I entered my first-ever basketball pool yesterday -- actually, my first-ever sports pool, period. At first, I protested that I know nothing about basketball, especially not NCAA teams. However, apparently I'm not unusual. This is an English department, after all ... not exactly what you'd call a hotbed of sports fans (outside of hockey and, since the olympics, curling). So some people have some unique methods of choosing teams. My friend Danine, for instance, is making choices based on the colours of team jerseys; someone else, on places he'd like to visit (so, Florida over Wisonsin, that sort of thing).
Me, I'm going with prominent English professors. Which schools have the big names? Well, they're taking through all the way, baby.
Indiana does well in my plan -- not so much because of profs, but I used a lot of books from Indiana University Press in my thesis, so they've got a good run. Penn State does well because they've got Michael Berube, but they come up against Duke in the Final Four, and, well, Duke's got Fredric Jameson ... on the other side of the tournament, U of Illinois gets carried to the final by Stanley Fish. It's a tight battle then between postmodern Marxism and reader-response Milton, but in the end The Jameson prevails.
At which point I will celebrate my victory in the pool with a glass of Jameson's Irish Whiskey.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Truly that is the most brilliant method of bracket busting I've ever seen. Will you be applying a similar method to this summer's World Cup? Frankfurt School over Birmingham? Hmmm, wasn't that a Monty Python sketch?
Of course, Fish no longer works at U. Illinois-Chicago - he's in Florida somewhere...
Matt
Post a Comment