I’ve never been much of a college basketball fan, but every year I get sucked into filling out a bracket and competing with my family. Even though we know none of us will watch any of the games, we bet anyways, usually small prizes, and my sister, who’s never intentionally watched a sport in her life, always seems to win.

This yearly competition to quantify one’s ability to randomly select a college based on their name has become an American tradition, of sorts, and you can’t read a single college newspaper now without being reminded of it on every page.

The most important rule about participating in a March Madness is to not get your hopes up.

I’d like to think that my logical decision to pick Duke will result in a couple crisp five-dollar bills at the end, but considering they were barely able to scrape out a win against UCF, I’ve decided to just not pay attention to the bracket until I check my score at the end.

This year was probably the easiest year to select a champion until the Sweet Sixteen was over. While I think you could of made a case for any of the top 20 teams, I’d have to be a bit crazy to bet against Duke, considering the sheer talent on their team. As long as Zion’s shoes can maintain a bit of extra wear and tear throughout the rest of the tournament, I think I’ve got good chances. My sister must have made the same evaluation, since she also took Duke to win it all. Or she just liked the logo, it’s hard to tell.

I just checked…Duke lost…so much for my bracket and my crisp five-dollar bills.

Honestly, I just don’t understand the appeal of college basketball. Some people have said that it seems like they are “trying harder,” which maybe is just a way to comment on the extra rest they’re allowed.

In either case, I can’t imagine seeing that Harden is playing Giannis and deciding instead to watch a selfish group of weak, failing college students make a bunch of poor choices for an hour.

This article has already been quite the series of vaguely connected rants, so allow me to end it with the moral of the story: Don’t watch March Madness. You might think it’s a good use of time or that putting money down will somehow make it interesting, but it won’t. It’s just like watching an NBA game, but if every NBA player was much worse and made five times as many bad decisions. This year, fill out your brackets, put in the money, and just watch some professional basketball.