I've never won an NCAA tournament pool in my life. Not that I've been playing for 20 years, but still. For once I'd like to have that feeling of being better than everyone else when it comes to sitting down and, half-randomly, half-analytically predicting better than anyone else, which teams will move on from which games, all the way to the national champion.

I'm not sure that I've even had the eventual champion correct in the roughly 10 years I've been doing these things. Sometimes I lose my top team by the end of the first weekend, though that's rare. More often, the first games of the Round of 16 take out the team I thought had it all. I'm also pretty sure I've never correctly nailed a complete Final Four, either.

In an effort to change all that this year, I increased my odds. I submitted 12 different sets of brackets with nine different champions with hopes of ending my streak of suckiness. Three are in the more traditional "office pools," one of which I run (two entries) for friends and family and another run by a family friend. The other nine are in the impossible-to-win mega pools on sites like Sportsline.com, Yahoo!, SI.com and ESPN.com (which allows up to five entries per ID).

These first two days of the tournament have been better than last year for me. I'm not sure how my picks stand up to last year's, but I've watched more games and enjoyed the close games more than I could last year, when I didn't have a TV near my cube in our old office. Now, I sit closest to the TV in this section of the office, and since we generally only have CNN on as background noise, nobody seemed to mind when I switched over to CBS just after noon these past two days. I've managed to get my work done, prepare for tomorrow's baseball draft and watch these games as they come down to the wire. Then, all of a sudden, it's 5:30 and the clock's ticking and there's just no time to update.

It was a little easier to fill out these brackets this time around because Notre Dame fell a game or two short of reaching the Big Dance, so I don't have alumni loyalties to cloud my judgement. Additionally, some of the teams I loathe � such as Indiana � missed out, so I don't get screwed by hoping (and predicting along those lines) that they lose in the second round only to see them reach the title game. I despise Florida, and went with Manhattan on 11 of my 12 sheets, which turned out to be more of an informed prediction than a gut reaction to eliminate the Gators. Same for Michigan State, which I had as one-and-done on 8 of 12. I missed out on Seton Hall, though, but not so much because I can't stand them. There's some Big East pride there, but I just didn't think they had a chance against Arizona. Oops. If only AZ could hold a 14-point second-half lead ... That game hurt me because, in a lot of pools, I had Arizona knocking out Duke in the second round.

But so far I'm in decent shape in the three pools in which I have a chance to win. On one sheet, I've lost 7 of the first 24, but two already in the Sweet 16 and one (Arizona) in the Elite Eight. On another, I'm 19-5, and all five I had wrong I had losing in the second round anyway. I've also got the entire left side of that sheet correct, with six games to go tonight. That perfection won't last, however, unless Richmond pulls the rather large upset of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. I pick the Spiders on just three of my 12 sheets, and that has to be one of them. On my third, I've lost eight in the second round, but three in the third/Sweet 16 and one (Arizona again) in the fourth/Elite Eight. If I can make it through tonight's eight games with six of those still alive, I think I'll be in good shape. The weekend, however, could be another story.

We'll see.