March is hallmarked by the first signs of summer weather, spring break, and the frustrating, certain disappointment of picking which college basketball team will win the Big Dance. The NCAA tournament victimized over 11 million brackets this year from ESPN.com alone, usually made by hopeful winners of a bracket pool, which is a small group of selections made by players who know each other -- similar in some ways to a short-term fantasy football league.

If your picks were as bad as mine, this year, you likely owe it to one of the following.

Your professor bet you extra credit. As mine did. You were promised a bump in your grade if your bracket could outlast the professor's. You found yourself putting together a bracket in the ten minutes after this was announced in class. As it turns out, Teach also received a Ph.D. in Bracketology from his university and takes this stuff a lot more seriously than you do. That was time better spent studying for next week's quiz.

You confused a couple of school names. It was an honest mistake. You turned on the game just to realize that there is a Georgia and Georgia State team. Oklahoma and OK State both made the tournament as well. In some mental lapse, you put both teams into your Sweet Sixteen and have to pull for the underdog to make a run at their first championship tournament since the decades of basketball shorts that made Chubbies look conservative.

You refused to pick any other SEC schools to advance. Yes, it's tough to imagine that the schools that bring their dreams to die in Death Valley on Saturdays have respectable basketball teams in the spring. When it comes down to making the pick more likely pick to happen or the pick that would make you happier, you chose to close the door on any other SEC team's chances this year. Even undefeated Kentucky, who received a 41-3 beat-down in Tiger Stadium last year, won't be making the Sweet Sixteen according to your picks. And for that, we thank you.

You picked LSU to win in the Round of 64. It seemed like the right pick. Even if it wasn't, you couldn't bring yourself to hash us out after the first round of play. If you could make this pick with ten minutes to go in last week's game, you still would have taken the Tigers to pull through. Whether you took them to make it to the next round or picked them to win it all due to a blinding amount of school pride, they certainly made your picks this year that much tougher.

As far as the Tigers' odds of winning, and our own odds of picking the perfect bracket go, there's always next year.