

Aside from a smattering of birds and the rogue turtle, this is a very mammal-heavy region. As such, the general rule of thumb is to choose the mammal with more and/or bigger claws and/or teeth.

There is, however, one match-up that must be discussed separately.

CAL GOLDEN BEARS VS. HAWAII RAINBOW WARRIORS: This is, hands down, the most majestic match-up of all time. Don’t come at me with any other games claiming that they were the pinnacle of basketball, for we alone are blessed to witness such an event. This is Magic Johnson throwing a running hook shot to win game 4 of the 1987 NBA finals. Except Magic Johnson is actually a Magical Golden Bear and the floor is rainbows and the basketball is a disco ball and everyone’s on just a plethora of shrooms.

So, predictions. In an unprecedented move, the Golden Bears and Rainbow Warriors will start tripping balls and decide competition isn’t for them. Soon after, they will combine #SquadGoals and become the unstoppable force that is the Golden Bear Warriors, led by our lord and savior, Steph Curry. RIP every other team in every sport on earth, basically.

Steph Curry making a 3 from outer space

(Also of note: there is a team in this region whose mascot is The Shockers. I have so many questions for them. Primarily: why? Did you crowdsource this name from a group of middle school boys? And does your mother know!???)

EAST REGION:

What we have here is a very career-focused field. We have the Trojans competing with the Friars and the Mountaineers facing the Lumberjacks (which I’m assuming will actually be a one-man play about a guy facing an identity crisis because I’m pretty sure Mountaineers and Lumberjacks are one and the same). Thrown into the applicant pool are also the Fighting Irish and the Musketeers.  

The key metric you’ll want to consider here is earning potential of each career field. Sorry, Musketeers, but the advent of modern ammunition and firing methods means you just don’t stack up against other forms of firearm-wielding soldiers these days. Time to update the ol’ LinkedIn because the only ‘ship y’all are going to is a sinking one.

Some match-ups to look out for:

USC Trojans vs. Providence Friars: At first, this seems like some time-warped medieval history lesson. Monks vs. some guys best known for waging war? It seems like an obvious choice until you remember that Trojans don’t have the greatest track record, militarily speaking. If the Friars show up on the court with their best offense ensconsed in a giant wooden horse, are the Trojans just going to be like “Oh, VERY CHILL, a gift from our sworn enemies. Let’s bring it right in and station it directly in the paint. Better not guard it in any form or even play defense at all.”? Historically speaking, it’s probable. Friars all the way on this one.

Indiana Hoosiers vs. Chattanooga Mocs: I don’t know what either of these are. This is an imaginary match-up and therefore any speculation on the outcome of such a match-up is going to be equally absurd. I predict that midway through the first half, a four-headed unicorn will dig up through the court using its horns like a tunnel borer and score the-square-root-of-negative-1 points, resulting in a massive victory for the Mocs, who would have otherwise resoundingly lost the game due to the fact that their team exists entirely of disembodied wizard heads floating around aimlessly.

Kentucky Wildcats vs. Stony Brook Seawolves: Wikipedia informs me that a sea wolf could be either a) a “solitary fish with strong, prominent teeth and projecting tusks that give it a savage look” or b) a nuclear submarine. Either way, I’m not fucking with it. I predict the sea wolves torpedo the wildcats with their nuclear, projecting tusks.

  MIDWEST REGION:

The shit that gets me about sports teams is the lack of naming creativity. There is nothing that says “thou shalt only name thy sport team after a wing-ed creature or semi-mythical beast”. I checked, because honestly, I’ve seen weirder laws out there. But no such rule, regulation, or divine commandment exists. And yet here we are. Of the 64 teams in the 2016 NCAA tourney, four are Wildcats and five are Bulldogs. Various forms of hawks – from sea to jay – play a prominent role. Two of the teams IN THIS REGION ALONE are named after different colors of raiders. I didn’t even know raiders came in colors other than varying shades of skin tone, tbqh.

Besides the red and blue raiders, this conference also features two pirates, some cavaliers, and the Spartans. It makes you wish they had spread the swashbuckling out among the regions a little more because I am 100% here for a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-themed Elite 8. Perhaps next year, NCAA committee, perhaps next year.

In general, the idea with this region is to pick the objectively more badass of the two mascots. However, there are two situations we’re dealing with here where that is either inadvisable or impossible:

Purdue Boilermakers vs. UALR Trojans: Congratulations, Purdue. You can boil water. Or construct water boilers, whichever. In either scenario, your “superpower” is that water eventually gets boiled via some mechanism. Normally I’d say the ability to transform liquid water into its gaseous state would not be enough to win any match-up of literally any sort. As previously discussed though, if you can conduct your boiling activities inside a wooden horse-kitchen of some kind, the Trojans could very well fall to your subterfuge. I’d say Boilermakers are a smart pick for this year’s dark horse.

Dayton Flyers vs. Syracuse Orange: A self-propelled, non-motorized aircraft vs… a single citrus fruit? Very hot take: this will suck. It will be too lame to watch. Unless you are actively trying to place yourself into a light coma, do not even attempt to look at your TV during this game. I’m picking the orange to win because it is roughly the same spherical shape and color as a basketball.

  WEST REGION:

This whole region is basically an animal kingdom version of Super Smash Melee. Ducks are fighting jaguars, beavers are smacking rams upside the head with their paddle tails, the whole thing is essentially one big round of zoologically improbable natural selection.

The preliminary games in this region are all wild cards. We can watch the game tapes (ie. back episodes of National Geographic shows), but there is nothing in this Earth’s natural history that can prepare us for the shit that goes down when a beaver fights a ram. The best strategy you have for picking this side of the bracket comes down to sports psychology 101. To catch a basketball, you must think like a basketball. And to pick a winning bracket, you must get a bunch of your friends from college together with some intoxicating substances and wait for the conversation to inevitably turn to Animal Fight Club/ Would You Rather.

The dust only really starts to settle in this region when we find ourselves at the gates of the Final Four, where one creature will emerge victorious. It’s the Roadrunners, because they have just spent the last few weeks running around tricking their opponents into dropping anvils on their own heads from comically high cliffs you aren’t even sure were there in the first place.

Or doing some shit like this

Anyway, yeah. Roadrunner vs Golden Bear Warriors in the final for sure. Here’s the full bracket for your viewing pleasure.

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Jalaso Kariye bicharraas!

I saw Gone Girl the other day and still had the same reactions I did when I read the book a few years ago. Everyone around me was all “ahhhHH this is the craziest shit I’ve ever been exposed to” but throughout most of the story my only reaction was “… true.” My friends took it as a cautionary tale against ever, EVER getting married and I took it as a classic cautionary tale about poison disguised as candy. Or, more aptly, regular humans disguised as Cool Girls.

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind, I'm the Cool Girl.

"Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, co-workers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I'd want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”

It’s way overdue, but I’m finally done. I’m done with Cool Girl. I’m ready to be out of college and out of my twenties, a phase where life is a precarious balance between trying hard to be a better person and trying hard to be cold, implacable, and above all, cool. I’m tired of emotionally crippled man-boys. I’m tired of deeply insecure girls-who-don’t-want-to-be. I’m tired of romance being a constant game of who cares less, who takes longer to text back, who can out-sociopath the other person because admitting you care about someone other than yourself is somehow a weakness and a sign of not truly being independent. 

Cool Girl is a trope. Cool Girl in her full, silver screen glory is an affected personality put on by insecure twenty-somethings who desperately need to be liked and seen as something different than the rest. Cool Girl measures her self-worth by the men who say they love her because she’s not like other girls, even when she knows they have shallow love for an equally shallow facade.

Haha, Cool Girl says, I am distant and hot. All other girls are clingy and emotional and they will TIE YOU DOWN and then your life - your own, College Boy trope of a life - will be over. But not me. I let you do whatever you want and take everything and give nothing and have no needs of my own because I am not a real person. I am never unreasonable. I am one-dimensional, once you see past the blatantly obvious “if you have to say you are, you aren’t” veil of mysteriousness. BECAUSE I AM NOT A REAL PERSON.

Let me tell you what happens behind the scenes, when the rest of the cast goes home and the camera crew packs up for the night. Cool Girl cries when you treat her like shit. Cool Girl is not effortlessly a size two - for each joke about pizza, there’s DAYS spent despising the way she looks and skipping dinner. Cool Girl hates your sexist comments but hates not being a Cool Girl even more. Eventually, this gets tiring. Eventually, Cool Girl would prefer to be treated as a living, breathing, feeling human, and not as a rare and prized commodity. 

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.” I believe this. I want it to be okay to be simultaneously feminine and complex. I want it to be okay to love someone openly and want to be loved in return for the person you are. I want to stop pretending I’m so unready for the commitments and responsibilities of the real world because I really, really don’t like being the fake person that living in the “fake world” requires.