MARCH MADNESS MARCHES ON IN THE BUCKET

WE ARE DEEP IN THE MADNESS NOW

Sixteen games were played yesterday and the  eight losing teams have already retired from the field. Yash made some great picks--out of the sixteen he chose fifteen correctly. But the sixteenth was a killer. Yash chose Syracuse over Baylor--come to think of it so did I.  This morning we reviewed the carnage while watching GET UP on TV. I explained to Yash that he did not just have one game wrong; he now has a doomed bracket. 

WHY?  Because he has Syracuse as one of the FINAL FOUR. 
Why, I asked him did you take Syracuse so far?
 He answered with ONE WORD--LOYALTY.
Why does he still feel so loyal to Syracuse?  Because Syracuse did not charge application fees--applying from India, he could only afford to apply to colleges with no fees. Syracuse accepted him and  gave him a full fellowship with no teaching and included room and board. Syracuse accepted his hand-written term papers. And when he showed up in Syracuse  looking forward to a Syracuse winter, he had no overcoat. Other foreign students took him to a Salvation army and  he picked out a warm coat.
So his brackets fell with Syracuse.
Now we are watching the Cincinnati-Iowa match up. WE both picked Cincy to win.
WHY. Same answer --LOYALTY.
I taught there for almost 30 years and Yash came back from India to make the move to the mid-west with me. As soon as they met him,  senior faculty members said :
Don't worry. He is so distinguished, he will soon have a job here.
And after I gained tenure at UC, they gave him a steady adjunct appointment.
Back to reality--Cincinnati managed to lose  the game in the last five minutes.  They seem to  be jinxed and get eliminated in their first game in the dance.  I felt sorry for the weeping players gathered around their coach at the close with their shirts drawn up over their heads weeping into those shirts.
Well so far Loyalty has take us to defeat twice.
But we have a third LOYALTY choice--DUKE.
We have them in the Final Four and one of us has Duke taking all.
Let's see how that works out.