boring bracket

I’ve paid less attention to this year’s college basketball season than to any season since 1977-78. But through faint peer pressure, I ended up having to fill out a tournament bracket in a pool of acquaintances anyway.

I was filling in the games one at a time, and was horrified when I ended up picking Duke to win the championship. What a lame, knee-jerk, casual sports fan sort of prediction. Worse yet, they’re not even going to win it.

Technically, the brackets aren’t frozen for another day or two. But I’ve drifted so far from my sportswriting days that I’m barely even a casual fan anymore, and feel too lazy to log in and fix anything. Take a busy personal and professional schedule and mix it with thousands of miles of distance from my home country, and you have the perfect recipe for a near-total collapse in sports knowledge over the course of a little more than a decade.

In fact, I just read Bill Simmons’ brilliant annual column on the 50 NBA players with the highest trade value, and hadn’t even heard of a few of those players. What’s next? Guys on the 2016 Olympic team that I’ve never heard of?