• Pick the team with the tallest players.
  • Get your hands on some syllabi and find out which star players have the least amount of homework due that week.
  • Ask everyone in the office what they majored in before repeating the story about how you “were so lost” your first two years of college until you stumbled into a small group of friends who really got you and that’s when you stopped pretending to be someone else. Then flip a coin.
  • Quickly explain that you totally knew it wasn’t, like, a swimming pool, you’re just wearing your bathing suit because you’re going to a swimming pool after work.
  • Fill out the winner of every game in the first five rounds as “#StayWokeUniversity” and write in the National Champion as the “Electoral College Sheeple.”
  • When your office crush gets his or her first pick wrong, lean in and say, “I guess that’s why they call it ‘March Madness,’” then go make some more copies.
  • Remember that the shot clock is longer in college basketball than it is in the NBA so high-tempo teams can be forced to play out of their element by an opposing coach with a disciplined strategy.
  • Also remember that college is a time when young adults learn the value of free expression, so what student athlete would ever fully constrict himself to a coach’s “strategy?”
  • Don’t pick Duke.
  • If a player suffers a gruesome injury on the court, break the nervous silence by screaming, “THEY’RE GETTING A FREE EDUCATION!” and then ask Brenda from accounting if you can expense this Buffalo Wild Wings bill.
  • Have a long, multi-scenario discussion about which mascots would win if forced to compete in a fight-to-the-death battle royal. Eventually just pick the cutest ones.
  • Confirm with Siri that basketball is the one with the orange ball.
  • Convince the NCAA that a prominent player received free bread and water while being recruited by his university. If he is deemed ineligible to play, pick against his team.
  • Pay close attention when Nate Silver explains how the most talented team will probably win. But wait, not so fast; according to the numbers, he says, they also might not (!) win.
  • Determine which teams best exemplify the self-discipline model created by John Wooden’s famous Pyramid of Success.
  • Determine which coaches best implement the free-labor model created by the NCAA’s famous pyramid scheme of success.
  • Don’t stop to wonder how important your job actually is considering you haven’t wholeheartedly worked on anything since the tournament started, and the same thing happened during the Olympics and the election and JoJo’s season of The Bachelor and the Ninth Circuit of Appeals’ ruling of Donald Trump’s travel ban and JoJo’s season of The Bachelorette.