Mark Shields helps you fill your bracket. Among his tips:
[M]ake your picks (guesses) based upon the originality, appeal or humor of the schools’ basketball mascot. If this were the sole, determining criterion, a number of teams that will not be asked to the tournament would be the overwhelming favorites, beginning with my personal pet mascot, the University of California at Santa Cruz’s banana slug. Nothing racially or ethnically offensive. No gratuitous violence. The banana slug was chosen, let it be noted, in a campus-wide referendum at the university and succeeded the sea lion. For a real team mascot brimming with energy and enthusiasm, none can really compete with the Hawk of St. Joseph University in Philadelphia. It’s not the outfit, which is fine. It is that the St. Joe’s Hawk NEVER stops flapping its wings, or arms, from the beginning of the game until the end. Literally the Hawk’s wings are flapped thousands of times in a two-hour game.
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