2019 Drive and Dish NCAA Tournament Bracket

Drive and Dish has a longstanding tradition of publishing handwritten NCAA Tournament brackets on the morning of the Tournament's first day.

The tradition began one night in the late '00s, when after playing pickup basketball into the wee hours, Drive and Dish's founders decided to fill out brackets and post them to this blog at a 24 hour Kinko's near the health club where our post-pickup hoops brainstorming had taken place.

It would probably be smart (for branding purposes) to say that the reason we decided to fill out handwritten brackets, as opposed to publishing more professional looking text brackets, was because we were committed to keeping this blog "authentic," with a DIY, lo-fi, boutique blogging hipster sensibility.

But the real reason we filled out handwritten brackets is because it was faster to just download a bracket, fill it out, scan it and post it to the blog.

Of course, origin story aside, the decision to continue publishing handwritten brackets year after year has been motivated by our recognition that "authenticity" is the current lingua franca in online media.  Thus, doing handwritten brackets helps to brand this blog as unyieldingly "authentic," DIY, lo-fi and boutique.

And just to keep things even more "authentic," yours truly has continued the somewhat more recent Drive and Dish tradition of waiting until the morning of publication to actually fill out a handwritten bracket.  That keeps the bracket from being well thought out, and helps Drive and Dish continue to promote the "fly by the seat of your pants" culture that we've worked so hard to foster.

In other words, it's still faster to just download a bracket, fill it out, scan it and post it to the blog.

But it would be great if we could turn that lack of preparation and thoughtfulness into a marketing/branding strategy.

Thus, Drive and Dish presents its 2019 brackets.

For the second consecutive year, brackets have been filled out by Drive and Dish founding member "S.K.", and Trainer to the Stars (and soon to be Florida Man [more here]) "C.H."


C.H.  Bracket:

S.K. Bracket:

Update:

Drive and Dish has decided to publish an even more "authentically" DIY, intentionally grimy and lo-fi hand written bracket courtesy of guest bracketologist "G.O." (not unlike a $500 pair of ripped jeans, or a pair $900 intentionally dirty Gucci kicks, this bracket even comes replete with folds, creases and crinkles!).


G.O.  Bracket:

Update (3/27/2019):

The first week of the NCAA Tournament has come and gone.  Survive and advance is the name of the game.  Sixty four teams have been cut in half to thirty two, and then cut in half once again to sixteen.  The losers have all gone home.  The wheat has been separated from the chaff.  The Sweet Sixteen is set, and Drive and Dish is keeping score of its prognosticators' respective bracket wins and loses.

The following is a run down of how the Drive and Dish experts' respective brackets have fared thus far:

C.H.  (Record: 12-4):

S.K.  (Record: 12-4):

G.O.  (11-5)

Update (4-06-2019):

The results are in.  We have an official Drive and Dish Bracket Challenge winner, even though the Final Four is only beginning, a National Champion won't be crowned until Monday night (4-08-2019), and the "win" is by default, since only one bracket of the three filled out by Drive and Dish's prognosticators correctly predicted a Final Four participant.

The winner is the bracket filled out by "G.O.," or "Ozzie," who should probably heretofore be referred to as the Bracket "Wizard of Oz," since his bracket has Auburn in the Final Four, and none of the other Drive and Dish bracketologists' brackets even has a single team still playing.

So by virtue of having predicting Auburn's ascendency to the Final Four, "G.O.," or the "Bracket Wizard of Oz" wins by default, regardless of who ultimately goes on to win the National Championship on Monday (G.O.'s bracket has Auburn losing to Tennessee in the semifinal game).

All in all, it was a completely pathetic showing by Drive and Dish's "experts,"  given that only one of our "experts" even correctly predicted so much as a single Final Four participant.  But then most of the "experts" in the national media picked super Freshman Zion Williamson and Duke to win the Championship, so most prognosticators ended up looking bad this year. 

Maybe the public relations department at Drive and Dish should try to spin our "experts'" dismal brackets as having been among the few in the nation who were prescient enough to see that Duke wasn't as good as everyone else thought.  Maybe Drive and Dish could issue a press release with a title like "Drive and Dish experts saw what ESPN's Jay Bilas, Dick Vitale, etc. didn't."

More to come...