Take a big whiff everybody, it's that b-ball time of year. You've got the men's NCAAs, the women's NCAAs, and the men's NIT. Don't even get us started on Division II, DIII, or the Warriors.

The men's NCAAs tip off this morning at 9:40 a.m., with the Bay Area's only entrant, the Stanford Cardinal, taking on their University of Louisville homophones.

It's hard to say which is more popular these days, watching postseason college basketball or "playing" an NCAA bracket pool or two, or seven.

The bracket, of course, being the scheduling grid that divides 64 of the "best" college teams in the country into four regions to play six rounds of games over three weeks to decide one champion (you listening NCAA football?). Made mathematically neat and tidy by the NCAA's decision to expand the postseason championship tournament to 64 teams in 1985 (sometime in the last decade they tacked on an additional "play-in" game between two tiny conferences for the chance to be a #16 seed), and hyped with massive underdog upsets by North Carolina State in 1983, Villanova in 1985, and Kansas in 1988, and mesmerizing teams like Christian Laetner's Dukies and the bad-ass UNLV squads of the 1990s, the men's NCAA tournament and its attendant office pool have been upwardly spiraling out of control for more than 20 years.

Got picks? Photo by SFist_Chris.

So much so that a new field of pop science called bracketology has even sprouted up around the NCAA pools. Essentially overhyped and overcommented analysis of the tournament fields, bracketology has been the hot word on everybody's lips for the past few years. In fact, bracketology has gotten so big, it's being applied to just about everything in a cross-disciplinary orgy of nonsensical shark jumping that confirms America's ability to bastardize just about anything.

So whether you live for the tournament or are just playing a pool so your buddy will stop sending you harassing emails, the moment of truth has come -- time to fill out the bracket. First question: what type of pool are you playing? Round-by-round points-based winner-take-all, Calcutta, team draft, or some other heretofore undiscovered variety? Are you playing one pool or juggling six different picks sheets for three different pools? Playing your buddy's hand-tallied pool, a corporate online venture, or just playing with yourself? Do you review stats, scouting reports, and experts' predictions to supplement the 29 hours of college hoops you watch every week or do the team mascots and colors determine your picks?

Well, we've got our men's NCAA bracket sheet out and we're ready to jump into the pool. . .

So, let's see, . . . Winthrop, that's a cool name, we'll take them. And, uh Madison is a party town, so let's take the Wisconsin Badgers to go all the way -- that should be an awesome victory celebration. We love to see coaches and mentors face off, so that means Pitt and UCLA to meet in the second round, and we'll take the protege in the Marquette-Michigan State throwdown. Oral Roberts is a given (heh-heh, we said Oral). Even though we're taking ORU, we're hoping they get hammered so we can write "Oral Roberts blows a big one" in our pool summary.

New Mexico State has to win at least one game so we can watch superfly Reggie Theus strut around the sidelines -- he's so cool, we want to be him when we grow up. The Albany Great Danes are a must, and of course we want perennial doormat Vanderbilt to go a couple of rounds, even though it's hard to take them seriously with a nickname like "Vandy." Bob Knight's Texas Tech Red Raiders are in the mix, so we'll go with them and hope for a massive meltdown from the frumpy one. We're going to take a pass on Stanford, because their game starts at 9:40 a.m. PST and we know how college kids hate those early morning classes (the game's at 12:40 Louisville time).

Holy Cross? Holy crap, they've got no chance. Wright State? wrong. It'll be blue balls for the Creighton Blue Jays and Coach K's Ducks of death will say V-CU later to the Rams. Gonzaga's season went up in a mushroom cloud about a month ago, so we'll have to take Hickory to win that matchup.

Florida is the defending champion and odds-on favorite to repeat, but there's a reason why they play the games. Upsets. Upsets are the driving force behind the tournament's popularity. Like NASCAR fans, college hoopheads want to see brackets resplendent in high-seed carnage. Half the fun of playing a pool is picking the upsets. No 16 seed has ever beaten a number one seed, so we'll fight our contrarian urge and go with the top seeds until at least the Sweet 16. However, never have all the number one seeds made it to the Final Four, so somewhere along the line, we've got to pick a couple of shockers to have a chance to win it all.

Or not. That's the beauty of pools based on point totals. If a team that nobody picked like Syracuse in 2003 or Kansas in 1988 wins it all, you could still win your pool without picking the overall winner. Or if you followed the seeding and a favorite like North Carolina, Florida, or Ohio State prevails, you'll be in the mix with about 75 percent of the other players in your pool.

As for our miserable picks sheet, well, we've got Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, North Carolina, and Texas A&M in the Final Four; NC and Wisconsin in the Finals, NC taking it all. Or not.

One thing that playing a pool does is personally invest you in the outcome of every single game, which makes the tournament a lot more exciting, and pertinent. Why else would you give a crap about Belmont?