STOP THE (NCAA) COUNT!

Mark Graber

Dear [Names withheld to protect the guilty]:

I demand to be paid as the real winner of your NCAA pool.  If the scores had been fairly tabulated and various frauds exposed, my predictions would have proven the most accurate.  Please do not let a combination of radical socialists, disloyal immigrants, and the cancel culture silence the correct count of the points scored during the 2021 national college basketball championship.  The evidence of my victory is irrefutable, particularly under evidentiary standards established by the former president, by which fantastical claims need only be alleged, but not documented or otherwise proven.

Oral Roberts over Ohio State (predicted to be in tonight’s final)?  Really?  I have been on the phone for hours with various officials demanding that they find evidence that stadium operators, no doubt under the influence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, manipulated the scoreboard, adding at least six points to Oral Roberts, more than doubling their winning total.  In your final count, you should determine I correctly predicted the result of that game, and that Ohio State won every subsequent game until tonight’s final.

North Texas over Purdue?  Ha! I am sure Purdue lost at least a dozen points because the official scorer’s pen ran out of ink at a crucial point in the game.  I demand a recount to be done, following the precedent set by recent Georgia law, by my children, whose next trips will be paid for by my winnings.

UCLA in the Final Four?  Impossible!  Everybody knows that California is a haven for undocumented persons.  One study found that 22% of the immigrants to California are undocumented.  America’s tournament must be free from that stain.  If, following various proposals for federal spending, we  appropriate lower UCLA’s point totals by 22% to account for the impact of the undocumented on all activities in California, Brigham Young University from the ethnically pure state of Utah, as I predicted, wins their first round game against UCLA by a score of 62-58.

Syracuse over West Virginia? Excuse me! Basic principles require that all baskets count the same.  See Reynolds v. Sims (one basket/one point).  If we count all baskets equally, not discriminating as the biased scorers did, between foul shots (only counted as one point), ordinary baskets (counted as two points) and longer shots (three points!), West Virginia wins.

Abilene Christian over Texas (predicted to make the elite 8)?  No way!  I think we would all agree that no good Christian would ever take advantage of the abortion right.  But consider the following.  We know that good Christian women never have abortions.  We can therefore assume that Abilene would have fielded the same team had Roe v. Wade been decided correctly and Texas permitted to ban reproductive choice.  But among the hundreds of thousands of babies killed by the abortion regime in Texas since 1973, surely two or three of them would have found their way to the Texas basketball varsity and improved the performance of that team by at least five points.  Once we eliminate the baneful influence of Roe and legal abortion on college basketball, Texas beats Abilene Christian in the first round by a 57-53 score.

We need to reconsider Houston (predicted to get knocked out early) in the semi-finals.  Observers claim that the Cougars mailed it in after falling behind in the first half.  But mailed-in basketball efforts should count no more than mail in ballots.  Houston, therefore, should be considered to have forfeited all wins after the second round.

A fair count would replace Houston in the final four with Illinois, as I predicted.  Illinois is the land of Lincoln.  Lincoln was elected with a majority of the electoral college votes, even though he gained only 39.4% of the popular vote.  Remarkably, that is close to the percentage of the total points Illinois scored in their first round game against Loyola/Chicago, which they supposedly lost.  If, however, we properly use electoral college point scoring rather than total points scoring, and we break the Illinois v. Chicago/Loyola game into segments, overvaluing, as the electoral college does, those smaller segments of time in which Illinois outscored Loyola/Chicago, the electoral college points total of the game turns out to be Illinois 14, Loyola/Chicago 13.

Really good people will be assembling outside the arena in Indianapolis tonight demanding you stop the tournament, score the final as Gonzaga 87, Ohio State 81, and award me the relevant prize money.  I have urged them to stay strong, to do what is necessary to ensure fairness by my light, and to remember the good patriots of the Boston Tea Party, but this should not be construed as any complicity in any invasion of the basketball arena that members of my family without my knowledge have suggested to crucial protestors.  That the persons responsible for guarding the arena may be assigned other duties tonight is purely a coincidence.

I am not a sore loser.  Predicting UConn over Maryland was a mistake. Nevertheless, surely a reasonable person would think a UConn/Maryland matchup in the NCAA tournament was between the women’s teams.  A fair count would have given me at least partial credit given the UConn women went further than the Maryland women.  The ballot, by not specifying that this was a men’s matchup, further demonstrates how the 2021 NCAA basketball tournament pool was rigged against me.