I'm done trying to figure out who's going to win the NCAA Tournament.

There's no way to do it successfully. Everyone will tell you they know who's going to win, but they don't. Everyone will proudly show off his/her brackets, confident about this pick or that pick, all the while somehow ignoring the inevitable fact that their postseason scenarios will be completely and totally obliterated in less than a week's time.

There are too many variables and too much parity for anyone to correctly pick their bracket. By the end of Thursday, everyone will be chanting the same lament everyone always chants every March: "Well there goes my bracket." There's no way around this.

Pick earnestly and you're done. All the studying in all the world won't tell you that Minnesota will beat Iowa State (or the other way around), or that Wisconsin-Milwaukee isn't the underdog darling everyone thinks it is (unless it really is).

But picking at random or using some quirky way to predict the winners of each game won't help any, either. Having your mom pick or pitting mascots against each other or throwing darts; all of these techniques (and others like them) help just as much as analyzing hundreds of hours of game tape on each of the 65 teams.

So what can one do in such a doomed situation? What could I do with my bracket?

Well, I decided to torch it ahead of time, to completely annihilate it well before the Salukis could get their upset-greedy hands on it.

That's right. I picked Fairleigh-Dickinson to win the national championship.

I picked the one team I know will lose Thursday, so that I could put my bracket out of its misery ahead of time. Instead of hoping against hope that I could accomplish the impossible, I went in the other direction and completely kamikazied my postseason predictions.

I didn't want some mid-major to upset some No. 1 seed and destroy my bracket; I wanted to go out on my terms, my way. Consider it one last, morbidly hopeless way of taking ownership of something that was never really mine to begin with.

The rest of my bracket was carefully crafted. I didn't completely detonate everything by picking all 16 seeds or something like that. I think it's more poignant this way, to have one beautiful explosion fatally cripple my otherwise well-constructed bracket.

I'll also be spared the anguish of watching each game with panic and instead will be able to enjoy the tournament, my personal stake having been neutralized very early on.

Unless I get it right.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Mar. 15 2005.