It’s tough when your 4-year-old could win the office NCAA basketball pool

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO ​

Each March, I donate $5 to an NCAA office pool.
I don’t win, but I come dangerously close. My husband has won, and I got to share in his bounty, so that was almost as fun as winning.
I don’t even work in an office now. That didn’t stop me from being in an office pool, but it did lessen my guilt about draining worker productivity by this year’s estimated $1.2 billion.
For the past 13 years, my husband and I have participated in this year’s same office pool, with my former newsroom colleagues in Jacksonville, N.C., cheerfully organized each year by our friend Robert. 
My husband spews sports statistics like a “SportsCenter” anchor, so he brings that knowledge to his brackets.
Although I am a sports fan and often could make intelligent choices based on strength of schedule and tournament seeds, I never do. 

Instead, I pick with my heart. I pick teams out of misguided loyalty. I choose schools from the states where I’ve lived, which becomes tougher the more we move.
No matter how long the long shot, I always choose Ohio teams to at least win the first round, if not the second and third — because I’ve lived here the longest.
This year, Xavier, Ohio State, Miami and Wright State got my nod. And when a team is good and has a legitimate shot, I pick them to go all the way — such as this year’s ill-fated Ohio State championship prediction.
If I’ve recently visited a state or have a friend who went to a particular college, that school is in. But if I don’t like a person who is an alumnus, that school is out.
It gets complicated with North Carolina teams, especially since UNC and Duke and Wake Forest have traditionally been so successful. With Tar Heels and the like, I generally let all the rabid ACC fans fill their brackets with those teams, since I’m part of a North Carolina pool. I try, then, to pull an upset out of my hat.
This year, after I submitted my bracket and my husband’s, Robert the office-pool organizer joked about getting an entry from Pearl, our 4-year-old daughter. 
I thought, Why not? (Other than ethics and child gambling and bad parenting …)
So I went through an entire bracket with Pearl and learned that my bracket-filling strategy is not so different from a preschooler’s. I gave her each pair of choices and she quickly and decisively chose which would advance.
“Florida or Jackson State?” I asked.
“Florida.” (Smart girl, you might be thinking, but I know that she was instead thinking of our relatives there and the fact that she’s vacationed there a few times.)
“Indiana or Gonzaga?”
“Gonzaga.” (It’s more fun to say “Gonzaga.”)
She got in trouble early on when she picked George Washington to get to the Final 8. But when the choice was between George Washington and Vanderbilt, Oral Roberts or Texas Tech, she couldn’t help but pick the name she recognizes as the first president and the face of money.
Somehow, though, our daughter was the only one to predict Virginia Commonwealth’s upset of Duke, and she predicted a championship game between UCLA and Ohio State, with UCLA winning it all. If that title game had come to pass, she could’ve finished in the top five. “Little Pearl could be the gambling story of all time,” Robert e-mailed us. “Boy, wouldn’t the State Bureau of Investigation, not to mention the Department of Social Services, love to hear about that!” 
Robert probably didn’t want to do the math to figure out how the three of us did in the office pool, especially since we’ve been at the bottom most of the time. But I had to know how our daughter fared overall.
There we were, all three of us, still drowning at the bottom of the pool. I was third to last — pathetic, but expected.
Right below me, though, was Pearl. Not in last place! Only second to last!
Second, though, to her font-of-sports-knowledge dad, who finished behind his 4-year-old daughter.
He couldn’t be more pleased.