Perfect pickin' in a pandemic

DISCLAIMER: This is a satirical piece. It does not necessarily represent the views of the Exponent or its writers and should not be construed as truth.

When Mac Hamburger set out to make his March Madness bracket earlier this month, he had absolutely no idea he’d be in the running for one of the most accurate brackets in the world. After a perfect first round, Hamburger found himself among only 14 other people in the country with a perfect bracket out of 16.2 million submitted brackets from college basketball fans.

Though no one in the history of college basketball has ever successfully predicted the one out of 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes for the tournament, Hamburger still believes he’s the one, and this is his year.

“It’s been a lot of hard work, I can’t lie,” Hamburger said. “I missed a lot of Zoom classes so I could keep up with every team this year. I even invested an entire stimulus check into buying 13 new TVs, so I could watch every game of the season, all at once while simultaneously binging ‘Bridgerton.’”

Between typical powerhouses like Duke and Kentucky not even qualifying, to the dramatic variation in total games played by each team due to COVID-19 cancellations (not to mention the frustrating training schedules,) this year’s tournament proved to be the most daunting in years. If there was ever a ‘good’ year to make a perfect bracket, this was not it.

“I have to give credit where credit is due,” says Hamburger. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the extensive network of Craigslist ads I found in college towns that offered paid advice. Shoutout to Terry in Tulsa for giving the goods on Oral Robertos’ new crop of shooters this year! Also shoutout to Reggie-Denim Paper for absolutely killin’ it as Sam Bassist, I mean that dude can seriously act!”

As the COVID-19 pandemic surged across the U.S., many found themselves scrambling to find new hobbies to save themselves from boredom; college basketball became Hamburger’s saving grace after his third two-week quarantine back in December. Hamburger, a statistics major, knew the impossible likelihood of actually making a perfect bracket, but found the determination to push through the doubt and put together the first bracket to have a serious potential of proving all the numbers wrong.

With vaccines rolling out to anyone 16 and up in Montana on Thursday, April 1, and a glimpse of normalcy on the horizon, we asked Hamburger if he thought his newfound passion might stick through the coming years. “I don’t know,” Hamburger said. “We’ll have to see I guess. I think it’s gonna be weird to watch anything once we’re out of the pandemic, I mean we’ve all changed so much. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at forums speculating what next year’s season will look like, how it’s gonna happen and supposedly the story’s shifting focus from the Duke and Daphne to her brother Anthony Bridgerton... Wait what did you mean by ‘next season?’”