Everybody Into The Pool

Beware the odds of March.
—WILLIAM SHAKEANDBAKESPEARE

You have no idea why they're asking you to put in for a dollar. You can't tell East Carolina from North Carolina, and the last time you looked, Rider was attached to your insurance policy. And yet they want your picks in the office pool by Thursday noon.

You're no killjoy—you've never said no, not when they passed the hat for the retirement gift for that boss you detested, not even when they invited you into that humiliating game of Twister at the company picnic—so you agree, reluctantly, to enter the pool. You shouldn't be so reluctant. "This is the year," says Maryland coach Gary Williams, "that the secretary who doesn't know anything about basketball wins the office pool."

Office pools, whether for money or not, have evolved into a sort of parallel NCAA tournament. The blazered folks in the CBS studio talk about their draw sheets on the air. High-stakes contests run out of Wall Street brokerage houses have ruined people's careers. The casinos in Vegas book more action in March than at any time except during the football frenzy of January, liven the most casual follower of the NCAAs finds it hard to resist scratching out his picks—picks we are all too sheepish to own up to after the tournament's first weekend.

The futility of the exercise is part of the office pool's charm. On the pages that follow we have nonetheless tried to bring a little science to bear on the proceedings, to identify those places where the chalk is most likely to hold and where it figures to turn to dust. Of course, by sundown Thursday our draw sheet will surely have suffered a fate similar to that of Chris McGuire, the hapless Wright State guard who found himself crumpled up at the bottom of a celebratory pile and had to be treated for a concussion following the Raiders" victory in the Mid-Continent Conference tournament final last week. (During March Madness you suffer certain bruises gladly; they're worth it somehow.) But we do believe a little guidance is better than none at all. As Utah coach Rick Majerus likes to say, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." So here are some rules to pick by.

•A 14th seed always beats a No. 3. From East Tennessee State's upset of Arizona last year all the way back to Cleveland State's shock job on Indiana in 1986, three-seeds have lost to 14-seeds at least once in every tournament for the past seven seasons. On our pool sheet the pick for this year's unlucky No. 3 was Florida State, which flamed out in last week's ACC tournament and was trying to rediscover its team chemistry as point guard Charlie Ward returned to the lineup from a shoulder injury. The No. 14 we picked as the perpetrator: Evansville. Which brings us to the next rule....

•Beware a team that's gathering momentum late in the season and plays a motion offense. As players become more accustomed to one another's passes and cuts, the motion offense gets honed lo a sharp edge. Year after year there's no better example of this than Indiana, which last season was beaten soundly by UCLA in the season-opening Tip-Off Classic, only to later whup the Bruins by 27 points in the West Regional final. While the Hoosiers' delicate balance has been upset by a late-season knee injury to forward Alan Henderson, Evansville has recovered from an early injury to 7'1" center Sascha Hupmann, and coach Jim Crews, a former Hoosier player and a onetime assistant to Indiana coach Bob Knight, has the Aces flush again. What's more, Indiana eliminated Florida State from each of the past two NCAA tournaments. Think of Evansville as IU-Lite.

•Don't pick against Tom Davis in a first-round game. It may be the result of the Hawkeyes' frenetic style, or of all those goofy bounce passes Davis's teams have thrown over the years, but for whatever reason, Doctor Tom is 7-0 in NCAA lidlifters going back to his days at Boston College. Thus we chose Iowa to beat a very sound Northeast Louisiana team, which beat Arkansas in December.

•Don't expect too much from the Pac-10 or the SEC. Since UCLA's appearance in the championship game in 1980, 28 of the Pac-10's 35 tournament representatives have lost in the first or second round. And of the 17 SEC teams in the draw over the past four seasons, 14 wound up back on campus by the end of the opening weekend. Ergo, we picked only Arizona and Kentucky from those two leagues to advance as far as the regional semifinals.

•"If you see a team with good, experienced guards win a tournament game, that's not an upset." Those are the words of Kentucky coach Rick Pitino articulating a truism that holds up when you examine the backcourts of many of the teams that have won NCAA titles: N.C. State's Sidney Lowe and Dereck Whittenburg in 1983, Villanova's Gary McLain and Harold Jensen in '85, and Louisville's Milt Wagner and Jeff Hall in '86—all were very experienced backcourtmen. Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins is the first to admit that this season's Bearcats aren't nearly as good as last year's team, which reached the national semifinals. But he counts three senior guards, Allen Jackson, Tarrance Gibson and All-America candidate Nick Van Excl, among his top six players and unhesitatingly calls them "the only reason we've won the games we've won." So we picked Cincinnati to come within a game of reaching the Final Four.