(we are not awarding the winner of the 2014 CSTBracket a copy of College Slam for the Sega Genesis because a basketball biting a rim is thoroughly unreleastic)
Eight years is a long time to be wrong. Most humans have been wrong about at least one thing for at least that long, with the exception of people under the age of eight and Mike Francesa. But still. This is the eighth year of the CSTBracket’s existence, which means that it’s old enough that someone — I’m not going to say who this person is or what his role is in writing this blog post — almost certainly picked a bracket in this contest based in part on reasoning that involved an abiding belief in Acie Law IV. It worked out as well as might have been expected.
That is: I was wrong LAMF, and I have mostly stayed wrong in varying degrees of likeness to a MF about college basketball for these eight years. And yet it all just sort of rolls off and rolls by, this near-decade of not knowing what the hell I’m talking about more or less ever. Time passes — 2010 winner Hot Shit College Student could be done with medical school at this point, for all we know — and it doesn’t ever quite seem to matter that much.
It’s a happy, safe sort of incompetence, and I am in no hurry to stop believing what is probably not true, being shown that I was wrong to believe it, briefly being frustrated, and then opening a beer. I am, in fact, in a hurry to do all that again, and trust that I’m not alone in this. And so: for the VIIIth year, here is the CSTBracket: a chance to be wrong about Aaron Craft and the Mountain West and a bunch of other mostly insignificant stuff, as per tradition, and with people who share a similar taste in sports blogs.
Or it’s here, rather, with the password being cstbracket and the stakes, as ever, being fairly low. It is, as ever, free to enter. It will, most likely, entitle the winner to a gift bucket of 12XU goodies courtesy of our gracious host. (A photograph of me in my Corliss Williamson Arkansas jersey has been a part of the prize package for years now, and has inexplicably not once been claimed.) Enjoy it. We may never get to be wrong this way again, although honestly we probably will.