For the first time since the NCAA tournament started seeding the teams in 1979, no 1 seeds made the Elite Eight. Basically, it means that all my brackets that I filled out with loving care are now trashcan liners. How are your brackets?

I understand that there is always a level of craziness that comes with March Madness, but this year’s level of crazy is unprecedented. So many teams that normally make deep runs in the college basketball tournament got bounced. I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years of keeping up with college basketball and filling out those brackets with the elusive hope of having a perfect bracket and winning millions of dollars.

The only bracket that I have that even has a champion still in the tournament is the one where I picked UConn to win it all. The rest went kaput when both Alabama and Houston lost tonight. Thankfully, none of them are the actual paper brackets like in the old days. That would just be a sad reminder of my futility in predicting and picking the winners of any kind of sports.

But that’s the fun of it. And the aggravation. You could theoretically spend hours analyzing all the teams and their strength of schedules and margins of victory and conference strengths. Or you could pick based on which team colors are your favorite. Or you could just randomly pick names and hope for the best.

At some point, it’s easier to give up and root for the underdogs to win every game.