When you come from a solid background of winning like I do, it’s hard not to be confident in your abilities.
Chuck Thompson|Sampson Independent
Brandt’s Corner
I have never done back-to-back columns before, but this is such breaking news that I couldn’t help but get this information out to the people.
In case you haven’t been on our Facebook page in the last week, we ran a contest for people to pick who they thought would win the men’s ACC tournament. Everyone who entered was eligible to win a $20 gift card to Burrito Shak. I’m upping the stakes and the contest.
While I can’t use the colloquial term that everyone uses to refer to the men’s springtime basketball championship tournament, I can hold a contest for the wonderful readers of The Independent to compete with me in a bracket pick ‘em.
And that’s what I’m doing. I’m even taking it a step above.
While we haven’t 100-percent locked in the prizes and prize structure yet, I wanted to get this information out there as early as I could so you could watch mid-major basketball in preparation of dismantling your local sports editor with the best takes in all of sports.
Remember, if you will, the old show on ESPN called Stump the Schwab. Stuart Scott hosted a sports trivia show where contestants would try to defeat Howie Schwab the statistician. That’s what we’re doing with the bracket challenge this year, but instead of Howie Schwab, it’s Brandt (and his daughter).
“What makes you someone that we should ‘stump’?” you might be asking yourself right now. And I’ll tell you. I was in the top 1.9 percent of all ESPN brackets last year, but at times, I broke the top 10,000 of all brackets. Save for the Oakland-Kentucky and Yale-Auburn bracket-busters in the first round, I called every game correctly in the round of 64. I even had UConn winning it all (although I picked them winning over Duke instead of Purdue). And my daughter, Gigi, picked that the Oakland upset for her own bracket.
I’m not going to pretend that she is some sort of basketball wizard, because she’s not, but she did earn herself a new Barbie for predicting that one. Most of her picks came for nonsensical reasons, hence the name of her bracket: Gigi Picked Based on Vibes. Usually, this came down to which school had the cooler mascot (are you going to tell a 5-year-old that the Florida Atlantic Owls don’t really stand a chance?)
With Selection Sunday being this week, I will get all of this finalized early next week after seedings and such. Gigi and I will each make our picks to go head-to-head with all of you wonderful Sampson County residents to test your basketball knowledge.
I’m confident I’ll win, but who will challenge me the best?