There should no longer be any debate: yesterday was the best day of the year.  Truly, it's our absolute favorite over at Steve's Word, better than Christmas, better than the Super Bowl, and much much better than your birthday.  And here's why: when your birthday sucks it's the worst day of the year.  If it rains, if you miss your train, if there's something wrong at work, you can't believe how the universe has screwed you.  And when you have a great day, no matter how fantastic it might be, well, you wake up and it's over.  Your b-day is a whole year away and nothing can change that.  With Day 1 of the Madness, you live it and it either works out great or it doesn't.  And you wake up the next day and what do you get?  A whole other day of basketball.  Another sixteen games to immerse yourself in, another day to pour over your bracket and ignore work.  And then you wake up Saturday and there's eight more games.  And eight more on Sunday.  There are literally not enough exclamation points in the world.

This first day of March Madness and our Virgin Tournament Pool is over. How did you do? Our own Jeff Larson is tied for first, having nailed 15 of 16 picks along with die-hard Steve's Word enthusiast Nima Shirazi.  Nima got tripped up when Butler couldn't overcome an all-out LSU blitz in the early minutes and Jeff lost his perfect day just as it closed when he didn't foresee the Western Kentucky upset.  Keep an eye on those 12 v. 5 seed games, statistically the most likely upset, as Arizona and Wisconsin look to knock off Utah and FSU today.  Who do you have?

Lots of other people had really successful days, too many to count really; about half the pool only missed two or three games.  So well done all around and we'll see how things shake out as Day 2 tips off.

At the bottom of the standings sits Steve's Word.  Our method for making picks was reverse graduation rates, the team with the lower 4-year student-athlete graduation rate won the contest (with general student graduation rate as a tie breaker).  That's how we ended up taking CS-Northridge to the National Title and we almost looked like geniuses for a moment as they gave 2 seed Memphis a real dog fight.  But the Tigers pulled away in the end and so did our douchebaggy hopes of winning our own contest.

So our method didn't really pan out, but a lot of people came up with great Methods to their Madness and they're all doing pretty well. We wanted to share some of our favorites with you and have you guys tell us who you think did the best. These are in no particular order:

Eric Galloway:

Ever since I was little and my dad used to take me to basketball games all the time, I have been horribly, sexually fascinated by basketball players' armpit hair.  So thank you again, Steve's Word, for giving me a good excuse to Google image search this years teams and compare players' armpit hair, and make hard-to-decide pics based on how attracted I was to various armpits in dunk, layup, or block action shots.

Some pics helped me quelch desires to pick upsets.  For instance...

I otherwise feel good about Purdue this year.  But apparently all of their star players wear t-shirts??!!  No money shots = no love from me.  So boring ol' UConn it is.

Despite a photo of a hairless LSU swimmer (NO!!) coming up in my Google search, LSU gets my vote over Butler for player #14's beautifully trimmed work -- possibly the best looking armpit hair in the entire tournament.  The dark hair shadows gracefully against his light brown skin during layups, and the hues are softly complemented by arena lighting.  Beautiful.  Sexy.

I feel like Oklahoma could win this thing.  But number 23, Blake Griffin, is shaved.  I don't think so.  Smooth is nearly as nasty as not trimmed and super sweaty.  On the other hand, the armpit hair of Louisville's players are really hairy, but the bushiness is in proportion with their big, delicious looking arms.  Go Louisville.

Jesse Allen:

Mine was chosen by State Animal - the Fiercest from each state’s categories of a) Wildlife Animal, b) Marine Animal, or c) Domestic Animal.

If schools from the same state went against each other (or states with the same animal), the school’s mascots were added to the fight- this only happened once with a Grizzly and a Matador VS. a Grizzly and a Bruin.

My Final Four consists of a Bison (Kansas) vs. Sperm Whale (Connecticut) and a Grizzly (UCLA) vs. Orca (Gonzaga). Sperm Whale destroys all in the end… defeating Orca.

Katie Kramer:

I pretty much made my picks based solely on the beer pong skills of the people I know who went to that college.

Lisa Greenleaf:

I picked mine based on guys I had sex with from that college and how good they were.  (Note: this is not meant to imply that Lisa had sex with a guy from every college in the tournament.)

Joe Dillingham:

I did mine in under 60 seconds. Not totally unrelated to Lisa's method.

So we wish you more good luck as Day 2 gets ready to tip-off.  Keep shooting daggers, keep up that full court press, keep talking trash, keep ignoring your job.