I hope to make this an annual thing, but for now here is my first-ever Completely Arbitrary NCAA Tournament Bracket. All winners were chosen based on which school I liked better, for reasons that are extremely personal and often stupid. Obviously USF is going to win the whole thing since they're in the field. But let's take a look anyway.

Click to enlarge.

Highlights of the bracket:

• Since it's completely arbitrary and I moved from Florida to Texas after college, it shouldn't surprise you that there are four Big East teams and four Big XII teams in the Elite Eight.
• Any school with funny things had an edge in this tournament. Georgetown made the Elite Eight based almost completely on Casual Hoya. Texas did the same because of Rick Barnes and Thujone. And so did Iowa State because of Wide Right & Natty Light and Paul "I AM SO PROUD TO BE YOUR FOOTBALL COACH" Rhoads.
• On the flip side, Duke was out immediately for obvious reasons. And North Carolina got knocked out by 16-seed Vermont for the same reason, and also Ben & Jerry's and Martin St. Louis. Sorry guys, ice cream and ice hockey trumped Jordan and epic douchery.
• Teams that could have made a run if they were in the tournament, in no particular order and with no explanations offered: Rice, Florida Atlantic, Oklahoma State, Virginia Tech, UT-Arlington, Iowa, Oregon.
• Kentucky only survived Western Kentucky because of Rich Brooks and some lingering bitterness about Willie Taggart.
• The hardest matchup to decide in the first round was Iowa State vs. UConn. WRNL vs. The UConn Blog was a standoff, but Paul Rhoads was more fun than Jim Calhoun was crotchety, so I took the Cyclones. Also STEELE JANTZ. Tough draw for UConn. They would have done well if they were somewhere else in the field.
• Another hard matchup was Vanderbilt vs. Harvard. I thought about DQ'ing them both on principle, but Memorial Gym is awesome, so Vanderbilt advanced.
• Kansas State vs. Southern Miss was a complete mismatch. K-State has an almost endless pile of funny things (RonP, EcoKat, the FieldTurf Webcam, Team Catlab's Tumblr and Twitter, their horrible gray basketball uniforms), plus we can thank them for their kind donations of Jim Leavitt, Ryan Schmidt, and Ron Anderson Jr. to our school. (Maybe Chris Cosh too, but I doubt it.) And we all just flat-out hate Southern Miss. In fact, Duke would have had a chance against them.

Eventually we got down to the Final Four, which was:

• Baylor, because of Scott Drew, Robert Griffin III, the Alamo Bowl, their game against TCU, their game against Oklahoma, building a whole new football stadium when they already have their own football stadium... just fun all the way around.
• Marquette, because of Anonymous Eagle and their totally irrational support of the Sun Dolls, and because of this:

• Kansas State, because see above.
• USF, because duh.

Of course USF romped in the Final Four, and Marquette, ahem, danced all over Baylor to get to the championship game. But they couldn't close the deal. Sorry, Marquette -- this time we were the dog and you were the tree.

(By the way - Mike Deane was last seen going 5-26 at Wagner in 2009-10. Eat it.)