March Madness 2012: 10 Best Things to Do with Your Losing Bracket

You're preparing for your NCAA tournament bracket to get put to the test tomorrow. It's a lot of pressure to go under and it often leads to last-minute changes.

Suddenly, that Cinderella team in the Elite Eight looks weak to you.

That top seed you called overrated on Monday morning suddenly seems Final Four bound.

A No. 16 seed eventually has to win a game, right? Why not be ahead of the curve and call that amazing upset before it seems possible to others?

By Thursday night, your bracket may be in shambles. Your Sweet 16 is more like a So-So Six. The only team left in your Final Four is a team you don't even think will make the title game.

Needless to say, after one round, you're in big trouble.

As the rest of your friends pump their chests for calling the correct upsets, you can sulk and drip tears onto your bracket. But your bracket deserves better treatment than that. You spent hours trying to perfect those matchups, only for them to blow up in just as much time.

You need to do something big or drastic with your precious bracket. After all, you won't be able to try again until next March.

To hold you over and to help save some face, here are some things to do with your not-so-perfect bracket.

Mail It to the Team Who Messed It Up

Every broken bracket can be traced back to one major problem with the results. You might not have had VCU winning a game last year or you had Iona as a surprise Elite Eight team. Either way, it is ultimately one team that probably kept you from having a halfway decent bracket.

That's why it will be beneficial for you to send them a letter with your bracket, as well as a note explaining how much you have ruined their March Madness experience.

Be sure to do a few things with this. Try not to put your mailing address on the envelope, just in case they suspect that you are trying to send a death threat or something. It also might help to have a photocopy of your bracket and not the original thing, which is full of your fingerprints. The less that can trace it back to you, the better.

If done tastefully and properly, it might even act as a rallying cry for that team during the offseason.

(Note: I don't actually condone you doing this, on the off chance that it gets defined as a threat and legal ramifications come your way.)

Root for Your Picks to Lose

That's right; purposely try to hope that your bracket keeps tanking. It's already gotten this bad, so get all of the losing you can possibly get out of it.

Pro sports teams can lose purposely to guarantee a top draft pick, so why can't you cheer to be the last place in your pool standings? It's a gracious way to lose. Nobody ever gets a lot of pride out of being next to last, especially when the person in last place could care less.

Some office pools even give money back to the person who finishes last in the standings. If that's the case, you might as well try and hope to break even while you're at it.

Blame It on Someone Else

This one is pretty easy. When your bracket looks awful, pretend that it isn't your bracket. I've seen my relatives fill out some pretty terrible brackets. They can be an easy scapegoat.

The conversation can include someone making fun of the bracket you are holding, only to have you retaliate by saying it was filled out by your grandpa, who doesn't know what color a basketball is and thinks he is still in 1992.

That would at least justify all the love you gave to New Mexico State.

When people think that bracket isn't your fault, they won't mock you as much. The only thing that may screw this up for you is when you see good brackets from random places, like this bracket from a two-year-old kid.

To be fair, if it comes down to a tiebreaker, his final score is screwed, even if it is inspired from last year's title game.

Shred It

Shred the evidence of sucking at Bracketology. Shredders are more common today than in past generations, so nobody can ever truly know what double-digit seed you believed way too much in.

It also leads to a multitude of questions you can ask to someone who tries to piece the document together. For one: Why in the world are you in my garbage?

Print Something on the Other Side

The incredible thing about a bracket is that it is only on one side of the paper. Assuming you aren't printing on toilet paper, printer paper is strong enough to withstand and be durable enough for something to be seen on the other side.

Whenever I print something that has something not useful to me on it, it can be reused in the printer to save paper on a useless thing to get printed.

Just don't print something important on the back of a bad bracket. It will end up being more of a cursed bracket than simply a poor chance at being an expert.

Use Pen to Write on Top of Wrong Picks

I don't know how many people you would fool with this one, but I guess it is worth a try. No bracket should ever be filled out in pen. A pencil is the way to go because there is always a way to erase and change an answer.

That is why a pen is a perfect cover-up for a bracket. Cocky people use pens to prove how awesome they are.

It also shows the confidence in picks. A bracket in pen without any scribbles is either someone cheating or someone who is certain in their picks and wrote the picks in pen to show their confidence, as well as just having a clean copy.

It's a victimless crime, but is it one you're willing to go through the trouble for?

Erase Your Mistakes

The other reason you use pencil is because you can literally erase mistakes. Just turn the pencil over and scrub away. Pretty soon, no trace of your embarrassing showing will still exist. Of course, if your bracket is in a pool, you can't change those.

This is for if you have it personally and want to compare it with friends.

Compare It with Other Bad Brackets

As long as we are in the spirit of comparing, go hunting down some bad brackets and look at them for amusement. Blow one region badly? Well, at least you aren't that guy.

Imagine that you have to at least get a handful correct. It's almost a guarantee that someone else did even worse than you did.

I don't quite know what to do if someone is looking at your bracket to feel better about themselves. I want to say that you should channel some sort of cycle, like how psychiatrists see other psychiatrists, but I can't quite figure it out right now.

Learn from Your Mistakes

The amazing thing about the NCAA tournament is that it is pretty formulaic. All it takes is a burn here and there to learn a lesson. It may be a way to just not trust a team or the simple mathematical chances of something happening. Either way, when you fail, it means it's time to learn.

Next time, you may be cautious or you may be just as aggressive as before. The difference is that the advice given is able to be given swiftly and effectively.

The numbers are what they are and, outside of odds-defying outcomes, playing with chalk is a safe way to go.

Recycle

It's just a nice thing to do. Millions of pages of brackets are printed each year, enough that not recycling could pose a problem.

If every bracket was recycled, the number of trees that won't be cut down are... okay, so they haven't done the research on that theory, but it has to be a lot of trees.

If you couldn't help yourself, you can at least help the environment.

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