To quote 80’s band Night Ranger, “I need a touch of madness.”

Well, it’s March, and the madness is here. I’m finding it hard to focus on much else this week as the tournament is less than 48 hours away.

(Yes, I’m aware that the play-in game is tonight, but nobody cares except the two schools involved and maybe Kansas, who will play the winner. Although I’m not even sure Kansas cares. Most other people don’t even know it exists. And if they’d been willing to reduce the number of at-large bids a few years ago like they should have, it wouldn’t exist. But I’ll complain about that another day. And, in the interest of filling out the full bracket, I’ll go ahead and make my pick for the play-in game now, so that all will be complete: Niagara over Florida A&M.)

Now, on to the rest… I intend to post five times tomorrow in order to share my inept thoughts on each region and then the Final Four. I will reveal my final Final Four picks, as well as my full “picks” bracket.

My record for picks is not exactly stellar. Once in college I picked something like 70% of the bracket correctly. And only once in recent history have I won a pool - in 2004. I picked three of the final four teams (UConn, Duke, Georgia Tech), and I correctly picked the final game (UConn over Georgia Tech). Unfortunately, it was a “bragging rights” pool, with no money involved.

But those are my only two glory moments. Last year, I picked exactly ZERO Final Four teams. And I wrote the following after day one (that’s right, the first day):

So if you check out my picks page, you’ll notice that I’m placing green check marks beside the correct picks, and red X’s beside the incorrect picks. I don’t know if you’ve seen the ending to Bonnie and Clyde, where the dudes unload their machine guns into Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. If you have, then you have an idea of how my picks bracket is starting to look.

Hopefully, I’ll do better this year. I’m reminded of Charles Barkley’s book title: I May Be Wrong, but I Doubt It. My book on predicting the tournament would be more like, “I may be right, but I doubt it.” We’ll see.

More tomorrow.