IDS columnists 0-11 -- ouch!

The questions rolled through my head as I watched team after team lose. Why did we even try? Why would we do that to ourselves and our readers? How could we possibly have been so far off?\nA week and a half ago, fellow columnists Ryan Corazza and Matt "Cakes" Glenesk teamed up with me to predict the NCAA's major conference tournament champions. Evidently we're pretty bad at it.\nMichigan State, Wake Forest, North Carolina, UCLA, Stanford, Connecticut, Kansas, Texas, Kentucky and Alabama. That's the official list of teams who didn't win their respective tournaments despite the most ringing endorsement the Indiana Daily Student had to offer. Even better is the fact that only one of those teams, Kentucky, even made the finals of its tournament championship, and only Michigan State, UNC and Kentucky are still playing in the big dance. \nAfter realizing that we went 0-11 with our picks and seeing my tournament bracket become more useful as kindling, I feel I should apologize for what we did.\nI mean it's our job as journalists to fully investigate situations and then report to you what we think the results will be. I'm not saying we didn't try but a monkey throwing feces at a wall would have at least gotten one right. \nI could make lame excuses but instead I'm going to take responsibility for what happened and move on. It's not worth it to dwell on the past. In our defense I feel I should offer one bit of information though. We are all really busy with our lives away from the IDS.\nCakes, our diminutive basketball columnist, has recently had talk shows clamoring to get him on since the discovery that he is, in fact, Rick Moranis' love child. The man simply didn't have time to study the Big Ten's rosters and predict the correct winner. Besides, if he stays away from the forest for too long, Snow White starts to wonder where he went. \nCorazza was busy rooting for the hapless White Sox, updating his TheFacebook profile and yelling at people who quote lines from "Napoleon Dynamite." How could he possibly take time to examine the intricacies of the Big 12 and realize that Kansas could not possibly win without Keith Langford at 100 percent? Or how could he have known that suspended-player-of-the-year candidate Chris Paul would mean so much to his Wake Forest team?\nAs for me, I've got a lot going on as well, such as maintaining a 3.4 grade point average, playing baseball (not real baseball, PlayStation baseball) and of course watching endless reruns of "My Super Sweet Sixteen." Seriously, that show is classic; it has more unintentional comedy than an interview with Anna Nicole Smith. \nBut frankly, this was bound to happen. This is why people love college basketball -- they love how unpredictable it is. How they are always surprised and somehow always shocked that the teams they picked didn't win. Sports fans thirst for an underdog, and it seems that every March we get plenty. We get great stories that not only leap off the TV screen and into our living rooms, they touch us in a way that no other sport can. College basketball is competition at its finest. Young men playing simply for the love of the game, giving their all regardless what the name on the front of their jersey says. \nMaybe the moral of the story is that it's impossible to predict what's going to happen during March Madness. Maybe it's not worth predicting who will win and who will lose simply because we can't. \nOK, so maybe I'm making excuses for our poor performance but I think this result epitomizes college basketball and the lessons it teaches us. Nothing is certain and sometimes the best things in life are unexpected.