IStock Photo 8784475 © Stefan Klein

Any given March Madness tournament could be mistaken for a Mel Gibson film. Braveheart, for example, has moments of intense battle action and riveting mayhem, but the vast majority of the film consists of standard scenes where actors wave around memorable prose instead of claymores. These scenes give the battles logical context, or at the very least temper the senses from becoming too engrossed in fictional violence.

Such is the case with March Madness. Most of the college basketball season is dwarfed in popularity by football; only in the third month does the competition hit overdrive and become a battle royale among tall men shooting an orange sphere. In the first week of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, there are 32 games over two days—that’s four games played at a time, every two hours, with some allotted time for napping and bathroom breaks. How on Earth could anyone keep track of that much basketball? Or, a better question: how could anyone possibly be given that many basketball games and correctly predict them all?

It’s like prophesying exactly which Scottish rebels will die, when, and by whose hand.

But half the fun of masquerading as a self-proclaimed sports expert is to be part of that annual tradition, the office pool. 1 in 2.27 workers have taken part in this time-honored rite, and those are better odds than the possibility of any top-ranked Associated Press basketball team heading into the tourney and winning (1 in 3).

Why are these bracket shenanigans so popular? It’s the rare sports fan who has intimate knowledge of all 65 participating teams. Some people probably pick Gonzaga University to win because it’s a cool-sounding name. But office pool participants seem content to select squads sight unseen, not worrying in the least that it might equate them with simians predicting the Super Bowl. In fact, when George Mason University became the lowest-seeded team—No. 11—to reach the Final Four in 2006, only 4 in 3 million ESPN.com registered users had correctly predicted it, and one of them only did so because he confused it with the more popular basketball team (and Founding Father), George Washington University. Hey, when it comes to March Madness, don’t question the method.

After all, what fun is it to scroll through 63 games and pick only teams that are already favorites? Why not mix it up a little? Dated someone who went to North Carolina and it didn’t work out? Pick against the Tar Heels. Partial to the classic UCLA colors? Ride ’em to the championship game. You wouldn’t be alone in such rationales: only 1 in 6.67 office poolers participates for the love of the sport, while 1 in 2.22 simply does it for the camaraderie (or the peer pressure).

And when the tournament starts, don’t fret over the impact of student-athletes cutting class to display their court prowess on a Thursday afternoon; after all, you might be one of the 1 in 3.85 employees who watches some March Madness games online while at work, which isn’t hard to do. And you would be in good company; among those bracket slackers last year was President Obama. And revolting against the President would be like rebelling against one’s own kind, which goes directly against William Wallace’s principles.