Bracketology tips #1 - Does it Sound Good?

I sat down with my kids last night to do our annual family brackets. For the past few years, I've tried to establish a tradition of a Weiss family NCAA pool where each of us fills out a bracket and we have a little friendly family competition.

With a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old you can imagine the kids need a little bit of help choosing teams. So, I took some of my color-coded brackets home with me last night, thinking it would be of great benefit to Hanah and David.

I'm not sure it helped much.

The first team I came to was the North Carolina, so I said to my 3-year-old son David, "North Carolina Tarheels." Immediately I realized that was a lot of information for him to digest and that he probably only remembered "Tarheels."

In an effort to be fair to all the teams, I kept going in this format, stating each team name and mascot followed by the opposing team and mascot.

To my surprise, David quickly latched on to the pattern and was able to distinguish team from team in each matchup. He also devised his formula for success, and that's where this tip comes in: Does it sound good?

Based on how good the team name and mascot sounded, here were a few of David's favorite teams:

Arkansas Razorbacks, Winthrop Eagles, Butler Bulldogs, Kent State golden Flashes, CSU Fullerton Titans, Texas-Arlington Mavericks, Drake Bulldogs and Belmont Bruins.

After working our way through each region, David has decided that the Belmont Bruins (a 15 seed that faces Duke in the first round) will beat the Cal. State Fullerton Titans (a 14 seed facing Wisconsin in the first round) in the national championship game.

By the way, as he kept picking Belmont to win games, he tailored the name to sound even better and started calling them the "Belmountain Bruins."

Hope this helps you with your picks!